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John Fund says Nancy Pelosi is having a hard time getting away from the torture tar baby.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to be stuck in an endless loop, claiming she didn’t know the CIA was using waterboarding on terrorism suspects while more and more evidence emerges that she was indeed briefed on the practice — and stayed silent. Now it appears there may be a full investigation of the dispute.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer added to Ms. Pelosi’s discomfort yesterday when he suggested: “What was said and when it was said, who said it, I think that is probably what ought to be on the record as well.” In other words, Ms. Pelosi’s deputy now believes the conflict needs to be resolved. …
Melanie Phillips is apoplectic over our new Israel policy.
Leaving aside for the moment the malice towards Israel that is involved, the attitude of the Obama administration towards the Middle East is well-nigh incomprehensible in its suicidal stupidity. It is trying to make Israel play the role of Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Britain under Neville Chamberlain told it that if it didn’t submit to the Nazis it would stand alone – with the result that the following year, Hitler invaded Poland. Determined to prove that history repeats itself the second time as tragedy, America is trying to force Israel to destroy its security by accepting the creation of a terrorist Iranistan on its doorstep, under the threat that otherwise the US will not help protect its security by defanging Iran (and how, precisely would it do that?). But in doing so, the Obama administration is jeopardising the security of America itself and the free world, not to mention the Arab states which have good reason to fear Iranian regional hegemony. This paper by Efraim Inbar spells out the multiple idiocies of an administration that believes that making nice with genocidal fanatics will turn them into apostles of peaceful co-existence : …
The kid president says he’s gonna raise much money closing all the corporate foreign operation loopholes. Robert Samuelson says not so much.
… Listen to President Obama, and the status quo seems a cesspool. Pervasive “loopholes” engineered by “well-connected lobbyists” allow U.S. multinationals to skirt American taxes and outsource jobs to low-tax countries. So the president proposes plugging loopholes. Some jobs will return to the United States, he said, and U.S. tax coffers will grow by $210 billion over the next decade.
Sounds great — and that’s how the story played. “Obama Targets Overseas Tax Dodge,” headlined The Post. But the reality is murkier; the president’s accusatory rhetoric perpetuates many myths. …
We’re truly in a silly season in our country. Yesterday we saved $2 Trillion in health care costs. Thank God we elected Obama. Otherwise we wouldn’t have thought of this. Bu, why can’t the miracle workers in the administration save that much everyday? Former Bush economic adviser Keith Hennessy blogs on the subject.
… The President is attempting to claim credit for savings that (a) do not yet exist, (b) are not backed up by any specific changes in industry practices or government policies, and (c) are related to him only in that the groups announced they were adopting his quantitative goal. For all three of these reasons, the President’s claim that these savings will materialize is wildly unrealistic, and it is absurd to attach a per-family savings number to it. This is like the Mayor claiming credit for the 40 additional wins now, and telling fans that he will be responsible for the team winning the pennant. No one should take these claims seriously.
This artfully constructed sentence misleads:
What they’re doing is complementary to and is going to be compatible with a strong, aggressive effort to move health care reform in Washington with an ultimate result of saving health care costs for families, businesses, and the government.
If the groups had specific plans to change industry practices to hit their new quantitative goal, then those changes in private-sector behavior would save money for families, businesses, and government. …
Speaking of health care, it’s mostly the subject of Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Mark Steyn.
… MS: Well, Canadian health care is basically, that’s one of the few countries in the world where private health care is actually illegal. There is a private health care system in Canada. It’s called America.
HH: (laughing)
MS: If you get sick and you want urgent treatment, head south. If you head south from Montreal on what turns into I-87, just south of the border they’ve got a big, new hospital on the New York side pointing north toward Montreal, with a sign on it saying Canadian checks accepted. That’s for patients who can’t get treated under their own health system. For the amount of money they pay in taxes, you should be entitled to three or four terminal illnesses a year. But in fact, when you actually do have a serious illness, you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait, and eventually, the province of Quebec ships you down to Fletcher Allen in Vermont, or Dartmouth Hitchcock in New Hampshire to be treated in a foreign hospital. I think that is, that’s the old joke about the Barack Obama reforms. Where are Canadians going to have to drive to once America gets government health care? …
… HH: … I’m spending the month of May on American medicine, asking doctors, posting their e-mails at Hughhewitt.com, why do the Democrats want to do this? We have no evidence that it works anywhere. They call it a government option, but it’s really single payer, and it really means rationing. Everywhere you try it, you just mentioned Bulgaria, Great Britain and Canada, it is a disaster. Why do they want to do it?
MS: Well, what is does is, if you’re a Democrat, what it does is it changes the relationship between the citizen and the state. It alters the equation. If you provide government health care, then suddenly all the elections, they’re not fought about war and foreign policy, or even big economic questions. They’re suddenly fought about government services, and the level of government services, and that’s all they’re about, because once you get government health care, the citizens’ dependency on government as provider is so fundamentally changed that in effect, every election is fought on left wing terms. And for the Democratic Party, that is a huge, transformative advantage. …
Camille Paglia’s monthly column is here. This month she beats up on some of the right’s talk radio. She seems to suggest things are so bad in the country that someone will make another movie like ”Seven Days in May.”
… Troubled by the increasing rancor of political debate in the U.S., I watched a rented copy of “Seven Days in May” last week. Its paranoid mood, partly created by Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie, minimalist score, captured exactly what I have been sensing lately. There is something dangerous afoot — an alienation that can easily morph into extremism. With the national Republican party in disarray, an argument is solidifying among grass-roots conservatives:
Liberals, who are now in power in Washington, hate America and want to dismantle its foundational institutions and liberties, including capitalism and private property. Liberals are rootless internationalists who cravenly appease those who want to kill us. The primary principle of conservatives, on the other hand, is love of country, for which they are willing to sacrifice and die. America’s identity was forged by Christian faith and our Founding Fathers, to whose prudent and unerring 18th-century worldview we must return.
In a harried, fragmented, media-addled time, there is an invigorating simplicity to this political fundamentalism. It is comforting to hold fast to hallowed values, to defend tradition against the slackness of relativism and hedonism. But when the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation, there is reason for alarm. Two days after watching “Seven Days in May,” I was utterly horrified to hear Dallas-based talk show host Mark Davis, subbing for Rush Limbaugh, laughingly and approvingly read a passage from a Dallas magazine article by CBS sportscaster David Feherty claiming that “any U.S. soldier,” given a gun with two bullets and stuck in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, would use both bullets on Pelosi and strangle the other two.
How have we come to this pass in America where the assassination of top government officials is fodder for snide jokes on national radio? …
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