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WSJ Editors come out for Dr. Ben Carson for prez.
Whether this weekend finds you blowing two feet of snow off the driveway or counting the hours until “Downton Abbey,” make time to watch the video of Dr. Ben Carson speaking to the White House prayer breakfast this week.
Seated in view to his right are Senator Jeff Sessions and President Obama. One doesn’t look happy. You know something’s coming when Dr. Carson says, “It’s not my intention to offend anyone. But it’s hard not to. The PC police are out in force everywhere.”
Dr. Carson tossed over the PC police years ago. Raised by a single mother in inner-city Detroit, he was as he tells it “a horrible student with a horrible temper.” Today he’s director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and probably the most renowned specialist in his field.
Late in his talk he dropped two very un-PC ideas. The first is an unusual case for a flat tax: “What we need to do is come up with something simple. And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe, God, and he’s given us a system. It’s called a tithe. …
More from John Hayward at Human Events.
Dr. Benjamin Carson is a leading pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, where he is a renowned authority on separating Siamese twins. He was raised in the Detroit inner city by a single mom who worked multiple jobs to get him through school. He is a professor of neurosurgery, oncology, and plastic surgery as well as pediatrics… and he holds over 50 honorary degrees on top of that. He’s been the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins since he was just 33 years old. In 2008, he received America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from George W. Bush. He and his wife Candy run the Carson Scholars Fund, which hopes to “name a Carson Scholar in every school within the United States.”
He spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast today, ahead of President Obama’s address. Carson’s 26-minute speech, played in part this afternoon by radio host Rush Limbaugh, is setting the world on fire. If you haven’t seen or heard Dr. Carson before, and his biography makes him seem intimidating, rest assured he is anything but. Video is the only way to properly appreciate this speech, both because the good Doctor is a very animated speaker, and because he’s standing right next to Barack Obama when he delivers it.
In the sequester fight, Charles Krauthammer wants the GOP to take a hard line.
For the first time since Election Day, President Obama is on the defensive. That’s because on March 1, automatic spending cuts (“sequestration”) go into effect — $1.2 trillion over 10 years, half from domestic (discretionary) programs, half from defense.
The idea had been proposed and promoted by the White House during the July 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations. The political calculation was that such draconian defense cuts would drive the GOP to offer concessions.
It backfired. The Republicans have offered no concessions. Obama’s bluff is being called and he’s the desperate party. He abhors the domestic cuts. And as commander in chief he must worry about indiscriminate Pentagon cuts that his own defense secretary calls catastrophic.
So Tuesday, Obama urgently called on Congress to head off the sequester with a short-term fix. But instead of offering an alternative $1.2 trillion in cuts, Obama demanded a “balanced approach,” coupling any cuts with new tax increases.
What should the Republicans do? Nothing.
Republicans should explain — message No. 1 — that in the fiscal-cliff deal the president already got major tax hikes with no corresponding spending cuts. Now it is time for a nation $16 trillion in debt to cut spending. That’s balance.
The Republicans finally have leverage. They should use it. Obama capitalized on the automaticity of the expiring Bush tax cuts to get what he wanted at the fiscal cliff — higher tax rates. Republicans now have automaticity on their side. …
Walter Russell Mead peers into our obamacare future.
Britain was rocked this week by one of the biggest scandals in the recent history of its health system—and it just might be a taste of things to come in the U.S.
The scandal surrounds a recent hospital report’s findings that StaffordHospital in Staffordshire ignored even the most basic standards of treatment to disastrous, and disgusting, effect. The NYT has more:
The report, which examined conditions…over a 50-month period between 2005 and 2009, cites example after example of horrific treatment: patients left unbathed and lying in their own urine and excrement; patients left so thirsty that they drank water from vases; patients denied medication, pain relief and food by callous and overworked staff members; patients who contracted infections due to filthy conditions; and patients sent home to die after being given the wrong diagnoses.
As the piece goes on to explain, the hospital’s actions sprung from its single-minded pursuit of cost control. It drastically reduced its operating budget in hopes of qualifying for foundation-trust status, a legal category that would grant it more freedom from central government control. It’s a textbook case of how structural incentives in government-dominated health care systems can lead to terrible outcomes.
Blue model partisans claim that the American health care system is one of the worst in the world in terms of bang for the buck. Many single-payer systems are indeed cheaper than ours, but this is only half the story, and this new report suggests that the other half of the story—quality of care—isn’t always as rosy as official metrics show. And while the American system as it currently exists has plenty of problems, including hospitals and elder care facilities where treatment is scandalously bad, increasing government control of the system is unlikely to make things better.
Expect problems like this to crop up in the U.S. as Obamacare moves us further down the road of wonk-based health care, with well-intentioned, top-down reforms that sow chaos across a complex system.
History of meteorology by The Morning News.
“The water came so fast.” That’s what you always hear, but I never understood what it meant until I watched the East River climb the walls of my apartment building. It’s not fast like a crashing wave or a bursting dam. You’re not dry and then wet. It’s not sudden so much as it’s suddenly lake-like where it had never been that way before. The transformation is so fundamental that you think it’d need days, or at least hours, but it doesn’t. In just minutes, there’s water where there was ground, and then water where there was wall, and then water at the windows and still more water. Water floating cars and billboard-size construction fences, swirling and cold and strong where you walk your dog, where you eat breakfast, where you work. The water’s real speed is its power to remake the familiar as hostile, uninhabitable, or even lethal regardless of planning, preparation, and every other effort. Its real speed is its inevitability.
Eight days before Hurricane Sandy made landfall five miles south of Atlantic City, NJ, I started following it. Over the course of a week, I watched it grow from a low-pressure area known as 99L to Tropical Depression 18 to a full-fledged hurricane with high-speed winds spread across more than 1,100 miles.
I watched it move up the coast and inch along my computer screen and steadily increase the odds that it would make a damaging hit on New York City. I read about it at websites like Weather Underground and AccuWeather. I checked the updates as they came in from the National Weather Service. Words like “unprecedented” and “Frankenstorm” started appearing in the staid prose of meteorology. Days before Sandy hit, it was already “historic,” and I was completely obsessed, which meant a trip to the library.
According to Kristine C. Harper’s Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology, the science of weather forecasting was born on Jan. 9, 1946, at a little after 10:30 a.m. in a conference room in Washington, DC. The head of the U.S. Weather Bureau and a handful of military meteorologists were meeting with Vladimir Zworykin and John von Neumann, two of the most celebrated inventors of the era. …