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Good news! Jennifer Rubin says they have recovered their senses in the administration about their condemnation of Honduras.
The White House may be in the process of reversing one of its egregious foreign-policy blunders. The Wall Street Journal reports that in answering questions from Sen. Richard Lugar, the State Department is beginning to hedge its bets on ousted president Manuel Zelaya. …
Today’s Pickings devotes much space to the health care debate. First up, David Harsanyi deals with the White House treatment of the folks who criticize them.
If you’re a virtuous and patriotic American, you may find this column either offensive or misleading. If so, please forward it to White House authorities at the Department of Fishy Activity. (E-mail the good people at flag@whitehouse.gov.)
As many of you have heard, the White House now requests that the public tattle on those of us spreading “fishy disinformation” regarding Washington’s proposed takeover . . . oops, I mean “reform” . . . of your health care. This step, naturally, is for our own good.
Now, don’t get overly paranoid, you freaky right-wing zealots. Judging from the Obama administration’s track record, the program will do absolutely nothing other than add billions to the deficit. …
Roger Simon comments on the same program.
Peter Wehner too.
… What we are seeing unfold today, online as well as in town-hall meetings and protests across the country, sounds very much like community-organizing, but for a conservative rather than a liberal cause. So in the eyes of some, community-organizing and political activism have gone from being virtues to being vices. …
And in Krauthammer’s Take from The Corner.
Well, the White House accuses it of being orchestrated. Orchestrated is a synonym for organized. And I thought that community organizing was a high calling. I mean, our president — he used to deploy it every day when he was a campaigner as a sign of his altruism.
This is unbelievable hypocrisy, and it’s because the administration has a hard time defending itself on the merits of the case. The support for health-care reform is sinking, and that’s because…as you look, as you unpack what is happening here and what’s in the bill, it is a monstrosity. …
Mark Steyn joins the chorus.
… When the community starts organizing against the organizer, the whole rigmarole goes to hell. Not that these extremists showing up at town hall meetings are real members of the “community.” Have you noticed how tailored they are? Dissent is now the haut est form of coutur ism. Senator Barbara Boxer has denounced dissenters from Obama’s health care proposals as too “well-dressed” to be genuine. Only the Emperor has new clothes. Everyone knows that.
Thankfully, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has seen through the “manufactured anger” of “the Brooks Brothers brigade.” Did he announce this in a crumpled suit? He’s a Press Secretary who won’t press. Apparently, the health care debate now has a dress code. Soon you won’t be able to get in unless you’re wearing Barack Obama mom-jeans, manufactured at a converted GM plant by an assembly line of retrained insurance salesmen. Any day now, Hollywood will greenlight a new movie in which an insane Sarah Palin figure picks out her outfit for spreading disinformation (The Lyin’, The Witch And The Wardrobe).
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, added her own distinctive wrinkle to the Brooks Brothers menswear. She disdained the anti-Obamacare protests as fake grassroots. “I think they’re AstroTurf,” she declared. “They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care.”
Is this one of those Chinese Whispers things? Obama told Gibbs to tell Boxer to tell Reid, and by the time it reached Pelosi, it came out as uniforms night: Brooks Brothers. Mel Brooks. Springtime for Hitler. Swastikas. Or is the Speaker right to sound the alarm about this army of goosestepping dandies? A veritable Garbstapo jackbooting down the Interstate like it’s a catwalk in Milan. …
Michael Barone points out Obama’s plans for the military and health care will stifle creativity.
… The Democratic health care bills threaten to undermine innovation in pharmaceuticals and medical technologies by sending those with private insurance into a government insurance plan that would be in a position to ration treatment and delay or squelch innovation. The danger is that we will freeze medicine in place and no longer be the nation that produces innovations that do so much for us and the rest of the world. …
Jennifer Rubin responds to the Dems’ assertion that the Town Hall protests are an insurance company plot.
The Obama administration would have us believe that the outcry from voters at health-care town halls is a concoction of the insurance industry. Well, those insurance execs must be awfully sneaky — they seem to have infiltrated the polls as well. The Wall Street Journal reports on the Democrats’ woes:
A new Quinnipiac University poll out this morning underscores the challenge facing them as they and their Republican (and some conservative Democratic) critics spend the month pressing their respective cases.
For instance, the Quinnipiac national poll -– with an unusually large sample of more than 2,000 interviews –- found that almost three in four Americans don’t believe Mr. Obama’s promise that any health reform that he signs will not add to the federal deficit. …
Theodore Dalrymple says animals get better care in Great Britain.
In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain, and on the whole it is better to be a dog.
As a British dog, you get to choose (through an intermediary, I admit) your veterinarian. If you don’t like him, you can pick up your leash and go elsewhere, that very day if necessary. Any vet will see you straight away, there is no delay in such investigations as you may need, and treatment is immediate. There are no waiting lists for dogs, no operations postponed because something more important has come up, no appalling stories of dogs being made to wait for years because other dogs—or hamsters—come first.
The conditions in which you receive your treatment are much more pleasant than British humans have to endure. For one thing, there is no bureaucracy to be negotiated with the skill of a white-water canoeist; above all, the atmosphere is different. There is no tension, no feeling that one more patient will bring the whole system to the point of collapse, and all the staff go off with nervous breakdowns. In the waiting rooms, a perfect calm reigns; the patients’ relatives are not on the verge of hysteria, and do not suspect that the system is cheating their loved one, for economic reasons, of the treatment which he needs. The relatives are united by their concern for the welfare of each other’s loved one. They are not terrified that someone is getting more out of the system than they. …
Corner Post on the passing of John Hughes.
The revered director and screenwriter died of at heart attack this morning at age 59. His impressive comedic talent was responsible for several classic films in the 80s and early 90s, including Planes, Trains and Automobiles, National Lampoon’s Vacation, and Home Alone.
But he’ll primarily be known for pretty much defining the American high-school experience for generations to come — Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, et al. They’re all classics. …
Ben Stein says goodbye to the man who cast him in Ferris Bueller.
… the insight that will make him immortal came in his teen movies, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and my favorite, the one that changed my life, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This insight was that the modern American white middle class teen combines a Saudi Arabia-sized reservoir of self-obsession and self-pity with a startling gift for exultation and enjoyment of life. …
WSJ reviews tonight’s ESPN documentary of Luis Tiant’s return to Cuba after 46 years in exile playing baseball.
One of the main attractions of sports is that they’re a welcome escape from the politics of the day and the things men do to one another in the name of this or that cause. Occasionally, however, the world of sports and politics collide. And when they do, it’s usually without a happy outcome—think of the 1972 Munich Olympics, when 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists; Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics; and the subsequent Soviet boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.
It should come as no surprise then, that “The Lost Son of Havana,” an ESPN Films documentary about Red Sox pitching great Luis Tiant’s return to Cuba after 46 years of exile, is not a happy tale (Sunday, 6 p.m.-8 p.m. ET on ESPN Deportes; Monday, 10 p.m. ET on ESPN). It is, rather, the story of a refugee’s rise to major-league stardom and the torment of returning home decades later to visit family on an island gulag.
“Things could have been different,” says Mr. Tiant, overcome with emotion at his aunt’s cramped and run-down Havana home. He is, of course, right. The wealth he accumulated in the major leagues could have helped lift his entire family out of poverty. But Castro’s revolution dashed any hopes he might have had of playing professionally in his country or returning home to help support his family and the community he left behind. In 2007, he was finally allowed back into Cuba as part of a goodwill baseball game between American amateurs and retired Cuban players. …