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Before our descent into the political news, a Washington Post article on the collapse of Russia is here. Behind the Russian Bear getting ready to ravage Europe are serious problems.
… According to U.N. figures, the average life expectancy for a Russian man is 59 years — putting the country at about 166th place in the world longevity sweepstakes, one notch above Gambia. For women, the picture is somewhat rosier: They can expect to live, on average, 73 years, barely beating out the Moldovans. But there are still some 126 countries where they could expect to live longer. And the gap between expected longevity for men and for women — 14 years — is the largest in the developed world.
So what’s killing the Russians? All the usual suspects — HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, alcoholism, cancer, cardiovascular and circulatory diseases, suicides, smoking, traffic accidents — but they occur in alarmingly large numbers, and Moscow has neither the resources nor the will to stem the tide. Consider this:
Three times as many Russians die from heart-related illnesses as do Americans or Europeans, per each 100,000 people.
Tuberculosis deaths in Russia are about triple the World Health Organization‘s definition of an epidemic, which is based on a new-case rate of 50 cases per 100,000 people.
Average alcohol consumption per capita is double the rate the WHO considers dangerous to one’s health.
About 1 million people in Russia have been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS, according to WHO estimates.
Using mid-year figures, it’s estimated that 25 percent more new HIV/AIDS cases will be recorded this year than were logged in 2007. …
Saturday Night Live did some satire that might help the GOP. So it was removed from their website. John Fund has the story.
One of the funniest and most politically searing comedy sketches in years has vanished from the Web site of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Visitor comments asking about its disappearance are also being scrubbed from the Web site. The sketch — a harsh indictment of the housing meltdown that led to last week’s bailout bill — was clearly too much truth for someone to handle.
The seven-minute sketch featured a mock news conference of Democratic Congressional leaders on the bailout bill, during which Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank inadvertently acknowledge that it was Congress that blocked reform and effective oversight of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. …
And Roger Simon has a link so you too can see it.
We are in the midst of an important, possibly crucial, political campaign and the head honchos at NBC are engaging in thought control. They are suppressing a Saturday Night Live sketch about the economic crisis that skewers the massive hypocrisy of Democrats like Frank and Pelosi on the issue. …
Good WSJ Op-Ed on McCain’s health care proposal. McCain’s ideas conform to Pickerhead’s dictum that to find solutions to problems, it is always a mistake to pass a law. The correct strategy is to find the bad law that created the problem, and repeal it.
With less than a month to go, presidential candidate Barack Obama wants to deliver a knock-out punch by hitting John McCain on health care.
On Saturday Mr. Obama called his rival’s health-care proposal “radical” and, in swing states, he is now blasting it in TV ads. Mr. Obama is also distributing mailers and organizing “Docs for Barack” meetings to rally voters.
It’s good politics for Mr. Obama. But it’s bad policy. Mr. McCain’s proposal — to give every American the tax credit businesses get for buying health insurance — is the right prescription for what ails our health-care system.
The foundation of that system — employer provided health insurance — is crumbling. For decades, the percentage of Americans who get their health insurance at work has been shrinking. In August, the Census Bureau reported that the decline continues. Today, 59% of Americans get their health insurance through the workplace. Twenty years ago, three-quarters of us did. With costs skyrocketing — health-insurance premiums roughly doubled since 2000 — the current path we are on is not sustainable. …
Thomas Sowell writes on the real Obama.
Critics of Senator Barack Obama make a strategic mistake when they talk about his “past associations.” That just gives his many defenders in the media an opportunity to counter-attack against “guilt by association.”
We all have associations, whether at the office, in our neighborhood or in various recreational activities. Most of us neither know nor care what our associates believe or say about politics.
Associations are very different from alliances. Allies are not just people who happen to be where you are or who happen to be doing the same things you do. You choose allies deliberately for a reason. The kind of allies you choose says something about you.
Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers and Antoin Rezko are not just people who happened to be at the same place at the same time as Barack Obama. They are people with whom he chose to ally himself for years, and with some of whom some serious money changed hands. …
Sol Stern in City Journal comments on Bill Ayers – school reformer.
… Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!” …
Melanie Phillips from London with more on Ayers who turns out to be the topic de jour.
… And in what appeared to be a pre-emptive strike to neutralise what it knew was coming, the New York Times finally published a story about the Obama-Ayers connection – only to dismiss it, disgracefully, as a relationship that had been exaggerated and, even worse, to sanitise Ayers as having been ‘rehabilitated’ in Chicago. The laziness and dishonesty of this piece was quite breathtaking. It produced this stinging response from Stanley Kurtz, the journalist who has been bringing the full extent of this troubling connection to light ( – once again in the blogosphere, on NRO):
There is nothing ‘sporadic’ about Barack Obama delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of many years to fund Bill Ayers’ radical education projects, not to mention many millions more to benefit Ayers’ radical education allies. We are talking about a substantial and lengthy working relationship here… The point of Ayers’ education theory is that the United States is a fundamentally racist and oppressive nation. Students, Ayers believes, ought to be encouraged to resist this oppression. Obama was funding Ayers’ ‘small schools’ project, built around this philosophy. Ayers’ radicalism isn’t something in the past. It’s something to which Obama gave moral and financial support as an adult. So when Shane says that Obama has never expressed sympathy for Ayers’ radicalism, he’s flat wrong. Obama’s funded it.
The line of counter-attack is clear. Dismiss all these associations as sporadic or exaggerated – hey, we might all be on a board sometime with someone we don’t approve of! – and categorise all this mountain of evidence and questions as a ‘smear’. Which is of course itself a smear. The whole point about a real smear, however, is that it isn’t true. The evidence that is being so painfully dragged into the light has yet to be refuted and looks pretty damn solid. The smear by Camp Obama is that the evidence of their man’s radical connections amounts to ‘guilt by association’. Wrong. This is guilt by participation. And big media is in collusion to keep it quiet.
Turns out CNN can do some real reporting. They did a six minute segment on Ayers the other night. Ed Morrissey from Hot Air has details.
You’ll want to double-check the logo at the bottom left corner during this report. It really is CNN and Anderson Cooper fact-checking Barack Obama’s claims to have barely known William Ayers — and calling it dishonest. Stanley Kurtz even gets to make an appearance on a network other than Fox for this report (via Dirty Harry’s Place): …
Power Line with a couple of Bill Ayers posts
Sarah Palin’s calling out of Barack Obama over the Bill Ayers connection has finally caused some mainstream outlets to report the story (albeit generally in misleading fashion) and has compelled the Obama campaign to respond. That response is surprising, to say the least: Obama now claims that he didn’t know about Bill Ayers’ terrorist past through all the years when he worked with Ayers in Chicago! …
… Exactly as Obama dropped out of Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright’s church only when the association became politically inconvenient, he insincerely “denounced” Ayers only after his association with the terrorist had become a liability. That was after years of working with Ayers as a radical political ally, without showing the slightest concern about his friend’s career as an attempted mass murderer.
One wonders, sometimes, what it would take to convince an American reporter that a Democratic Presidential candidate has poor judgment.
Jennifer Rubin is next.
We end this with a Dick Morris column.
In the best tradition of Bill Clinton’s famous declaration that the answer to the question of whether or not he was having an affair with Monica depended on “what the definition of ‘is’ is,” Barack Obama was clearly splitting hairs and concealing the truth when he said that William Ayers was “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”
The records of the administration of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), released last week by the University of Illinois, show that the Ayers-Obama connection was, in fact, an intimate collaboration and that it led to the only executive or administrative experience in Obama’s life.
After Walter Annenberg’s foundation offered several hundred million dollars to American public schools in the mid-’90s, William Ayers applied for $50 million for Chicago. The purpose of his application was to secure funds to “raise political consciousness” in Chicago’s public schools. After he won the grant, Ayers’s group chose Barack Obama to distribute the money. Between 1995 and 1999, Obama distributed the $50 million and raised another $60 million from other civic groups to augment it. In doing so, he was following Ayers’s admonition to grant the funds to “external” organizations, like American Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to pair with schools and conduct programs to radicalize the students and politicize them. …