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David Warren packs a lot into his article in the Ottawa Citizen. It includes a rundown on some of the administration’s czars who have avoided much-needed public scrutiny.
…Tell you the candid truth, I don’t like “nice” people. Conversely, I have a sneaking regard for real political enemies who are prepared to state candidly what they are about. Which is why I mentioned Obama’s long list of policy czars, above — people like John Holdren (1970s advocate of forced abortions and mass sterilization) the new science czar, Van Jones (declared Communist) the new green jobs czar, Vivek Kundra (convicted shoplifter) the new infotech czar, Adolfo Carrion (pay-for-play scandals) the new urban subsidies czar, Nancy DePerle (lobbyist-to-regulator) the new health czar, Cass Sunstein (behaviourist and animal rights wacko) the new regulatory czar, and so on.
There are dozens of these, altogether. They are Obama’s “shadow cabinet,” with the advantage over his more presentable official cabinet that they can avoid congressional scrutiny in almost everything they do. They didn’t need to face the Senate confirmation revelations that lost Obama so many of his earliest cabinet appointments. A mere Internet search for quotes reveals that many of them are capable of great candour, at least in the radical leftist environments from which most of them came. …
Roger L. Simon posts on Obama’s distorted ideas about fairness which is his “f” word.
I first noticed this during what was, for me anyway, one of the seminal moments of the campaign – Charles Gibson asking the candidate about the correlation between a cut in capital gains taxes and an actual increase in government revenue. For a moment it seemed Obama didn’t know what Gibson meant or had never heard of this before, but then he covered himself with the f-word. Even if this were the case, Obama said, it wasn’t “fair” to cut capital gains. Peculiar, no, given that an increase in government revenues would be more money to spend on O’s pet programs that allegedly would help those people that were suffering?
Mark Steyn discusses the quality of life problems that arise when government is in charge of healthcare.
…The problem with government health systems is not that they pull the plug on Grandma. It’s that Grandma has a hell of a time getting plugged in in the first place. The only way to “control costs” is to restrict access to treatment, and the easiest people to deny treatment to are the oldsters. Don’t worry, it’s all very scientific. In Britain, they use a “Quality-Adjusted Life Year” formula to decide that you don’t really need that new knee because you’re gonna die in a year or two, maybe a decade-and-a-half tops. So it’s in the national interest for you to go around hobbling in pain rather than divert “finite resources” away from productive members of society to a useless old geezer like you. And you’d be surprised how quickly geezerdom kicks in: A couple of years back, some Quebec facilities were attributing death from hospital-contracted infection of anyone over 55 to “old age.” Well, he had a good innings. He was 57. …
…Well, amazingly, millions of freeborn citizens exercising their own judgment as to which of the latest drugs, tests and procedures suits their own best interests has given Americans a longer, better, more fulfilling old age to the point where there are entire states designed to cater to it. (There is no Belgian or Scottish Florida.) I had an elderly British visitor this month who’s had a recurring problem with her left hand. At one point it swelled up alarmingly, and so we took her to Emergency. They did a CT scan, X-rays, blood samples, the works. In two hours at a small, rural, undistinguished, no-frills hospital in northern New Hampshire, this lady got more tests than she’s had in the past decade in Britain – even though she goes to see her doctor once a month. He listens sympathetically, tells her old age often involves adjusting to the loss of mobility, and then advises her to take the British version of Tylenol and rest up. Anything else would use up those valuable “resources.” So, in two hours in New Hampshire, she got tested and diagnosed (with gout) and prescribed something to deal with it. It’s the difference between health “care” (i.e., going to the doctor’s every month to no purpose) and health treatment – and on the latter America is the best in the world.
President Barack Obama has wondered whether this is a “sustainable model.” But, from your point of view, what counts is not whether the model’s sustainable but whether you are. I am certainly in favor of reform. I would support a Singapore-style system of personal health accounts – and Singapore, for Mayor Bloomberg’s benefit, has the third-highest life expectancy in the world. But, under any government system that interjects a bureaucracy between you and your health, the elderly and not so elderly get denied treatment. And there’s nothing you can do about it because, ultimately, government health represents the nationalization of your body. You’re 84, 72, 63, 58, you’ve had a good innings. It’s easy for him to say. And even easier for his army of bureaucrats. …
David Harsanyi uses Obama’s own sales pitch against him.
…In his pitch to the masses on health care, President Barack Obama says that a public option “will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health-care market . . . and keep the insurance companies honest.”
So let’s agree, then, that the more we inject competition into a marketplace, the more consumers benefit from lower prices and innovation. Consequently, there should be no problem infusing this open-minded brand of policymaking into an array of issues. You know, to keep everyone honest.
All one needs to do is employ the president’s logic and it becomes patently obvious that the time is right for a “private option” in Social Security. This would free citizens to extract themselves from a failing program and pay into a private one that offers more than a 1 percent return (like a savings account or a tooth fairy, for instance). Since injecting competition into markets is healthy and desirable and all that good stuff . . . it should be painless. …
…And what about those vulnerable children? If health care is a “right,” then education is a sacred moral imperative. How could an enlightened society allow a “public” education monopoly to run our precious schools into the ground? Let’s get moving on a private option by means of vouchers so parents — or “victims,” in this case — can blunt the influence of “villainous” super-funded special interest groups like the National Education Association. …
Michael Barone looks at the huge increase in government spending.
…The tea parties this spring and the so-called “mobs” of protesters against the health care bill seem to have sprung up largely spontaneously; it is those who support the Democrats who appear in organized busloads with mass-produced signs.
And the tea party and health care protesters, in their often unsophisticated way, are raising an issue that seems to have become central to our politics: Should we vastly increase the size and scope of the federal government? This issue was long dormant, with a consensus prevailing during the quarter-century of low-inflation economic growth from the early 1980s to the financial crisis of 2008.
Now it’s clearly presented, thanks to the Democrats’ plans. As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke noted on June 3, the national debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product will increase from about 40 percent in 2007 to 70 percent in 2011 — the highest level since the years after the massive debt buildup in World War II. “The fundamental decision that the Congress, the administration and the American people must confront,” Bernanke testified, “is how large a share of the nation’s economic resources to devote to federal government programs.” …
Ann Coulter counters Kathleen Parker’s attempt to play the race card.
…Throughout the presidential campaign last year, liberals were champing at the bit to accuse Americans of racism for not supporting Barack Obama. That was a tough argument on account of the obvious facts that: (1) for every vote he lost because he’s black, Obama picked up another 20 votes for being black; (2) Obama won the election in (3) a country that’s 87 percent non-black.
So the accusations of racism had to be put on hold until … the first note of dissent from his agenda was sounded.
Inasmuch as Obama was just elected and his policies have turned out to be the most left-wing the country has ever seen, it wasn’t going to be easy to claim the electorate suddenly decided they didn’t like the mammoth spending bills or socialist health care bills because they just noticed Obama is black.
But Kathleen Parker has leapt into the fray to explain that the opposition to Obama’s agenda is pure Southern racism. And she’s from the South, so it must be true! …
…How one gets from “we don’t want socialized medicine” to “we hate black people” was a tough equation. As my algebra teacher used to say: “Please show your work.” …
John Stossel says that big business is happy to use government to its own gain.
…Not that Big Pharma and Big Insurance like every detail of the Democratic plan. Drug companies don’t want Medicare negotiating drug prices — for good reason. If it forces drug prices down, research and development will be discouraged. (Depending whom you believe, Obama may or may not have agreed with the drug companies on this point.)
As for the insurance companies, they worry — legitimately — that a government insurance company — the so-called public option” — would drive them out of business. This isn’t alarmism. It’s economics. The public option would have no bottom line to worry about and therefore could engage in “predatory pricing” against the private insurers.
But despite these differences, the biggest companies in these two industries are on board with “reform.”
It illustrates economist Steven Horwitz’s First Law of Political Economy: “No one hates capitalism more than capitalists”. In this case, big business wants to shape — and profit from — what inevitably will be an interventionist health-care reform. Can you think of the last time a major business supported a truly free market in anything? …
Arthur W. Herman in NR reviews Allis and Ronald Radosh’s book A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel.
In most world capitals, the creation of Israel — which used to be seen through a heroic lens, as in the film Exodus — is now viewed as a matter of regret. The current U.S. administration, too, is rather cool toward Israel. So this is a good time to be reminded of how and why Israel was founded in the first place, and how one American’s role in that founding rose to the heroic. Allis and Ronald Radosh have given us an invaluable and compelling account of Pres. Harry Truman’s fight against enormous and unscrupulous opposition from within his own administration, in order to make sure America played a public role in the creation of Israel. …
…The State Department did everything it could to prevent that birth. It importuned the British to remain in Palestine. When that failed, at the last minute Truman’s U.N. ambassador sabotaged the president’s clearly stated policy by switching the U.S. vote from supporting partition of Palestine to supporting a more or less permanent U.N. trusteeship. A furious Truman had to read the riot act to Marshall and Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett. It was as close as Truman and his semi-deified secretary of state came to breaking publicly on an issue. Marshall relented, but told Truman he intended to vote against him in the upcoming presidential election. …
…And it may also come from a lingering sense, as Winston Churchill put it, that the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine is an event “to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years.” Supporting Israel was and is an act of gratitude toward the religion and people who stood at the founding of Western civilization, and without whom we would not exist. Men like Churchill and Truman understood it was important to return the favor.
Nose on Your Face.com reports Obama named Mike Tyson as “Town Hall Debate Czar”.