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Using his knowledge of slavery around the world, Thomas Sowell has interesting thoughts about the limits of power.
… Ironically, the United States is moving in the direction of the kind of economy that China has been forced to move away from. China once had complete government control of medical care, but eventually gave it up as the disaster that it was.
The current leadership in Washington operates as if they can just set arbitrary goals, whether “affordable housing” or “universal health care” or anything else — and not concern themselves with the repercussions — since they have the power to simply force individuals, businesses, doctors or anyone else to knuckle under and follow their dictates.
Friedrich Hayek called this mindset “the road to serfdom.” But, even under serfdom and slavery, experience forced those with power to recognize the limits of their power. What this administration — and especially the President — does not have is experience.
Barack Obama had no experience running even the most modest business, and personally paying the consequences of his mistakes, before becoming President of the United States. He can believe that his heady new power is the answer to all things.
Mark Steyn looks at the decline of British society.
… In the United Kingdom, “civilized society” cedes turf remorselessly: the highest drug use in Europe, highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, highest number of single mothers; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. Britain’s social disintegration ought to be a major election issue, but the governing class is always the most insulated and thus the last to notice, even when the “underclass” is all over the map. Alan Jay Lerner’s biggest hit concerned a man who took a “creature from the gutter” and transformed her into an English lady. Today, an entire country is downwardly mobile. …
We have four items on the Clinton/Obama attempt to hang the Oklahoma City bombing on the Tea Parties. The NRO staff posted some of Charles Krauthammer’s comments.
…On Bill Clinton’s comparing the rhetoric preceding the Oklahoma City bombing to that of the Tea Party movement:
…When a Republican is in power, dissent is the highest form of patriotism. And when a Democrat is in power, dissent is near treasonous and a call to mutiny and insurrection. This is really disgraceful.
Peter Wehner also criticizes President Clinton for his comments.
…The problem for Mr. Clinton is that his concern about the dangers of incendiary rhetoric seems to have taken flight during the two terms of the Bush presidency, as well as during his own. Regarding the former, there was, for starters, the 2006 film, The Death of a President, on the assassination of President Bush. Mr. Clinton did not, to my knowledge, condemn the movie in a front-page story in the New York Times or in a major speech.
Moreover, George W. Bush was, during his two terms in office, routinely called a war criminal, an international terrorist, and compared to Hitler [see a photo gallery here and here]. Signs with bullet holes in Bush’s forehead, with blood running down his face, were all part of the fun and games. The president was accused of moral cowardice by Al Gore, of being a liar and the anti-Christ, and of being a totalitarian and dictatorial leader. Members of Congress such as Keith Ellison compared the attacks on September 11 to the Reichstag fire.
…And now Mr. Clinton is preaching to us about not demonizing our opponents and about the importance of not crossing rhetorical lines. Can a Clinton sermon on the importance of fidelity and the gift of celibacy be far behind? …
Jennifer Rubin addresses the reason for Clinton’s agitation.
…You don’t see the liberal attack machine getting this bent out of shape over nothing. As Bill [Kristol] remarked, “The Obama administration has given rise to a more powerful conservatism than has existed for 20 years, since Ronald Reagan in this country.” And it’s not the GOP Beltway crowd that has done this — it’s ordinary citizens. I don’t think Bill was exaggerating when he said: “The Republican establishment is the threat to the future of the Republican Party and conservatism. The Tea Party is the best thing that’s happened for conservatives.” (You need look no further than the Florida Senate race, where the insiders picked the hapless Charlie Crist, and the Tea Party amateurs identified Marco Rubio as a rising star.) And so the liberals attack and make ludicrous connections to murders like Timothy McVeigh or concoct racist allegations that do not stand up to scrutiny.
The irony is great, of course. The community organizer has stirred the sleeping beast and is now the object of its ire. The Democrats want to shush them all up. I suspect the more the Democrats shush, the more irate the citizen protesters will become. It is proof of how disconnected the ruling party is from popular sentiment and how scared the Democrats are of their own constituents.
Debra Saunders addresses Clinton’s faulty logic.
…When a former president seizes such a tragedy for partisan purposes, it is no wonder a new Pew Research poll found that a modest 22 percent of voters say they trust Washington to do the right thing most of the time. …
…Think about that for a minute: If anyone were to cast blame for the Fort Hood shootings that left 13 dead, or any other attacks within American military bases on the anti-war movement, then that assertion would be followed by howls of outrage, and deservedly so. It would be absurd to suggest that opposition to the war be misconstrued as promoting violence against U.S. troops. …
Ed Morrissey discusses the economic effects of one insurance mandate in New York.
Perhaps the New York Times needs to change its well-known motto to All the News That’s Fit to Print … Eventually. In today’s edition, buried in its Regional section, comes an analysis of the health-insurance reforms imposed by the state of New York over fifteen years ago. Like ObamaCare, the state required insurance carriers to issue policies to people with pre-existing conditions as a means of making the industry more “fair” and imposed community pricing rather than risk-based premiums. How did that work for New Yorkers? About the way ObamaCare critics predicted:
“…New York also became one of the few states that require insurers within each region of the state to charge the same rates for the same benefits, regardless of whether people are old or young, male or female, smokers or nonsmokers, high risk or low risk.
Healthy people, in effect, began to subsidize people who needed more health care. The healthier customers soon discovered that the high premiums were not worth it and dropped out of the plans. The pool of insured people shrank to the point where many of them had high health care needs. Without healthier people to spread the risk, their premiums skyrocketed, a phenomenon known in the trade as the “adverse selection death spiral.” …”
David Broder fills us in on Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Charles Baker. Says there might be another GOP upset.
Before there was a Scott Brown, amazing the political world by capturing Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, there was a Charles D. Baker Jr., challenging the Democratic grip on Beacon Hill by announcing that he would try to deny Barack Obama’s favorite governor, Deval Patrick, a second term.
Baker, a 53-year-old Harvard grad, was no run-of-the-mill candidate. His GOP credentials were established during the years that he worked as the budget chief for Republican Govs. William Weld and Paul Cellucci, and his business background was augmented by his more recent service as chief executive of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, the second-largest insurer in the commonwealth.
But on the day he entered the race last July, Baker said he supported abortion rights and same-sex marriage. “My brother’s gay, and he’s married, and he lives in Massachusetts, so I’m for it. Is that straight enough?” he told the Boston Globe. …
Roger Simon does a travelogue on his trip to foreign lands – Texas and Nascar.
I was standing in the center of the Texas Motor Speedway Monday morning, staring up at my … now I guess I could say friend … Governor Rick Perry of Texas as he was giving a brief welcome for the annual Sprint Cup, when he boomed out the words with his fist thrust in the air:
“In Texas, we love our guns, religion and NASCAR!”
The crowd went wild and I knew I wasn’t in the Hollywood Hills anymore, Dorothy. I was in reddest of red state America and this blue state boy — born in NY, father from Massachusetts, educated in New Hampshire and Connecticut, most of his life in LA — was lovin’ it. …