A little health care debate

Found this article at Real Clear Politics. It is a non-spittle-flecked, straightforward presentation of arguments for a public option. I thought I'd go through it, and respond in like kind, from the small storehouse of knowledge I have gleaned in the debate so far.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/10/01/the_public_option_only_looks_dead_98532.html

'The strangest aspect of the debate over a public option for health coverage is that the centrists who oppose it should actually love it.'

Advocates of the full-on socialised single-payer system are repeatedly to be heard indicating that public-option government health insurance is an excellent waypoint/gateway to their preferred end-state. A responsible centrist/moderate would therefore hear 'trojan horse' when the latter is proffered.

'It doesn't involve a government takeover of the health care system.'

No serious person suggests that the public-option government health insurance in and of itself is a takeover of the health-care system.

'The idea is that only consumers who wanted to enroll in a government-run health plan would do so. Anyone who preferred private insurance could get it.'

Thank you for not taking away our private insurance. Very grateful. Awfully kind of you old chap. What about the very large majority of people who get their insurance through their employer? Will they be unaffected? Will you guaruntee that every employer will continue to offer to their employees the same private health insurance plan that they do right now?

'The public option also uses government exactly as advocates of market economics say it should be deployed: Not as a controlling entity but as a nudge toward greater competition. Fans of the market rightly oppose monopolies. But in many places, a small number of insurance companies -- sometimes only one -- dominate the market. The public option is a monopoly-buster.'

The 'every tool is hammer if you need it to be' argument. If you want greater competition between insurance companies offering health insurance, there are vastly simpler, less intrusive and less costly ways to do it than create a brand new government-run health insurance program. Allowing interstate competition for one. Removing all legal barriers to the free market in health insurance would be a far more elegant solution, especially the artificial links between employment and health insurance. But something tells me that your end goal is not a healthy market in health insurance... this is more of a tactical argument than a genuine one.

The lie can be put to this very weak argument by comparing it to other industries. Has the government promoted competition in the supermarket sector by creating its own chain of supermarkets. You can't imagine them doing it, because it is so obviously not the right tool for the job. So why is it the right tool for creating a healthy health insurance market?

There is also no mention of the nonsense that any insurance company in the world, no matter how big, could compete with the deepest pockets in the world, the United States government. Because of the coercive confiscatory power of taxation, the US government WILL out-compete you. In this David and Goliath battle, Goliath will always win. That's not competition, that's annihilation. An example? Where is the private sector competitor to MediCare? Doesn't exist. Why not? Because absolutely nobody could compete with the positively gargantuan MediCare system for either economies of scale or legally-mandated coercive pricing. Should there be competition with MediCare? Definitely! Should MediCare exist? Not if you ever want a market solution to the problems of end-of-life health care.

'Centrists tell us they want to hold down spending and fight deficits. Strong versions of the public option, as the Congressional Budget Office showed in its scoring of Sen. Jay Rockefeller's proposal, cut the costs of insuring everyone.'

What is the effect on Government spending and deficit reduction of no action? I bet in every possible scenario, no action would cost less than imposing on government a huge new responsibility. But you gently move the goalposts in that last phrase. So what is your concern: government fiscal health, or cheap universal health coverage? Needless to say, those two concerns have completely different imperatives.

'Unfortunately, the debate over the public option has rarely concentrated on the substance of the idea. Instead, it has been almost entirely ideological.'

Yet more pointless insults aimed at those you are trying to persuade. I'm going to send you a copy of 'How to win friends and Influence people' gratis. 99% of the articles I have read go directly to the substance of the policies proposed while leaving aside ad hominems like this one.

'Because opponents know from polling that the public wants the chance to choose a government plan, they move the discourse to abstract and often demagogic ground. The most revealing "argument" during the Senate Finance Committee's public option debate on Tuesday came from Sen. Chuck Grassley.
"The government is not a fair competitor," Grassley said. "It's a predator."'

There is no doubt about the polling on a government provided health insurance option is squarely in favour. I suspect that this is a function of how polling works. If you ask a question of the public which they fundamentally don't understand, but which sounds positive and good, most people will agree to the proposition (rather than admit that they don't understand, and risk looking stupid). I would like to see the poll numbers on a government provided health insurance option when all the ramifications of creating it, paying for it, enlarging the government role in society and reducing the role of private industry are explained in detail to the poll respondents.

I don't agree with Grassleys formulation- I would not say that the government itself is an unfair competitor. Many many of the politicians and wonks driving the public option intend unfair competition, however. They don't intend for the public option to do any of the things Dionne lists above. They intend for it to be a trojan horse for their REAL goal, which is single-payer socialist healthcare. Sadly, Senator Grassley, like so many American politicians, couldn't form a coherent argument for going to lunch.

The public health insurance option is intended to be an unfair competitor to drive private insurers from the marketplace, and create a situation 'on the ground' which presents single-payer socialist healthcare as the only reasonable development. That is the publicly stated intention of large numbers of advocates of this policy, including Barack Obama back when he spoke out loud about his genuine intentions. It is both insulting and disingenuous to pretend the opposite.

'Grassley was then forced to explain how he felt about Medicare. Is it predatory for government to pay health bills for the elderly? Is Social Security, which lives side by side with private pension and savings plans, predatory? Is it predatory for government to regulate, well, predatory lenders or stock swindlers or bank boodlers?'

Good! Grind the bastard down! Aux barricades! Ok, back to the calm reasoned discussion...

MediCare, MedicAid and Social Security move the following three functions from civil society into the orbit of government- medical provision for the elderly, medical provision for the very poor and basic housing and food for the very poor. Is there a valid public policy objection to the wholesale shift of civil society functions into the government orbit? Absolutely. The argument is this: none of the functions above are universal provisions (although MediCare comes close). The public option health insurance is not a universal provision either- but is intended as a first step to government provided universal health care provision. As such, it would mean moving another huge tranche of American life from civil society into the government orbit.

Oh, and just to answer your question, it is not predatory 'for government to regulate, well, predatory lenders or stock swindlers or bank boodlers', in case you were hanging out for an answer.

'Democrats have been far too timid in taking on the right wing's arguments against government.' Yeah, whatever.

'They have been defensive at a moment when they should be going on offense by insisting that government can expand human freedom and give people options they would not otherwise have.'

Thats coy. What Democrats have been offering is an expansion of human freedom and new options while paying the same taxes, not interfering with the free market, preserving all the good things about the current situation, not increasing US Government debt and not increasing the government footprint in American life. Which is complete bullshit. Nobody believes you.

'Consider universal K-12 education, loans and grants to help students attend college, clean water systems, and unemployment compensation so people can get by while they look for the next job. A public insurance option lies squarely within this American tradition of using government to open new avenues of choice and opportunity.'

Talk about a rag bag. Universal education is by no means a big win. There are very good arguments that apart from a very basic reading, writing and arithmetic, coerced universal schooling is a waste of everybodies time. Choosing to get an education is light years from having to have an education. In many countries, universal education has had very mixed results while always costing prodigious amounts of money. Loans and grants to help students attend college have existed for as long as colleges have- just not provided by the government. They would remain if the government stopped providing them in the future. We have clean water in the UK, and the government has nothing to do with it. Unemployment compensation is nice, but not essential. It also lessens the motivation to go out and find a new job.

The concluding sentance bears no relation to the previous examples. What new vistas of choice and opportunity does unemployment comp give you? None. Its just a stop-gap until you go find a job. The crucial fact here is that none of the tasks being performed by the federal government mentioned here exclusively require the federal government to get them done. They don't require the federal governments heft to get them done. Education used to be provided locally, by private funds and by charities and religious groups. Student loans, bursaries and scholarships have always been provided by civil society groups, banks and charities. Unemployment compensation is a luxury- nobody really needs to pay this out at all. Just go get a job.

'Using government' is not necessary- its just a bad habit copied from statists and communists.

'Yet supporters of the option and the Obama administration have made unforced errors of their own that led us to Tuesday's votes.

The public option is a means to an end, not simply the symbol it has become in some progressive circles. From the beginning, the public option should have been seen as part of a larger effort to make insurance affordable. This means that its promoters need to worry more than they have so far about subsidies for the uninsured. If this bill does not help make insurance affordable for middle-income families, it will be a failure.'

Dionne finally puts his own policy preference squarely on the table. The purpose of health care reform is to make insurance affordable. That means that all other considerations are subsidiary to that goal. And he doesn't mean just affordable to the poorest people, but middle-income families. I'm guessing that that policy would be startlingly unpopular with the American public. The Congressional Democrats and Obama have only kept the public vaguely on board with their stated policies because they insist they will be CHEAPER in taxation terms than the current situation, not MORE EXPENSIVE. Higher taxes to pay for expensive health-care for low and middle income people gets virtually no support when polled. There is no free stuff. 'Affordable' health insurance to low and middle income families means higher taxes for middle income and high income families.

See, when you get down to the nitty gritty, to the details and away from the airy fairy promises of ice cream and cake for everybody forever, nothing validates the Democrat assertions on health reform.

'As for the Obama administration, it's been too ready to hint that it would throw the option overboard. Its highly public unfaithfulness to the view it purported to hold simultaneously enraged progressives and weakened its own bargaining position.'

That is entirely beside the policy point.

'And one more pragmatic consideration: Americans wonder if all this noise around health care will do anything to change their lives. By offering a genuinely new insurance product of its own, the government would be acting as an innovator, a prod for change and, to borrow a phrase, an insurer we could believe in. As Max Baucus has taught us, there's a lot to like about that.'

A genuinely new insurance product? They are going to cover diseases nobody else thought of? Provide access to equipment nobody else does? Get you in to see doctors no one else gets to see? This is semantic bollocks. The insurance would be the same ol' insurance everybody offers- just organised by the government bureaucrats you may remember from such previous hits as the IRS and the DMV. 'An insurer we could believe in'? Government bureacracy as receptacle for religious fervour? What a weirdo.

Quick question in closing- why interpolate all that stuff about tactical commentary and process detail into an article trying to argue the substantive policy justifications? Its just annoying.

How would I grade this effort? D-

What was the best thing about it? It does adduce actual evidence towards its assertions.

What was the worst thing about it? Does not manage to supply even close to a legitimate justification why the federal government of the United States should provide a health insurance plan to citizens.

Frederic just can't understand punishing child rape

'Mitterrand continued with a jab against the United States: "In the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face."'
http://www.popeater.ca/article/france-rushes-to-polanskis-defense/690466

Punishing child rapists is scary? Allowing famous film directors to rape thirteen year old girls is 'generous'? Who the fuck are these people in charge of our neighbor?

Living for others

'It was with sad acceptance that I read your passages . . . I say acceptance because I have seen all too often that [a priority on self] is the way all too many people feel they must live their lives. I am sad about it because this attitude is so determinedly self-defeating. Here’s the seemingly contradictory truth about being human: You can get anything you want by helping other people get what they want. True joy is found only in serving others, not in serving yourself.

I’m a fairly successful man in his forties with a wife and two kids. I am steady, calm, and blissfully happy in my life. I know what I’ve got going for me; sometimes I revel in it. I’m a good father and a good husband, if I say so myself. However, in order to be those things, I had to realize that it’s not about me. It’s about them. As I live my life for them, the rewards that I get back far outstrip the minimal, immediate cost to me.

Living your life for yourself is like squeezing a handful of sand: The harder you clench, the faster it slips through your fingers, leaving you with nothing. But if you open your hand up flat, you can hold that sand all day.

This is a fundamental human truth that our current social structure is working hard to deny. Everyone’s working for self-actualization, self-gratification, and self-realization, when all one needs to do is step back and take the focus off self, putting it on others. Do that, and the rest falls into place. Amazing, innit?'

Quoted in http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTViNmFmOThmZGYzYzllZjlmMzk5ZGRiMWMxMmQ5NzI=

Do you think Obama is President because he wants to help the poor and afflicted, or because he wants Barack to be President? Some of both? I wouldn't judge too harshly. Although President Obama is unbelievably vain, it is possible to be vain and have good intentions. Just thought I'd make my views known.

I canz have pron on the NHS?

'Preventive health care update [Mark Steyn]

Given the President's claims about the cost savings of preventive care, I do hope he will consider acting on the results of this research and instituting a mandatory program:

A study by German scientists showed that 10 minutes a day of ogling women’s breasts by men was as good at warding off heart disease, high blood pressure and stress as 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.

By the way, this wasn't just some nickel'n'dime, fly-by-night survey. Two hundred men participated in this survey, for five years. Which is a lot of breasts. Or a lot of work-outs, if you drew the short straw.

Weatherby found that a mere 10-minutes of staring at well-endowed females is roughly the equivalent of a 30-minute aerobics workout, because sexual excitement gets the heart pumping and improves circulation...She added:

“Our study indicates that engaging in this activity a few minutes daily cuts the risk of a stroke and a heart attack in half. We believe that by doing so consistently, the average man can extend his life four to five years.”

Now that's affordable health care.'
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NGIwNzA1YmYyNDRkOGZmYTlmZmQyZmQ2OTQ0NTg5YWE=

I love Mark Steyn. Not in the same way I love women's breasts of course.

New York Times knows what is best for you to know

Further to the last post:

'...Some conservatives think O’Keefe and Giles were doing work that should have been done by the mainstream media. But most news organizations consider such tactics unethical — The Times specifically prohibits reporters from misrepresenting themselves or making secret recordings...'
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/opinion/27pubed.html?_r=2

WTF? Are they serious???? Undercover videoing is a staple of both broadcast and print journalism in Britain. Without it, the proof of many many important stories would be absent. If you don't video, even if you go straight from discovering some pertinent information and write it in a notebook, you could misremember, leave out important details and be subject to the standard 'its my word against yours' defence. Even WITH video, the lefties in the states have tried to both deny that what was said was said, and call into question the editing of the tapes. Without the video, this story would have been NOTHING. The ACORN people would simply have accused the two individuals of inventing everything out of malice for the organization.

The BBC constantly try to find pockets of racism and fascism round Britain and get it on secret video. Its their favourite pastime. They have NEVER tried to find pockets of communist or anarchist activity because they are politically approved of, but the tactic itself is valid. A few years back, it was an internet truism that it doesn't exist if its not on video.

Mark Steyn constantly rails about how utterly boring American newspapers are. Perhaps now we know one of the reasons why.

'And the two were sloppy with facts. One Acorn employee who bragged about killing one of her former husbands said she knew she was being scammed and was playing along. The police said they found her ex-husbands alive.'

Eh? Talk about garbage reasoning- because one of the Acorn employees bragged about killing her husband, the two investigators are sloppy? No assertions have been made about the contents of the tapes- they have simply been published and allowed to speak for themselves. The feeling I got from that particular incident mentioned was that she was a pathetic fantasist who enjoyed telling gratuitously over-the-top lies for dramatic purposes; to brighten up her terrifically boring life and job with some soap-opera glory. Her after-the-fact self-justification just adds a little more pathos to the sad incident. It does add to the overall impression from the tapes, however, of a highly disfunctional workforce who have no judgement and no morals.

'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.”'

Er, you did ignore it you lying liar. For the longest time it was possible to ignore this story, you sat on it like pompous old school marms pretending that the annoying scuffle in the corner will simply sort itself out. You completely failed to perform your basic function. Wanker.

'Baquet said people need to keep Acorn in perspective with other Washington stories: health care, two wars and the deep recession.'

Oh my God! Can you listen to yourself for a moment? YOU CAN'T DICTATE TO PEOPLE WHAT STORIES THEY THINK ARE IMPORTANT (any more). Millions upon millions of people find it perfectly easy to discern in what way this story is important- Obama and ACORN have been linked at the hip for decades, or had you forgotten? Scandal at ACORN is scandal for Obama.

If George W Bush had been linked over decades with some barely legal scam outfit like ACORN, the NY Times would be running above-the-fold splashes about any whiff of scandal there every other day. Hell, they even invented scandal about the completely not corrupt President Bush anyway. And McCain. And Palin. But when real live demonstrable scandal hoves into view, suddenly the NY Times has bigger fish to fry, because its Saint Obama in the crosshairs.

'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.”'

Trust me Jill, there's a whole lot more than those two you are not tuned in to. Day was when a story which broke on ABC would be on CBS and NBC within a few nano-seconds. Why not? All is fair in love, war and ratings. The fact that it was BigGovernment.com which broke the story is completely by the by. The NT Times in its haughty grandeur doesn't consider the whole vast array of right-leaning media legitimate, so it ignores it and its stories. THAT is a story in itself. Where is the newshound spirit of the muckrakers? Long long gone. Replaced by a prim fastidiousness which is contrary to all known cultural aspects of traditional Anglo-American journalism.

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

That's right, there is no track record of liberal bias at the New York Times. Nuh uh. Nada. Rien. Nil. Zippo.

'Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, said he has studied journalists for years, and though they are more liberal than the general population, he believes they are motivated by the desire to get good stories, not to help one particular side.'

We love him.

'Conservatives who believe The Times isn’t critical of Democrats forget that the paper broke damaging stories about the personal finances of Representative Charles Rangel and the hiring of prostitutes by Eliot Spitzer.'

I don't know about the Spitzer story, but the Rangel claim is complete shite. Local journos in Harlem have been digging dirt on Rangel from pretty much day one, but he is a protected species. Here is a question for the NYT: and what effect has your reporting on Rangel had? I didn't notice him losing his job... or his influence... or anything...

'And Republicans earlier this year charged that the paper killed a story about Acorn that would have been a “game changer” in the presidential election — a claim I found to be false.'

Not going to tell us what the story was? Not going to back up your judgement with facts, reasoning or evidence? How surprising. Not only is the claim true, the courts in thirteen states are investigating voter registration fraud. They don't do that for fun. Most Americans don't find organizations like ACORN interesting to read or talk about- for good or ill. But that doesn't mean if they were given the facts it couldn't have changed the outcome of the 2008 election. It may well have done. But we'll never know, because the NY Times suppressed the story.

'“If you know you are a target, it requires extra vigilance,” Rosenstiel said. “Even the suspicion of a bias is a problem all by itself.”'

Yeah, that's right- its all just faked-up suspicion by the Rethuglicans, right!

A winning formula

'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.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/opinion/27pubed.html?_r=2

What a crazy idea - 'mobilizing people to 'dig up dirt' and then trumpeting the results via some mass outlet. I'm sure I've heard that idea before somewhere but I must have been wrong. Certainly the people at the New York Times would never deign to do such a thing.

Tired of being right

'President Obama is unlikely to close the much-maligned detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in time to meet the self-imposed deadline of January, as his administration runs into daunting legal and logistical hurdles in moving the more than 220 detainees still being held there.'

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/25/ap-guantanamo-close-january/

There are legal and logistical hurdles to closing Gitmo? Who Knew?

Its almost like its a problem. You know, a difficult problem. Fucking idiots.

Choir master of the hate chorus

1000 Posts!!! Whoo hoo!!! Right, now we've got that out of the way...

'...The continued flow of criticisms of the previous administration and Obama's apologies for the actions of the United States are becoming more than unseemly. The president observed, "I came to office at a time when many around the world had come to view America with skepticism and distrust." He allowed that "part" of this feeling about the U.S. was due to "misperceptions and misinformation." But apparently another part was a justified—or at least justifiable—response to American actions, or so he invited his audience to infer...'

'The president seems to hold a fixed view that he can mitigate anti-American feeling by conceding the truth of what the anti-Americans say.'

http://www.theweek.com/bullpen/column/100770/Obama_plays_to_the_antiAmerican_crowd

They will like Obama more, that's all. Hatred of the United States, based on envy, shadenfreude and rivalry is going nowhere. Of course, Obama's belief is also steadily alienating the people who voted him into office.

Can you say 'cult of personality' children?

'Nearly 20 young children are captured in an online video as they sing songs that overflow with campaign slogans and praise for "Barack Hussein Obama," as they repeatedly chant the president's name and celebrate his accomplishments.'

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/24/elementary-school-students-reportedly-taught-songs-praising-president-obama/

How huge are the negatives?

'From Holly Merrigan on September 24, 2009 at 10:07 am. IP Logged, 70.104.12.x Report Abuse

I love Sara Palin and all she stands for but, unfortunately, I think she is unelectable. There are too many people who despise her...we need someone who starts out with no huge negatives. And I agree that adult supervision is a good thing. I like Petraeus. He has actually successfully run something.'

http://poll.pollcode.com/C6TQ_result?v

There will be endless discussions in the next three years about this exact subject. For the record, here are my thoughts.

The 'huge negatives' with Sarah Palin substantively are? She's a woman? You really wanna go down that road? She has a sense of humour? She didn't go to an Ivy League circle jerk? She hunts? She has a big happy family? She doesn't pander to the right-on holy cows? She was the object of probably the most vile hatefest in the history of Democrat politics (admittedly there are many rivals for that)?

Objectively, most of those are positives or neutrals for your average American. The last one- well what does that have to do with Sarah Palin? Nothing. Three years is a long time in pretty much any business. The crazed accusations that the Democrats spat at Ms Palin will have lost all their ability to influence by 2010, let alone 2012. Ms Palin has three plus years to introduce herself, the real person, to the American people.

If Ms Palin has real negatives, they are a lack of depth of understanding of some of Americas most pressing issues. But now she isn't running a state, she has lots of time for reading up and talking to the pertinent knowledgeable people. What she has in spades is guts, charisma and steely resolve. I would have given my left testicle to have seen her at the UN shindig yesterday rather than President of the World Obama. I can just imagine her taking on the motley rabble of dictators, psychopaths and lunatics with devastating grace; a twenty first century Margaret Thatcher.

Obviously, the road to the White House is long and tortuous and pretty much anything could happen in the interim, but I think Sarah Palin has a real shot. I'll drink a toast to her success!

Democrap

'The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee lashed out at McConnell's charges Wednesday, saying, "If there was ever any doubt who Republicans are looking out for in the health care debate, Mitch McConnell has offered conclusive proof: the insurance companies.

"Republicans jeopardize their own credibility when they choose to defend big insurance companies trying to make false claims about senior citizens," the DSCC said in a press release.'

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/23/mcconnell-blasts-government-gag-order-private-health-care-provider/

Lets put aside the grammatical and logical mistakes for a moment, and consider here what is being said. Obama keeps on repeating that he is all about reducing costs, enhancing choice and enlarging the numbers covered by insurance- when did crushing and destroying big insurance companies get to the top of the agenda?

How am I going to keep my insurance, which I like, a promise Obama has made in that skin-crawling 'I'm going to talk to you like you're first graders' way about a billion times, if the Democrats destroy my insurance company on behalf of the little people?

You know, some of this talkin' not makin' sense to me.

F. U. Republicans

'Obama, at U.N., Sets New Tone for U.S.'

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125370101525033631.html

And that tone is? Fuck you Republicans. You didn't keep to America's values, you killed my people, and now I'm gonna do things the Democrat way. Gaddafi likes it, Chavez likes it, Ahmadinejad likes it. You'll get used to it!

Jutting chin, absolutely no sense of his own rediculousness

So Bill Clinton compared Al Gore to Mussolini? That is spot-on. The more I think about the comparison, the funnier it is.

The usual bollocks

'Olivia Bailey, womens' officer for the NUS, said: "I am appalled that a university vice-chancellor should display such an astounding lack of respect for women.
"Regardless of whether this was an attempt at humour, it is completely unacceptable for someone in Terence Kealey's position to compare a lecture theatre to a lap dancing club, and I expect that many women studying at Buckingham University will be feeling extremely angry and insulted at these comments."'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8270475.stm

Doesn't matter what he ACTUALLY said, its what it kinda sorta if you are half-paying attention you think he MIGHT be saying that makes this COMPLETELY unnacceptable. Love that line '...I expect that many women studying at Buckingham University...'. I haven't bothered to call any and check, so I could be completely wrong, but I expect...

Bring on those elections

'Among those most angry are Republicans -- 90 percent of whom say they are somewhat or very angry. Seventy-seven percent of independents are angry and just 44 percent of Democrats are peeved.'
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/22/poll-americans-angry-feds/?test=latestnews

77% of independents are angry. Thats a bad bad number. Of course, 44% of democrats is a bad number too. Among them, probably many who voted for Hillary, the REAL centrist Democrat candidate.

Can't WAIT for 2010.

A stupid proposal

'A Modest Proposal [John Derbyshire]

I suggest a Constitutional Amendment to the effect that the United States not engage in any war longer than the Revolutionary War. That was 8 years and 137 days, Concord to the Treaty of Paris. The Afghanistan War would then be unconstitutional after February 21 next year.

We've been thrashing around in that worthless sinkhole of a country for eight years — twice as long as it took us to defeat Germany and Japan. And the Taliban is busily active in 80 percent of the place? HEL-LO . . .'

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmM0ZTY0ZGMxMmMwOTMwMmU0MDI0MTc2NDI4YzU2OWQ=

I think he's serious. Wait, let me amend that- he is seriously making this completely arbitrary trivial point. The United States went to war in Korea on the 25 June 1950. There is still no peace treaty in that war, only a temporary cease-fire which has held (pretty much) since 27 July 1953. Thats fifty nine years.

It seems almost too obvious to need pointing out, but you fight wars until they are won. Five years, ten years, fifty nine years. Every war, every circumstance is different. How long would the war against Japan have rumbled on if a) there hadn't been any nukes and b) if the Japs had followed through on their decision to fight for every square inch of their islands? It could be still going on!

The Iraq intervention was over within weeks; except that a three-cornered fight broke out in the political vacuum created by the collapse of the Ba'ath party. Predictable? Yes. Was it predictable that the combatants would carry on fighting long past any possible chance of success? No. In Afghanistan, the Taliban/tribes are now used to fighting all year every year. Young men grow up in Afghanistan with the tension and fear of war as a constant. They seem addicted to it. My guess is, they will carry on fighting until most of them are dead.

I'm pretty phlegmatic about that, but are the people who run the US? There does not seem to be any clear distinction in Afghanistan between 'civilians' and the people who do all the shooting and bomb-laying. Especially in the Pakhtun areas, pretty much everybody is hostile. But the rest of Afghanistan is not able to escape from the Pakhtuns malevolent orbit. What to do?

My sense is that there is no opportunity in Afghanistan to separate the civilians from the combatants cleanly. How do you run a counter-insurgency when that is true? You can't. The only alternative is what the British used to do, which is punish areas which disturb the peace outside their own borders, and leave them to their own devices. Rope them off to the extent that that is possible, and do something very positive with the Hazara and Uzbek areas of the country. Oh, and destroy every last poppy field and heroin processing facility.

The righteousness game

'China will increase efforts to improve energy efficiency and curb the rise in CO2 emissions, President Hu Jintao has told a UN climate summit in New York.

Mr Hu gave no details about the measures, which should mean emissions grow less quickly than the economy.'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8268077.stm

The Chinese have sussed this game. Like all the bullshit signatories of Kyoto, they have no real intention of cutting their actual CO2 emissions. They don't need to. They will get a huge blaze of positive publicity from the overexcited puppies of the world media anyway. For the latter, saying something is just as good, if not better, than doing something. You just have to show you care. That you are a paid-up believer.

They know that none of the puppies can be bothered to do all that dreary after-the-fact checking to see whether there are more or fewer coal-fired power stations, whether scrubbers get fitted to the ones that have already been built, whether CO2 rules are kept to when building new factories etc. In China, where a bribe takes care of just about any business that needs transacting, even if the documents say that CO2-limiting technologies are in place, you would probably be well served to go take a look with your own eyes.

I could be wrong about this, but I don't think I am.

Where can you go to find freedom?

'Last Monday dawned clear and bright in the nanny state of New York City. The newspaper brought word that the city's new health commissioner was working on ways to get residents to exercise more. That same morning, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his latest assault on unhealthy behavior. By 2012, the mayor hopes "to lower the proportion of adults who drink one or more sugar-sweetened beverages each day by 20 percent." Tuesday's news was about plans to forbid smoking at public parks and beaches.'

http://www.slate.com/id/2228722/

I always liked 'Brazil' as a movie title. The not-so-subtle subtext: what will the world be like when even the wildest places on earth are not just tamed, but locked down and tormented like Russia under Stalin?

I am currently going through a burst of enthusiasm for moving to the US, something which periodically assails me. I have to say, though, that its not nearly such an enticing prospect as it would have been fifteen or twenty years ago. And that's because the growth of the cradle-to-grave state has rumbled on, sadly under George W Bush and now Obama (less surprisingly). Tax rates are creeping up, entitlements are growing like some genetically mutated horror, and the state feels freer and freer to clamp down on your life and tell you what to do.

I guess there's always Alaska...

He's not an American, he just plays one on TV

'It's Not That He's Black. It's That He's An Enigma.
The more I think about it, the more the townhall anti-Obama anger isn't explained completely by the issues (sorry, Frank ). There's also something about Obama himself-. But that something (or the main something) isn't his race. It's that he's a relative newcomer, as Presidents go--an unknown quantity, an enigma, with a short track record and patches of that record left fuzzy. That means opponents can fill in the blanks with ominous possibilities. It makes paranoia more rational, if you will.'

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2009/09/20/it-s-not-that-he-s-black-it-s-that-he-s-an-enigma.aspx

Yes, or as they say, no. I agree that the dissatisfaction with Obama goes considerably beyond the laws he has so far enacted, and the ones he is trying to enact right now. There are other things that mainstream, non-partisan Americans don't like about Obama personally. But I don't believe he is an enigma. How can he possibly still be an unknown quantity for heavens sake?

You are an enigma right up until you start taking actions- and Obama has a raft of those already. I read this piece with great anticipation, because I thought Mickey Kaus was going to get specific. But he doesn't, not really. What is it that people instinctively don't like about the whole Obama fandango?

I believe it is fundamentally his persona. He is about as American as Udang Pete Balado. All the aspects of his life story add up to 'NOT AMERICAN'. He can't throw a baseball. He likes poncy Grey Poupon rather than French's plain ole mustard. He has a very foreign sounding name. The policies he loves are French, German and Russian in origin. He seems to be more at home talking to muslims in Egypt than Americans in Peoria. He doesn't consider America exceptional, apart from in bad ways. He doesn't respect American political traditions. He doesn't respect traditional American allies; indeed, he seems to mildly despise them. In a contest between 'them and us', you get the distinct impression he'd drift towards them. The man sat in a church that constantly spews anti-Americanism that 99% of Americans find disgusting and abhorrant for twenty years without apparently caring.

The gut feeling of millions and millions of Americans is that he just isn't one of them. Forget the birth certificate and the 'he's a muslim' canard; the bare facts do enough to mark the man out as an outsider. To paraphrase an old commercial, he is not an American- he just plays one on television. And so when it comes to defending American interests and the American way of life, they absolutely don't trust him to do the business. And I totally understand.

Like I said before, Bill Clinton, even in his darkest days, never lost the deep and abiding affection of tens of millions of especially poor working class Americans. So he ate too much, shagged as many women as he could and was not particularly dependable- those are badges of honour is some parts of the American population! The contrast with Obama is severe. What is most shocking to me though, is the extreme racist slant of the black population in the US. Over 90% support Obama; who isn't an 'African-American' by definition at all. His mother was white, and his father was African. The only presumption which can be made is that it is not his IDENTITY with which they identify, but his skin colour. That is truly disgusting. Martin Luther King would be weeping. What happened to 'judge a man not by the colour of his skin but by the contents of his soul'? Not only is it disgusting but it bodes very ill for future race relations in the US. Rather than finally once and for all rejecting a retrograde black American identity, and joining the vastly richer and more successful mainstream, it signifies a deepening and concretion of a competitive and confrontational separateness. Down that road leads poverty and violence.

Nothing Obama says will stop millions of Americans from seeing him as foreign. And that is because psychologically its true.

I hear what you say... but

'It strikes me that there is a giant, overarching difference between veterinary care and regular medical care, and that is that the former is barely regulated by the government, while the latter is so regulated that even now -- without socialized health care -- many doctors feel as if they spent most of their time being bureaucrats. Is that it? I'm sure my vet kept records for Puff, but I'd be willing to bet they consisted of little more than a couple of paragraphs summarizing the diagnosis, the procedure, and his recovery. And I'd also be willing to bet that for the same procedure on a boy, if all of the records were all printed out they'd be a stack of documents inches thick.'

http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2009/09/a_dog_is_a_rat.html

Trouble is... and I hate myself even as I type these words... if you look at where many of the high paying jobs are in the US, where manufacturing has been shedding millions and millions of jobs, it is in Health Care management and such related boondoggles.

To me, one of the great unanswered questions of the post-manufacturing economies is, what can we do?

We can't all be plumbers, bin-men, doctors, roofers, golf commentators or firemen? Can we? Doesn't somebody somewhere actually have to, you know, make stuff? And what about all the dunderheads who are too stupid even to be a plumber? The ones who used to be the cannon fodder for large-scale manufacturing? Are they going to sit around in their council houses taking heroin FOR EVER?

Perhaps somebody with an economics degree could point me in the right direction...