The Disturbing World of the Arizona Shooter

The initial campaign to connect in people's minds the Arizona shootings with "violent eliminationist rhetoric" from the Right continues in the modified form of a campaign to "tone down" violent rhetoric in politics and the media.  We are now witnessing a more subtle and devious way to connect idea of violent rhetoric from the Right with the Arizona shootings. And it deflects attention from the issues which should be under discussion as a result of this terrible tragedy.

This red herring is especially disingenuous after the shooter's friends have said that he was "on the left" politically in high school then apparently stopped watching the news, didn't listen to the radio and stopped taking sides in the normal political process.  But he was obsessed with the 2007 "new-age" anarchist internet movie "Zeitgeist".  Produced BEFORE Sarah Palin and the Tea Party were in the national news.  The shooter was also reported to have said in 2007 that Representative Giffords was a "phony" because she did not answer to his satisfaction his irrational question about government and grammar. He may have also developed a certain obsession with her.  None of his acquaintances seem to connect him IN ANY WAY with "right wing" politics. RS McCain links Dan Collins, a father whose child developed a rare form of childhood-onset schizophrenia, concerning the thought processes of schizophrenics.

 Pima college has release a disturbing video in which the shooter talks about what he is thinking as he walks around campus. It makes Collins' heartbreaking observations come to life. Drew M. says this  about the video:

This appeared last night and the reaction from folks on Twitter and email was that it's a tough watch.

The guy is genuinely disturbed. We knew that but to hear and see it so clearly is pretty shocking.

I would love to sit with Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Paul Krugman and the like to watch this. Then when it's over, I'd like them to explain to me how they think this broken and damaged man was in any way influenced by the 'tone' of our political discourse. . . .

Also read his quote from a commentator in the New York Times about the misuse of this tragedy to further a political agenda.  (The Times has backed off its original story line, probably due to the rapid response of competitive voices and real journalists).

Getting back to the Zeitgeist thing:  The Zeitgeist movie's producers, like many new-age types, paid attention to conspiracy ideas from across the political spectrum.  But the style of their movie was typical of activist art from the Left, and the movie won an award at a lefty film festival.  No wonder, since it attacked Christianity, suggested that the U.S. government was complicit in 9/11 and warned against "banking interests" and secret plots to start wars.

On the other hand, it also stated that the income tax is unconstitutional.  I haven't yet fully figured out why "truther" anarchist filmmakers who hate Fox News often get along very well with big-government leftists at rallies and activist film festivals. I would expect anarchists and big-government leftists to be ideologically incompatible. But then again, sometimes lefty anarchists espouse some big-government ideas -- which sort of makes them atypical anarchists.

Somehow, I am not confident that Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Paul Krugman and the like will now condemn violent rhetoric and images in left-wing activist "art"   like they condemned violent rhetoric and images from the Right. Art must reflect freedom of expression (unless it is critical of one of the Left's more fashionable "communities" of the moment).  These commentators cannot be consistent and retain their affinity with today's progressives. And they already have a designated villain.

Michael Crichton, Science and Global Warming

The late Michael Crichton describes the "nasty, unfair, brutal" response of his fellow liberals in the Global Warming camp to his book, State of Fear. He supported a traditional scientific approach over the post-normal approach to science favored by global warming alarmists. Entire interview is here. Critique of An Inconvenient Truth here. Note that Crichton died before Climategate confirmed many of the points he made in these videos.

Michael Crichton talks with high school students:

1. Although he does not name the Sierra Club, he gently explains to students how the lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club helped lead to the deaths of 30 million people - "more people than Hitler and Stalin together killed". People of color.

2. Should environmentalism be a religion?

3. His personal interest in people's attraction to totalitarianism.

4. Second-hand smoke

Richard Fernandez looks back at the alarmism concerning Global Cooling in the 1970s, to which Crichton made reference.  Prominent Global Warming alarmist James Hansen was just a lowly computer model developer back in those days of global cooling alarmism.  I don't think he got nearly as much publicity (or money) then as he does now.

. . . . .   Can a New Ice Age be blamed on America? If it can, then it’s real. Otherwise it is false. Over the coming years and beyond my lifetime, historians may wish to apply this formula: V = American Policy multiplied by the absolute value of any variable. It’s always America’s fault.

And of course, whatever problem with the climate emerges in the future, The Left Must Be Put In Charge.

Because the Liberal Elite is always right.  Somewhat brutal, but hilarious. There are a lot of people just  like this on the Left.  Especially in academia.

How Barak Obama Invented Himself

Despite the fact that he had written two autobiographical books, most Americans really didn't know much about Barak Obama when he was elected President.   Most of the mainstream media seemed to play a cheerleading role more than an investigative role concerning Obama's candidacy.

 Here's an interview with the author of a new, somewhat hagiographic biography. There's a lot of information in the interview about how Obama invented a black identity for himself. Early on, he apparently presented himself as the head of a "Joshua generation", with the promise of leading blacks into the promised land.

Consider this interview (and perhaps the book) along with the following articles by another man with a white mother and a black father, just like the President.  Although he addresses Obama's relationships with blacks elsewhere, these articles focus on the President's relationship to whites:

Obama and our post-modern race problem:

The president always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol.

Barak the Good:

Well, suppose you were the first black president of the United States and, therefore, also the first black head-of-state in the entire history of Western Civilization. You represent a human first, something entirely new under the sun. There aren't even any myths that speak directly to your circumstance, no allegorical tales of ancient black kings who ruled over white kingdoms.

If anything, you may literally experience yourself as a myth in the making. . . .

Does this special burden explain Barack Obama's embrace of scale as vision (if I don't know what to do, I'll do big things)? I think it does to a degree. It means, for example, that a caretaker presidency is not an option for him. . . .

Of the two great societal goals — freedom and "the good" — freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today's liberalism is focused on "the good" more than on freedom. And ideas of "the good" are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence — if not superiority — on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.

This is an old formula for power, last used effectively on the presidential level by Lyndon Johnson. But Johnson's Great Society was grasping for moral authority after the civil rights movement. I doubt any white president could use it effectively today, and even ObamaCare passed by only a three vote margin in the House and with no Republican support at all. Worse, in the end, it passed not to bring the nation better health care but to pull a flailing Democratic presidency back from the brink. . . .

Mr. Obama's success has always been ephemeral because it was based on an illusion: that if we Americans could transcend race enough to elect a black president, we could transcend all manner of human banalities and be on our way to human perfectibility. A black president would put us in a higher human territory. And yet the poor man we elected to play out this fantasy is now torturing us with his need to reflect our grandiosity back to us. . . .

Of course, these views can't tell the whole story of Mr. Obama's rise to power, but the information at the links starts to add some pieces to a puzzle - how and why did he rise so fast, and then fall in popularity so fast?

UPDATE: From 2009, a former Democratic aide to Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, Brent Budowsky: Why is everyone saying "No" to President Obama?

Last Friday the president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing. Don’t blame the president. He did not ask for it, and had the grace to say he did not deserve it.

The Nobel Prize gets to the heart of the matter of the Obama presidency. The prize was not awarded to President Obama, but to the idea of Obama. . . .

The president has described himself as a Rorschach in which others with divergent views project their views onto him. This is brilliant politics in a campaign but a disastrous approach to governing. Opponents become energized, supporters become depressed, power centers become disrespectful, and the president who tries to be many things to many people influences very few to do anything of substance for change. . . .

Shelby Steele was not correct in predicting that trying to be too many things to too many people would prevent Obama's election. But maybe he was right about the eventual ability of Obama to "win" on policy issues.

It seems to me that Mr. Budowsky, as late as October of 2009, still viewed the President as trying to be "too many things to too many people" on the domestic front. Fascinating how different his perspective was from mine. I noticed that the President immediately started playing to his progressive base after his election while treating Americans who disagreed with him as insignificant (dismissing Republicans in Congress with, "I won" during his first meeting with them, for example,) or as enemies. Unfortunately for him, his base was not as large as he might have thought it was. His sudden reversal of the promise to be a "healer" alienated many. His policy proposals have sometimes reflected what may have seemed to him to be political realities, at odds with his statements, twitter and blog communications with his liberal base, and Mr. Budowsky's article reflects disappointment from that camp. But by then, the President had just about stopped two-way communication with the "other side".

His tendency to defer actual work on policy to his staff and the Democratic Congress followed the pattern he had shown when he headed up the Harvard Law Review, where people who did the actual work recalled him as sort of a figurehead leader there, too - showing up to say a few inspiring words and to talk with people from time to time while others shouldered the burden of putting the publication together.

Our last election was one in which America would probably have done better if there were a ceremonial leader of America (sort of the equivalent of the Queen of England) in which role Obama would have been a natural, along with a working President.

It seems to me that the President was exceptionally good at image-making. He did not seem to understand the "governing" bit too well, though. Virginia Postrel on Obama's "glamour problem":

reason: You’ve called glamour a beautiful illusion. A lot of people would say that describes President Obama.

Postrel: Yes, President Obama is a very glamorous figure. Glamour is a particular form of illusion. It’s an illusion that tells a truth about the audience’s desires, and it requires mystery and distance. During the campaign people projected onto Barack Obama whatever they wanted in a president or even in a country. Lying is usually a bad thing, but they would project onto him that he was lying about his positions because he secretly agreed with them: “Anyone that smart has got to be a free trader at heart. He’s just saying this to pander to those idiots. He can’t really mean it.”

You’ve seen, as he’s taken office and tried to govern, this back and forth where he is consciously or unconsciously trying to maintain his glamour—which requires a kind of distance from the political process so that people can continue to see him as representing them, regardless of their contradictory views—while actually trying to be president, which means you have to decide what to do about Guantanamo. You have to decide what health care bill you’re going to back. You have to decide all these things, and you’re going to make somebody disillusioned. This morning I saw that the former editor of Harper’s is about to write a book, The Mendacity of Hope, attacking Obama from the left. That’s the power and the downside of glamour. . .

Even More on the Democrats' Fake Hate Crimes

After the Health Care Bill passed, Democrats immediately tried to divert attention to the Tea Party movement. With a lot of help from the Mainstream Media (Iowahawk really scored this time). Mark Steyn and others explained the significance of what happened on March 20 with the "walk" by the Congressional Black Caucus. Why are Democrats so firmly stuck in the past? Also back in March, VDH put the Democrats' "bottled piety" in perspective:

Like it or not, between 2001 and 2008, the “progressive” community redefined what is acceptable and not acceptable in political and public discourse about their elected officials. Slurs like “Nazi” and “fascist” and “I hate” were no longer the old street-theater derangement of the 1960s, but were elevated to high-society novels, films, political journalism, and vein-bulging outbursts of our elites. If one were to take the word "Bush" and replace it with "Obama" in the work of a Nicholson Baker, or director Gabriel Range, or Garrison Keillor or Jonathan Chait, or in the rhetoic of a Gore or Moore, we would be presently in a national crisis, witnessing summits on the epidemic of "hate speech."

So here we are with the age-old problem that once one destroys decorum for the sake of short-term expediency, it is very hard to restore it in any credible fashion on grounds of principle when the proverbial shoe is on the other foot.

Below is an ongoing update on the transparent attempts by Democrats to vilify the Tea Party Movement.

Don't Leave It to Cleaver
Part 2: Starting to back off claims
Part 3: The Breitbart challenge
Part 4: Video debunks claims
Part 5 The Washington Post's contribution to the brouhaha.
Part 6: The AP reports on the controversy, gets facts wrong.
Part 7: A citizen challenges WaPo's ombudsman.

Changes in Media Stereotypes of Tea Party Protesters

Some time around the beginning of April, the descriptions of Tea Party protesters began to change. Maybe the push-back from Breitbart, et. al, had some effect. Maybe the polls had some effect, or the presence of Democrats among the protesters. In any case,

There was a time, oh, a week or two ago, when the mainstream media portrayed the tea-party movement as an assortment of crazed angry extremist redneck racist idiots. What changed?

The headline we've given this column is a phrase coined by the conservative writer Tom Bethell to refer to the media's attitude toward conservatives who veer leftward. What we're about to describe is a bit different: more an epiphany on the media's part than a change in the object of coverage. It seems unlikely that the tea-partiers have suddenly become mainstream.

Yet that's what you'd think from reading some of the recent coverage. The Christian Science Monitor, which a month ago baselessly labeled Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell a "right-wing extremist," begins a Saturday story by rehearsing the stereotypes but then cautions that "political experts say that many such criticisms are near-sighted, if not outright inappropriate--and ultimately may miss the point": . . .

Something different is happening out there.

Update: From Punchline to Powerhouse

What did they find in the Health Care Bill NOW?

The Health Care Bill passed by Congress may have accidentally stripped them of health care coverage.

Just to review, Nancy Pelosi said we would be excited when we started finding out what is in the bill. It will be good for part-time artists. Not to mention violent sex offenders who want Viagra and child abusers on Indian reservations.

Even though they tried to divert attention from the bill to its opponents, we soon started to find things out about the bill. (If Nancy Pelosi REALLY thought that the Tea Party protesters were so violent, why did she lead a group of legislators through the protest, wearing that Cheshire cat grin of hers and carrying a giant, cartoon-sized gavel, after the vote?).

We found out, for example, that senior Democratic staffers who helped write the bill were exempted from its restrictions. Legislators who made sleazy deals in return for their votes, like Ben Nelson, were kicked under the bus. I'm not sure if the special deals for rich people in Nevada, not to mention union members who are paid more than their non-union counterparts, are still in there. All in all, approval of this bill was an ugly, messy, corrupt, haphazard process.

Members of Congress were surprised when corporations took massive charges against earnings, decreasing their ability to hire more employees during this recession. Henry Waxman declared war on those who had followed accounting rules for which he voted. Glenn Reynolds explains that this is not because Rep. Waxman is stupid.

Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can't possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what's more striking is that Waxman's outraged reaction revealed that they don't even understand their own area of responsibility - regulation -- well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.

If Congress were able to understand what was in the bill, would they have used language which might deny them health care coverage?

Update:  From a smaller, less complex country where government health care is firmly, solidly established, a grand idea for politicians.  Read through the entire post for an exciting political decision to waive health and safety regulations for health care workers belonging to a certain minority. Not that conditions are much better without those exceptions to sanitary procedures.

Imagine what politicizing health care would be like in the vastly larger USA:

The politics of deciding who gets what in the way of medical treatment doubtlessly will push aside traditional affairs of state. Every member of Congress will need to hire several staff members just to manage constituents' complaints about their care. Elections will be won and lost on the basis of who can get the most in the way of health care for their districts.

We will become the Gulliver of nations, a great power whose leaders are tied up in strings as they spend much of their time addressing the medical complaints, valid and imagined, of their electorate.

There's something to be said for allowing the individual states to become "laboratories" for the best health care policies.  The USA is so big and complex.  Socialized medicine would fall into a miserable condition in the USA faster than it has done in Europe, due to the size and complexity of our nation.  British hospitals were not ALWAYS compared to those in the third world.

UPDATE II:  Waxman has cancelled his show trials, apparently.

UPDATE III: Where were all the reporters before the health care bill passed? Oh, and incidentally, the promises that insurance premiums would be lower and that less-healthy citizens would pay less may not be true.

More on the Democrats' Fake Hate Crimes

The media, amplifying statements by Democrats, have exhibited a grand paranoia about members of the Tea Party Movement, even though the vast majority of recent political violence has come from the Left.

Mark Steyn:

On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.

And then, when the crowd didn't, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. Representative Andre Carson (Democrat, Indiana) insisted he heard the N-word 15 times. He's either suffering from the same condition as that Guam-flipper from Georgia, or he's a liar. At a scene packed not only with crews from the Dem poodle media but with a gazillion cellphone cameras, not one single N-word has been caught on audio. (By contrast, see my post yesterday for how easy it is to get it on tape when real epithets are flying.)

I disagree with John Lewis (Democrat, Georgia) politically but I have always respected him as a genuine civil rights warrior. And I feel slightly queasy at the thought that he would dishonor both the movement and his own part in it for the cheapest of partisan points - in the same way I would be disgusted by a Holocaust survivor painting a swastika on his own door and blaming it on his next-door neighbor over a boundary dispute.

But that's what the Democratic Party has been reduced to - faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. Congressmen Carson, Lewis, Cleaver and the rest have turned themselves into the Congressional equivalent of the Duke University stripper. Except that they're not some penniless loser but a group of important, influential lifetime legislators enjoying all the privileges and perquisites of power, and in all probability acting at the behest of the Democrat leadership.

Isn't that what societies with functioning media used to call "a story"?

John Lewis is, indeed, a "Genuine Civil Rights Warrior". But here is one recent instance in which he puts on his tinfoil hat, concerning his fears of "right-wing Republicans", and it works in a local election.   Listen to the clip. From the irrational scare tactics in the clip, you would never guess, if you didn't know, that Representative Lewis had faced down ACTUAL VIOLENCE in the past. This is the new post-racial era we were supposed to get with Obama.  

Peter Kirsanow has some thoughts:

As Mark Steyn noted this past weekend, the smearing of tea-party members by elected representatives and their media acolytes demonstrates the desperation and bankruptcy of many of today’s arguments in support of the liberal agenda — in this case, health-care reform. The claim that black Democratic congressmen courageously defied being spat upon and being called the n-word reflects a pathetic attempt to equate their support for the cynical, corrupt process by which the health-care bill was passed with the heroic efforts of the civil-rights movement. . .

Continued use of the “cry racism” tactic — despite its diminishing effectiveness — is partially the result of groups like the CBC (Congressional Black Caucus) having long since lost their reason for being. . . .

While members of the CBC tilt at windmills from decades past, they adamantly refuse to engage or even acknowledge the actual problems that currently plague the black community — single parenthood, dysfunctional schools, the debilitating effects of the welfare state (if you want to see the promised splendor of Obamacare right now, go to the inner city), to name a few.

These problems don’t fall neatly into the anti-discrimination model with which liberal groups are most comfortable. And they refuse to leave their comfort zone.

What Just Happened?

Have you been feeling like Roger Kimball's daughter lately:

Our daughter, aetat 2 and a bit, has been talking up a storm lately. The world, she has discovered, is a surprising place. When something happens that she doesn’t understand, her usual query is: “What just happened?” There’s an unexpected noise: “What just happened?” Her mother exclaims over a dropped stitch: “What just happened?” I scan the latest news out of Washington and mutter: “What just happened?”

It’s hard to know how to respond. One thing that happened is that she is already nearly $40,000 in debt: how precocious the young are today! A week ago, the Obama administration, aided by its Democratic allies in the House, passed one of the most unpopular and radical pieces of legislation in the history of the Republic. What just happened? The United States suddenly became poorer. How much poorer? It will take years, maybe decades, to tabulate. AT&T acknowledged the obvious by taking a billion-dollar charge in its first quarter to help pay for the anticipated cost of Obama’s experiment with socialized medicine. Caterpillar, 3M, Deere & Company, and AK Steel Corporation also announced [1] that they would be taking huge charges in order to prepare for the government’s intrusion into their businesses. What just happened? The recession just got longer. Adding tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of liabilities to your balance sheet isn’t exactly a prescription for growth, is it? . .  .

But wait! Wasn’t ObamaCare supposed to make thing cheaper? That’s what the Democrats have said. (Well, some of them. Nancy Pelosi, in an uncharacteristic burst of candor [2], said that “we have to pass the health care bill so that you can find out what is in it.”) But companies across the country have started assessing what’s in store and are planning accordingly. They have looked to the market, not The Narrative, for their marching orders. As Andrew McCarthy observed over the weekend, our Democratic masters in Washington do not appreciate this forthrightness. . . .

But, say, aren’t companies required to disclose events that materially affect their balance sheets? Isn’t that part of what financial transparency is all about?

Yes, but in this case, honest reporting of liabilities takes a back seat to promulgating The Narrative: that spending trillions of dollars and putting the government in charge of health care will make the delivery of health care cheaper and more efficient. Does anyone — anyone — believe that? Does Henry Waxman?

Ah, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!

Would that Sir Walter were with us today. . . .

Americans are entering upon untrodden ground here. What just happened? Everyday, it seems, brings some new enormity. . . .

What just happened? It’s untrodden ground in this country, but other countries have not been so fortunate. For decades, the Soviet Union labored under similar contradictions. How was the wheat production this year, comrade? The correct answer is “Absolutely splendid!” The true answer is “Disastrous.” Hunger, of course, is a counter-revolutionary sentiment, as is dissatisfaction with the paradise your masters are preparing for you. Dissent is now unpatriotic. Criticism is a sign of greediness . . .

Follow the link for more.

What's In the Bill? Two "Knowledge Problems"

Even members of Congress who helped draft the Health Care Bill seem  shocked by what is in it. Why is this?

Glenn Reynolds goes a little deeper into Representative Henry Waxman's outraged, totalitarian-style demands that corporate CEOs subject themselves to a show trial to explain why they drifted from "the narrative".    Waxman and his friends planned so carefully to hide from voters most of the big costs of their health care bill until after the election, and these CEOs have the audacity to follow regulations which Mr. Waxman voted for, and which require those CEOs to disclose some of those costs NOW! Unacceptable!   Reynolds explains:

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together. 

Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on. . .

Hayek's insight into economics and regulation is often called "The Knowledge Problem," and it is a very powerful notion. But recent events suggest that it's not just the economy that regulators don't understand well enough -- it's also their own regulations. This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation. The additional costs created by Obamacare, conveniently enough, weren't going to strike until later, after the November elections.

But both Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them. . .

Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there's some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here! More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can't possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what's more striking is that Waxman's outraged reaction revealed that they don't even understand their own area of responsibility - regulation -- well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.  In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created.   It's like a second-order Knowledge Problem.

. . . The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117 pages long and composes 226 volumes. No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can't be aware of all the real-world complications it's producing, it can't even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it's doing.

Read the whole thing.

Update:  Explaining why Congress gave companies subsidies for not dumping retirees into the federal system when MediCare drug coverage was enacted.

Dangerous, Violent Groups Overtake America

Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats promised that we would come to love Obamacare once the bill was passed. But, instead of helping us understand the bill, Democrats and the mainstream media turned their primary attention, the very next day, to completely destroying the reputation of the Tea Party Movement.

The "brave" walks past Tea Party protesters

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus made a provocative, unnecessary walk past protesters, hoping to capture on video a reaction which could be use to discredit the protesters. They didn't get any video, but they DID get members of the Black Congressional Caucus to report incidents of racial epithets and spitting. James Clyburn (the congressman who accused Bill Clinton of racism during the Presidential primaries) was prominent in making these charges. Check here for his definition of racism. Oddly, despite the ubiquitous video equipment present during the "congressional walk past protesters", no epithets could be confirmed. But the bogus charges got out into the mainstream media in an unusually fast, seemingly coordinated manner. In an effort to further divide America, this event was followed by a similar provocative "walk", led by Nancy Pelosi carrying a giant gavel, after the vote on the health care bill.

Democrats and the media seemed alarmed about the "threatening" attitude of the protesters and they repeated, and in some cases amplified, charges of racial epithets used against black congressmen. Video here. They tried to blame Republicans for "inflammatory language". Yet they downplayed or failed to report the arrest of an Obama supporter for threatening to kill a Jewish congressman and his family as well as other violence directed against Republicans and conservatives or libertarians.

Glenn Reynolds points out the hypocrisy. John Hinderaker points out that most recent political violence has been by liberals. Why haven't the incidents of attempted murder (some of which sent elderly bus riders to the hospital) by activists near a Republican convention in 2008 received more media attention? Andrew Breitbart reflects Alinsky tactics back toward the Democrats, with his offer to pay for proof of a racial epithet during the "walk" now increased to $100,000.

The first Alinsky president is now using surrogates to split this nation into two hostile parties so he can puppeteer the have-nots against the perceived haves. The non-response to my $100k challenge is a tacit acknowledgement that the Congressional Black Caucus and Barack Obama don't have the stomach for doubling down.

Leftists are not used to conservatives using inflammatory, Alinsky-type speech against them.  Democrats are starting to back off their claims about the incident.

Oh, No! Militias!

Now the press and Democrats are having vapors over "Christian", "Right-wing" Militias. Some perspective is in order. If a Lefty actually kills someone for similar motives, it doesn't make big news. And these groups are not always what they seem on the surface. Though some of those all-white militias can be sort of threatening.

Other Threatening Groups

Master of satire Iowahawk points out other menacing, violent groups in America.

At the Media Violence Project, our charter is to protect public safety by researching, documenting and raising awareness about the ever-increasing wave of violent, disgusting crimes perpetrated by members of the American news media. It is a largely thankless task -- often requiring a cast iron stomach -- but if our work has prevented one more American child from falling victim to a criminally insane anchorman or newspaper reporter, it will all have been worth it. . . .

Shocking as they are, these incidents scarcely scratch the surface of the global crime wave caused by rampaging journalists. Our in-depth biennial 30 minute Google search uncovered a seemingly endless catalog of journalist-related crimes, astonishing as much for their depravity as their number. The reasons behind this phenomenon are complex, according to Media Violence Project staff psychologist Divad Egrub.

"Journalism school leaves these people ill-prepared for life in conventional society," explains Egrub. "They see typical American people expressing normal opinions, and it causes confusion. In time, they become boiling cauldrons of paranoia and rage. This triggers a 'fight or flight' reaction, and sometimes they simply lash out." . . .

As bad as these case are individually, collectively they represent only the tip of a vast, bloody iceberg of media brutality. Most experts believe that the overwhelming majority of media crimes are never reported. "Think about it," says Egrub. "We are actual relying on reporters to report on the crimes of reporters. All we really know about are the cases other journalists were too incompetent to cover up. For every one of them there are likely dozens lying on the media's cutting room floor."

Politicians: An Even Greater Menace?

And yet, Americans may be facing an even worse wave of domestic attacks from the only organized group arguably even more violent, stupid and useless than the news media: elected public officials.

In response to growing public outcry, the board of the Media Violence Project earlier this morning established a new affiliate organization, the Center for the Study of Politician Sociopathy. What our comprehensive 15 minute Google search revealed was an explosive outbreak of violence that, if trends continue, may actually eclipse the media public safety crisis by November. . . .

"There's an deep undercurrent of anger, alienation and frustration in Congress, as well as America's statehouses and city halls," explains CSPS study director Vadid Grube. "They feel that voters are no longer listening to them. Then come the drugs, followed by the extensive, journalist-like paranoid fantasies. And then... snap." . . . .

What you can do to protect yourself and your family

"Americans are accustomed to viewing their political representatives in an idealized light," explains Divad Egrub. "We assume them to be clean, friendly, hard working, nonviolent criminals, peacefully thieving away at the public trough and diligently extorting bribes from special interest groups. The politician takes advantage of this gullible trust to draw an unsuspecting constituent within striking distance. Before you know it, the constituent is dealing with an erupting volcano of psychosexual rage."

Read the whole, brilliant thing. It's full of links which put the inflammatory, often false, news stories about the Tea Party Movement in perspective. If we can survive the violence of journalists and politicians, we can certainly survive the occasional nut case from the Right or the Left. Republican politicians, and even conservative commentators and bloggers, are used to death threats and threatening or intimidating actions at their homes.

But while people take violent language from the Left and violent actions by leftist extremists in stride, as a normal part of life, the Right is expected to "control" its extremists by refraining from criticism of their liberal counterparts. "Shut up,"  he explained.

The fact is that, unlike conservatives, modern liberals have had little quarrel with political violence. This is best demonstrated by their support for card check legislation, the entire point of which it to abolish the secret ballot so that union goons can use the threat of violence to extend union power and thereby enrich the Democratic Party. (If you doubt the truth of that proposition, try to think of another reason why the Democrats want to eliminate the secret ballot in union elections.) The beating of Kenneth Gladrey by union goons--more specifically, the lack of any interest in it by anyone in the Democratic Party, the media, or on the Left generally--shows how hypocritical the Democrats' current pacifism is. If the day ever comes when conservative groups start hiring goons, we can take the liberals' purported fears of violence more seriously.

So far, the smear campaign against Tea Partiers doesn't seem to be working out quite as planned. Except among some of the Democratic base, who seem more fired up (oops, is that inflammatory?)  than before, perhaps even more than the Tea Partiers. So much for "bringing America together".

What's in the bill? Rep. Waxman declares war on accounting requirements for which he voted

Even members of Congress who voted for the bill appear to be  caught off-guard by the provisions of ObamaCare. Like Henry Waxman, who seems to want to portray as Enemies of the State the CEOs of any companies which report changes in their financial forecasts based upon future expenses expected to be imposed by the bill. Meg McArdle (who voted for Obama):

Accounting basics: when a company experiences what accountants call “a material adverse impact” on its expected future earnings, and those changes affect an item that is already on the balance sheet, the company is required to record the negative impact–”to take the charge against earnings”–as soon as it knows that the change is reasonably likely to occur.

This makes good accounting sense. The asset on the balance sheet is now less valuable, so you should record a charge. Otherwise, you’d be misleading investors.

The Democrats, however, seem to believe that Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are some sort of conspiracy against Obamacare, and all that is good and right in America.

Glenn Reynolds:

I think when they planned for ObamaCare’s costs to come online post-election, they didn’t know enough to realize that accounting rules (and SEC regulations) would require companies to act now. Just another example of the “knowledge problem” confronting economic planners and regulators . . . . 

UPDATE: Reader Bill Hesson emails: “Would somebody please explain to the gentleman from California that the incessant prosecution of business executives for nothing more than excessive optimism is likely to have consequences that include pessimistic accounting?" . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Brad Garton writes: “What’s really funny is that among other things Sarbanes-Oxley requires them to make the impacts public, and Waxman voted for that. Apparently he didn’t read that bill either.”

The country's in the very best of hands . . . .

Exciting Discoveries in the Health Care Bill

Nancy Pelosi promised us that we would be excited when they passed the bill and we started to discover what is in it. We're starting to find out now.

One big surprise for many people is mandatory massive charges against earnings for major employers in anticipation of new taxes, which will undoubtedly increase unemployment. Followed by threats which place those employers in a legal double-bind situation:

Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden. Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don't like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.

Who, besides companies with tight political connections, would want to do business in this threatening climate?

Andy McCarthy:

. . .  I worked for many years in the U.S. Attorney's Office in whose backyard was Wall Street. If a company like AT&T failed to make a legally mandated restatement of its financial position while continuing to participate in the capital markets, it would be investigated and the responsible management officials would likely find themselves prosecuted while the SEC, concurrently, went after the company and its officiallys in civil enforcement suits. There are prosecutors and investigators who would salivate at the prospect of doing such a career-making case.


If we are now under a system where disclosure gets you a public whipping and other threats by the Powers That Be while nondisclosure promises the ruinous expenses of defending against criminal investigations and civil enforcement, this is no longer anything but a thugocracy.

Furthermore, the section of the bill which led to these massive charges against earnings will lead employers to drop prescription coverage for retirees, which will place more people in the federal program, making the Democrats' claim of "deficit neutrality" even more laughable.  Captain Ed:

Over the past year, I’ve repeatedly warned about the dangers of static tax analysis. That process considers changes in tax policy without considering its impact on behavior. The closure of this “loophole,” as Robert Gibbs called it yesterday, is a perfect example of this stunted thinking.

The Democrats in Congress argued that they would gain $5.4 billion in revenue by eliminating the tax break enacted in the 2003 Medicare Part D program as an incentive for businesses to keep their retirees out of the Medicare system. Instead, they have given businesses a reason to dump their retirees out of the private networks and into the Part D system now. Not only will the expected tax revenues never appear, but now we will have to spend a lot more money covering those prescriptions out of public funds. The seniors in these programs will suffer most of all, as the Part D coverage is vastly inferior to the private plans offered by businesses in the private sector.

Who could have foreseen this? Well, businesses have been trying to get attention to this problem for months, as the AP somewhat belatedly reports . . .

Update: Congress mandated the disclosures which the Democrats now wish to hide, in response to the Enron scandal.

"Transforming America"

President Obama got his Health Care Reform vote in the House.

Liberty dies, with thunderous applause.

Well, perhaps the Star Wars comparison is a bit dramatic. However, as C.S. Lewis said,

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

The President is going directly from a reality-bending (she's right: he turns the meaning of words on end from the beginning to the end of the speech) victory speech about "Health Care Reform" (read the whole speech if you have doubts about its Orwellian nature) to "Immigration Reform".

The Democrats have to enroll as many dependent voters as possible before November to continue their plan to "Transform America", I guess, since the Democrat's "Health Care Reform" bills are so unpopular.

Remind anyone of the Stamp Act, 245 years ago today.?

The final big points in the President's speech about giving people "control over their own health care":

The work of promoting private sector job creation goes on. The work of putting American families’ dreams back within reach goes on. And we march on, with renewed confidence, energized by this victory on their behalf.

In the end, what this day represents is another stone firmly laid in the foundation of the American Dream. Tonight, we answered the call of history as so many generations of Americans have before us. When faced with crisis, we did not shrink from our challenge -- we overcame it. We did not avoid our responsibility -- we embraced it. We did not fear our future -- we shaped it.

Compare with the observations here, like "My health insurance just became illegal". Well, I guess that's one way to give people control over their own health care. Force them to buy the kind of insurance YOU want them to buy. Unless they're senior Democratic staffers who helped write the bill or something.  OF COURSE you would want to exempt THEM from the restrictions of this bill.

And here's Canadian-born Mark Steyn, writing when the Democrats were still planning on the "Deem and Pass" evasion of responsibility for their votes:

This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II – and that's change you can believe in. This is what "health" "care" "reform" boils down to: Fewer doctors, longer wait times, but more bureaucrats. . .

Investor's Business Daily argues that the "health" debate is really a proxy fight on the size and role of government. According to their poll, 64 percent of people think the federal government has "too much power."

Correct. But a big chunk of that 64 percent voted less than 18 months ago for a man and a party explicitly committed to more government with more power, and they're now living with the consequences. Obama is government, and government is Obama. That's all he knows and all he's ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who's never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who've demonized (demonized?) such grubby activities. Many of which associates he appointed to high office: Obama's Cabinet has less experience of private business than any in the past century. What it knows is government, and government's default mode is to grow, and grow.

California is bankrupt: The dependent class and the government class that issues the checks to the dependent class have squeezed out the poor boobs in the middle who have to pay for it all. Everybody knows this. But a state that already has a Bureau of Home Furnishings cannot restrain itself from setting up a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation – or, anyway, an impact study to study whether the Bureau of Impact Studies should study the impact of a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation.

Look around you, and take it all in. From now on, it gets worse. If you have kids, they'll live in smaller homes, drive smaller cars, live smaller lives. If you don't have kids, you better hope your neighbors do, because someone needs to spawn a working population large enough to pay for the unsustainable entitlements the Obama party has suckered you into thinking you're entitled to. The unfunded liabilities of current entitlements are $100 trillion.  . . . To these existing entitlements, Obama and his enforcers in Congress propose to add the grandest of all: health care, on a scale no advanced democracy has ever attempted.

Steyn's observations are set to music by a Dutch Immigrant. With a few additional comments.

. . . he mentioned in passing one of my persistent observations about the strange new world being engineered in Washington; a world in which all, except for the elite, lead smaller, much smaller lives than ourselves or our parents.

Partly because the Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen.

Milton Friedman, April 17, 1996, on the depersonalization of medicine with government control.

Pelosi: Giving Artists the Luxury of Unemployment. Meanwhile, is Obama writing Europe off?

Did I miss a great renaissance in European Art with the advent of socialized medicine there?  Nancy Pelosi imagines how the Democrats will give freedom to artists to "quit their day jobs" to concentrate on their art, by passing the Democrat's Health Care Bill.  Which we will only understand once it's passed, she says.

Pelosi has a point about the distortions produced by providing tax breaks to employers, but not to private citizens, for the purchase of health care.  (This unfair situation arose out of the desperate attempts of employers to get around wage and price controls during World War II by offering health benefits in addition to wages.  When the IRS tried to impose taxes on these benefits, the people revolted).

But Ms. Pelosi also seems to be imagining a utopian dream world where the same amount of money just magically appears and makes its way into the government's coffers even if people make much less money.   If everybody becomes an unemployed  artist, living romantically on love, beauty and a few dollars scratched together from selling his work (don't forget to pay the sales tax and self-employment tax, Mr. Artist), who will do the hard, unartistic jobs that pay the bills?  She also seems to want to punish people who become entrepreneurial to the point of hiring significant numbers of employees. And people who make "more than their fair share" of money.   If you subsidize unemployed artists, you get more of them.  If you punish job creation, you get fewer jobs.

A tax base containing more struggling artists and fewer employers and high-wage employees moves the  the "fiscal neutrality" fiction concerning the health care bill even further from reality.  It's that type of unintended consequence that helped turn Lenin's dream of a utopian society (where everyone would be freed from drudge labor to pursue meaningful work like art)  into a society featuring a privileged nomenklatura contrasted with forced labor ("we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us") along with gulags and starvation for those who did not fall into line.

Even though the vast majority of American progressives reject Stalinism, much of the utopianism of early Marxist-Leninist theory remains in their good-hearted, benevolent plans for the rest of us.  And you can tell from listening to Ms. Pelosi that she really does believe that she is helping people.  But childhood stories which she has related in interviews have also revealed that she has a profound admiration for political power.  This is consistent with her behavior in pushing through health care reform.  Benevolence is often accompanied by thuggish or dictatorial behavior.  Totalitarianism is very tempting, even (or perhaps especially) to the benevolent.

Has Ms. Pelosi not noticed the financial condition of her own state?  That's what happens when progressives control the legislature for a few decades.   Pelosi is not doing so well herself at leading the nation into a "pay as you go" direction.  And she looks forward to creating vast new federal bureaucracies where government employees will be paid better than the shrinking private sector, and where they will probably be largely exempt from the health care rationing which her romantic starving artist will experience.  Because re-arranging wealth is far more noble than creating wealth, so bureaucrats deserve better treatment.

And then it will all fall apart, as in Greece and, barring a federal bailout from better-run states, California. But maybe art can console us.  If we do better than the Europeans in that department.

 Another point by Kenneth Anderson from the link above, concerning the EU's current problems with the financial crisis in Greece:

. . . These European leaders know better than anyone on the planet how the shift to their domestic social model implies geopolitical decline. So they have no doubt as to where Obama is taking the US in foreign affairs. . .

The post linked above makes reference to a second post on the reasons developed for forming the European Union in the first place:

. . . the Obama administration’s pooh-bahs seem to have written off Europe as the past, Asia is the future. The irony is that it is precisely on account of striving so desperately, so mightily, to become a Western European democratic socialist state that the Obama administration feels no need any longer to look to Europe. It has already priced-in internally anything of ideological value Europe might have to offer, on account of the transformations under way in the US. We’ve now got — thanks to the decension of Bush and the inclension of Obama –anything of value Europe might offer in the way of values, so why pay attention to those losers? . . .

Of course, the one missing piece of that puzzle is how it is that Europe went into decline, and whether that lesson for the US has been priced-in ....

I wonder how the European art scene will change when Europeans start to internalize the possibility that America will not longer be paying for Europe's military defense? The Russian Bear is stirring. And the Islamists are on the rise.

 Any chance of a return to "hard" totalitarianism in Europe in response? It's been less than a century.  Anti-semitism is on the rise again . . .

Do you know any Bolsheviks?

Back in January, President Obama surprised the Republicans by insisting that their meeting be on C-Span (unlike the healthcare debate, which he had promised would be on C-Span), He tried, quite successfully, to make Republicans seem unreasonable and ultra-partisan by saying that they reacted to the Health Care Bill like it was a "Bolshevik Plot". He characterized the plan as "pretty centrist". Hmmmm.

There aren't any Bolsheviks anymore. But I think you could characterize the Democrats' plan as a "Statist Plot", given the way the Democrats tried to rush it through with no debate or scrutiny, given the special deals for Democratic constituents, given that they seem to be willing to sacrifice their majority in 2010, given that they at one point inserted language to make certain parts of the bill irreversible by future congresses, and given that President Obama and other Democrats have stated that they intend for this plan to lead to a single-payer system. (Follow the links here).

Lenin said,

Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.

Mark Steyn said,

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate" statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect "conservatives," as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha'penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

I saw the video clip of the President dressing down the Republicans, which had been put on YouTube by the big Lefty blog "Talking Points Memo", at a link which presented additional evidence that the "Coffee Party Organizers" were more than just beginners at political action (as they had been represented by themselves and by the press). Some of them had clear Marxist leanings. This crowd was probably not as happy with some of the videos from the "health care summit".

There is no "Bolshevik plot". President Obama had many Marxist influences during his formative years, and he has appointed a few people with strong Marxist leanings. But they are not "Bolshviks". And most of the Democrats pushing this bill are not Marxists, even though many admire some of the principles which Marx advanced. The sleazy, devious, desperate and sometimes whacky tactics used to pass the various versions of this bill are a testament to the fact that it is not "centrist". The Democrats could not pass it with a filibuster-proof Congress. The Republicans were totally beside the point until Scott Brown was elected. They were not, at certain points, even expected to know what was in the bill before voting on it (the same was true for some Democrats).

Are you getting a better feeling for how the President manipulates language to divert attention from reality? No wonder his approval ratings have fallen so fast.

Despite the collusion of the mainstream Media. Ed Morrissey:

Yesterday I spoke at the Kill the Bill Rally staged by Minnesota Majority at the state capital. The event drew thousands of people, which makes them about 100 times more newsworthy than the “coffee party” gatherings that drew tens of people … three tens of people in St. Louis, for instance, which garnered CNN’s attention. I didn’t see CNN at our little get-together, but perhaps the cold weather and bitter wind deterred them from covering our grassroots event. It didn’t deter thousands of Minnesotans from joining our call to kill the ObamaCare bill and start over from scratch on reforming the cost structure of American health care. . . .

I’m amazed at the hubris of these politicians and their elite group of allies in Washington DC. Perhaps in early 2009, after that big election win the previous November, they had an excuse to assume that they had a mandate for a radically statist agenda, one that sought to make the most private of decisions subject to government oversight – the choices we make for our own health. Since last summer, though, they have no excuses. . .

However, even in the November elections, Obama and the vast majority of Democrats who won DID NOT run on the radical statist agenda which they are now attempting to impose on us. So they had no excuses even in January, 2009 for their statist push to pre-cripple future generations (Mark Steyn's colorful characterization).

Finding out what is in the Health Care Bill will be exciting

Nancy Pelosi realizes that you may be against the Health Care Bill now,

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it

She's also jazzed about the prospect of all those compassionate Democrats in Congress and the federal bureaucracy controlling what you are allowed to eat:

Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

Personally, I prefer to leave control of the citizenry's diet to State and Local Governments. Because, like an over-diversified mega-corporation, the more things the Federal Government tries to do, the fewer things it does well. The difference is that an over-diversified, ineffective corporation must generally restructure or fail in the marketplace. But an over-diversified, ineffective government can limp along for decades because it can use police force to extract money from the citizenry. And then, suddenly, you get a disaster like Greece.

Incidentally, the claims that preventative medicine in the form of increased diagnostic testing, etc., will lower health care costs have been soundly refuted. So if Pelosi really believes she can lower health care costs through prevention, it will have to be through federal controls on the lifestyles of the citizenry, as she suggests above. Because we wouldn't want citizens learning how to take on adult responsibilities themselves. The more people become dependent on the government, the better it is for the Party of Big Government.

Close Enough for Government Work

Matt Welch gives us a few too many facts about the differences between President Obama's words and reality.  Read the whole thing.  How can we POSSIBLY believe now that all Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi would have to do to convince us that the Democrats' health care plan is great would be to explain the bill better.  The Democratic leadership in Congress helped set the President up for the big fall in his approval ratings:

Take the issue he has explained more than any other: health care. In the State of the Union address, Obama claimed that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had estimated that “our approach” to health care reform “would bring down the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades.” This is, strictly speaking, not true. The Democrats’ “approach” to health care reform includes a permanent change to the Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors, colloquially known as the “doc fix.” The CBO estimated that the doc fix, when combined with the health care reform legislative package, actually “would increase the budget deficit in 2019 by $23 billion relative to current law, an increment that would grow in subsequent years.” This is why House Democrats stripped out the doc fix from the health care bill, and passed it separately; it made the CBO scores look bad, making it harder for the president to present bogus claims about deficit neutrality.

That bit of mendacity only scratches the surface of how Congress and the administration gamed the system to produce nice-looking numbers. The CBO, by its own rules, has to take Congress at its word when a piece of legislation promises unspecified future “cuts” in spending, even though an overwhelming majority of promised future cuts never come to pass (a fact that the CBO itself has repeatedly warned in supplementary comments). The Senate promised more than $300 billion in such cuts. Furthermore, the CBO scores bills in 10-year windows. So the Senate delayed more than 99 percent of the reform package’s spending until 2014, thus allowing the decade of 2010–2019 to clock in under the magic $1 trillion number. Add to all that chicanery the fact that every major health care entitlement expansion in U.S. history has vastly exceeded initial cost projections, and you have ample reasons for why Americans believed, by a margin of more than 3 to 1, that health care reform would exacerbate rather than improve the deficit.

Glenn Reynolds:

It’s funny — all he had to do to be a success was to live up to the kind of Presidency he promised. But he didn’t, and it appears that he couldn’t. 

Reader comment:

The best example of this is health insurance mandates. The President defeated Hillary Clinton for the nomination of his party by telling Americans that it was wrong to require people to purchase insurance. Now, as President, he is trying to force people to purchase health insurance. And threatening IRS audits and fines. And he claims to not understand the opposition to this proposal.

Welch again:

(Bill) Clinton’s reptilian relationship with the truth, suffused as it always has been with a catch-me-if-you-can sense of personal preservation, actually turned out to have some uses for the nation when he changed course after the 1994 Republican revolution and began co-opting some of the limited-government policies proposed by his opponents. It’s easier for a chameleon to change his spots.

Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. . . .

But there’s a less charitable explanation too. . .

I wonder how close the experience of being President is to Mr. Obama's expectations? He's started talking about how he'd rather be a great one-term President than a mediocre two-term President. Like Stephen Green says, Being President is hard.

How to Reform Health Care without Killing Innovation

Glenn Reynolds links kidney donor and breast cancer survivor Virginia Postrel.

. . . most of the things that drive people crazy, like dealing with insurance companies, are also true of Medicare. . .

FUN FACT: Medicare denies a higher percentage of claims than ANY major American insurance company.

Professor Reynolds also links his own piece on hiddent costs of nationalized health care.

Obamacare: Worth the Price of the 2010 Election

Mark Steyn, with more on the President's unseemly push for the Democratic health care bill, even at the likely cost of the 2010 election:

So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that "now is the hour when we must seize the moment," the same moment he's been seizing every day of the week for the past year . . .

Why is he doing this? Why let "health" "care" "reform" stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it's worth it. Big time. I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible.  . . 

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

 Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. . .  .  The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too. . . 

 Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary "comprehensive" health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out. . . 

. . . Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., justifies her support for Obamacare this way:

"I even had one constituent – you will not believe this, and I know you won't, but it's true – her sister died. This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister's teeth."

Is the problem of second-hand teeth a particular problem in this corner of New York? I haven't noticed an epidemic of ill-fitting dentures on recent visits to the Empire State. . . Yet, even granting Congresswoman Slaughter the benefit of the doubt, is annexing the equivalent of a G7 economy the solution to what would seem to be the statistically unrepresentative problem of her constituent's ill-fitting choppers? Is it worth reducing the next generation of Americans to indentured servitude to pay for this poor New Yorker's dentured servitude?

Yes. Because government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

Read the whole thing. It's full of great examples.  Think about it. Then, you might want to consider this piece on the Consent of the Governed (and what to do when it is ignored) again. And this video. The best points are at the end.

By the way: Ezra Klein pretty much admits that Steyn is right. though he wishes the shift to the left went further.

The great mystery of the health care debate is why liberals, who don't trust doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies or insurers, trust Congress and federal bureaucrats.

 Darleen suggests that a new ObamaPress bill might be in order to regulate Mr. Klein's business.  Of course, Campaign Finance laws have been passed to impose stringent regulations of this type for non-journalists (though a recent Supreme Court ruling has recently negated some of these regulations).  And the Democrats are considering something along these lines for journalists, too.   Sean Penn has something even more dramatic in mind for regulating journalists.  Totalitarianism IS tempting.

 I'm waiting for price controls on attorney's fees. At least there would be SOME constitutional basis for this. What with all the bright young college kids who will be going into law instead of medicine, SOMETHING will have to be done.