Cool:
First few paragraphs:
Original posts: BizzyBlog; NewsBusters
Thanks to the folks at the WSJ’s Opinion Journal Federation for thinking enough of the work to pick it up.
Erick Erickson at Red State (“Dear Senator Mike Enzi and Heritage Foundation: Shut Up”):
Because I am a big fan and come from a family of donors to the Heritage Foundation, I take no pleasure at all in writing this post. But this must be said.
The Heritage Foundation, which played a vital part in building conservative support for Romneycare in Massachusetts, is setting the stage for Republican capitulation on healthcare. This is the second time in less than a year that Heritage will have been instrumental in organizing a conservative collapse in opposition to big government. The first time was when Heritage gave conservatives cover to support TARP, calling it “vital and acceptable.”
Now with healthcare, because Heritage is trying to be “helpful”, confusion is starting to crop up among Republicans in Congress at a very critical time in the healthcare debate. Capitulation and compromise are now on the table using a bastardized version of a Heritage proposal.
….. The Heritage Foundation is a profoundly good organization. I have many friends there. I hate to ding them for this. But this must be said. Their continued push for cooperatives at this time muddies water, confuses congressmen, and plays right into the hands of Democrats eager for a new talking point to sell a government healthcare option.
Erick doesn’t go far enough. Though Heritage clearly has many good people, sensible conservatives (a redundant term, of course) need to drop the presumption that Heritage as an institution is “profoundly good.” If the RomneyCare debacle isn’t evidence of that, what is?
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Maybe Glenn Beck should send money to those trying to orchestrate a boycott against him, based on this Media Bistro item (HT to Erick at Red State, who is really hitting his stride these days):
“The Glenn Beck Program”, which airs out of primetime at 5pmET, had its highest rated week ever among Households (1,907,000) and Total Viewers (2,409,000), and second best week in the A25-54 demo (682,000).
Beck was #2 in his time period in both Total Viewers and the demo in all of cable last week, behind NICK, and beating his cable news competition combined in Total Viewers and the demo.
Related: Fox News’s ratings as a whole are on fire. On Monday, Fox News outdrew CNN, MSNBC, and CNN headline combined in every hour from 5 p.m. – 10 p.m. in the 25-54 demographic, and in every hour from 5-11 overall. It’s the Number 2 cable network of any genre (one-page PDF) in primetime.
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Pamela Geller at American Thinker (my title) — “Dhimmitude Infects the State Department — Along with Gross Violations of the Establishment Clause.”
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Martin Feldstein at the Wall Street Journal:
Although administration officials are eager to deny it, rationing health care is central to President Barack Obama’s health plan. The Obama strategy is to reduce health costs by rationing the services that we and future generations of patients will receive.
Rationing without recourse is central to EVERY statist health system.
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At the Strata-Sphere — “Did Government Run Healthcare In The UK Needlessly Kill 17,000 People?” The underlying article is from early 2008 at the UK Guardian, and is based on a study by that country’s Taxpayer Alliance using data from 2005. These are “people receiving treatment in the UK …. (who) died unnecessarily because of the inadequacies of the NHS. That would be the equivalent of about 85,000 here in the U.S. Even people who receive rationed statist care aren’t getting decent care.
I’m not convinced of Guinness’s “world’s oldest student” claim, but this is a nice story nonetheless:
The Kenyan man named by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s oldest pupil, who enrolled in classes to learn to read the Bible and converted to Catholicism in the final years of his life, died in Nairobi on Friday morning at the age of 81.
Stephen Kimani Maruge died at Cheshire Home for the aged after receiving the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick from Comboni missionary Fr. Paulino Mondo, the Catholic Information Service for Africa (CISA) reports. He had lived the last three years of his life at the home, where he ultimately succumbed to cancer of the esophagus.
Fr. Mondo said one of Maruge’s children was present at his death. He reported it was Maruge’s wish to die at the home and said the man would be given a Christian funeral.
In 2003, Maruge enrolled at a primary school in western Kenya after the government of President Mwai Kibaki fulfilled its election pledge to offer free and compulsory primary education.
Maruge, who said he enrolled in order to learn to read the Bible for himself, was in Class Seven at the time of his death.
Go here for the rest of the story.
The story of his passing is here.
Here, in my view, the most direct measure of the man: He never forgot those who worked with him (and I suspect that was the case for those who worked for him).
Proof: He and his partner Rowland Evans were responsible for the Evans-Novak Political Report until Evans died in 2001. Novak never renamed the newsletter.
Wikipedia says of Evans: “He was known best for his decades-long syndicated column and television partnership with Robert Novak, a partnership that endured, if only by way of a joint subscription newsletter, until Evans’s death.”
But Novak obviously didn’t believe that the partnership dissolved when Evans died.
Though he was clearly sufficiently recognizable that he could have renamed the newsletter for himself, its name remained the Evans-Novak Political Report until he wrote its final entry in January of this year:
Dear Reader,
As you may have read in the Evans-Novak Political Report, my recent health issues have forced me to give up active participation in the newsletter. Thankfully, my gifted deputy, Tim Carney, has ably filled the void for the past few months.
However, with the election and the inauguration behind us, and after much thought and deliberation with my publisher, we have decided that it is time to retire the Evans-Novak Political Report.
As you might imagine, this was an extremely difficult decision for me, and one I did not make lightly. It has been an honor to report on American politics for more than five decades, covering eight presidents, 23 Congressional elections and state and countless local elections and issues. I am grateful for your support of the Evans-Novak Political Report over the years, and wish you and your family all the best.
There’s more at that final ENPR entry, written by the editors of Human Events:
In 1967, four years after Rowland Evans and Bob Novak joined forces for a six-times-a-week syndicated newspaper column, the two ace journalists launched a bi-weekly political newsletter with the name, the Evans-Novak Political Report.
While their column was built around unearthing news about those in power and those aspiring to power, Evans and Novak used their newsletter to analyze the political scene, note trends and shifts in the landscape, and forecast elections. While both writers had their own opinions on policies and politicians opinions they shared in columns and television appearances ENPR, in order to be useful to readers trying to understand the political scene, always aimed to set aside political prejudices.
From the start, ENPR succeeded in stirring up strife, landing Evans and Novak on Richard Nixon’s enemies list when an early newsletter drew attention to the disconnect between the President’s demeanor and the real troubles he faced.
Throughout ENPR’s history, dozens of journalists working for or with Evans and Novak have contributed to the newsletter. It was the journalistic training ground of many young journalists including the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, and National Review Online’s David Freddoso. I, too, served as a staff writer, from 2002 through 2004, before returning in 2006 as senior reporter and more recently as editor.
ENPR’s reporters and editors dug into every potentially competitive U.S. House and Senate race, poked their noses around Capitol Hill, and burned up the phone lines to sources in federal agencies, campaigns, and parties all with the aim of providing our readers with the most complete analysis of the political scene.
ENPR was among the first covering each House and Senate race and sizing up all the candidates. Evans and Novak were pioneers in this field, and for an aspiring politician looking to get his name known, trotting into the Evans and Novak offices was the way to show up on the radar.
The reporting of Novak, and of Evans, embodied “fair and balanced” decades before Fox News appropriated the term to itself. It only appeared to lean right to some because the rest of the media routinely tilts so far to the left.
The fact that the establishment media hung the nickname “Prince of Darkness” on him — a name he ultimately took on in good cheer — says volumes more about them than it does about Novak.
May he rest in peace, and condolences to his family and friends.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
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UPDATE: Fellow columnists at Creators Syndicate pay tribute.
Regardless of the surgical removals being done on the monstrosity known as ObamaCare, what I wrote here a short time ago about the fundamental moral shortcomings of statist health care still stands:
First — Virtually without exception worldwide, state-run health care has led to rationing of care and long waits for even critical services. This has led to many needless deaths and disabilities, along with greatly diminished quality of life for many who eventually do receive care. Obama and the Congressional majority have presented no evidence indicating that serious rationing will not occur under its plan. In fact, under its progenitor known as CommonwealthCare aka RomneyCare in Massachusetts, serious rationing under the guise of fixed per-patient budgets is already on the horizon. How can any compassionate person claiming to have his or her moral bearings even consider supporting this almost certain result? Update: The Democrats’ response to the administration’s alleged desire to remove the “public option” clearly shows that their primary objective is control and not improvement.
Second — Virtually without exception worldwide, state-run health care has led to denial of care on age-based and so-called qualify of life criteria. The Obama administration and Congress already opened the door for this abomination in the stimulus bill passed in February when it included funding for “comparative effectiveness research.” Michael Barone has accurately portrayed this attempt at final solutions that override doctor-patient decisions as “worse than junk science—it’s inherently deceptive.” How can someone claiming to have his or her moral bearings even consider supporting this? Update: Comparative effectiveness is still the law.
Finally — The Obama administration is stacked with czars, Cabinet officials, and others who are enthusiastic supporters of the first two items, and who have frighteningly ghoulish outlooks on life and humanity. Take John Holdren (please). Many of these same people and others with similar “philosophies” would take responsible positions within ObamaCare’s maze, and would no doubt stay on as long as possible regardless of who controls the White House or Congress. How can someone claiming to have his or her moral bearings even consider allowing these people anywhere near the nation’s health care system? Update: Those holding ghoulish outlooks are still around.
That wasn’t difficult, was it?
If ObamaCare is opposed on clear moral grounds, it could go down to a crushing, argument-over defeat. If argued on cost alone, it will more than likely be back to haunt us. I say we bury it once and for all.
There’s no point in discussing what’s in ObamaCare or whatever Obama and his party want to call “Health Care reform” or “Insurance reform” until:
Any time the Democrats want to bring up freedom-enhancing, free-market solutions to the problems that exist, they’re more than welcome to.
Until then, pass the shovel, and let’s pile on the dirt really, really high. Using Fort Ancient as a model, put ObamaCare’s putrid, statist carcass under a figurative Serpent Mound.
While catching up on a few things, I came across this outstanding piece by Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) in the WSJ:
Man vs. Mutt
Theodore Dalrymple on who gets the better treatment, and what this means for U.S. health-care reform.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.
The latter is the fear that also haunts Americans, at least those Americans who think of justice as equality in actual, tangible benefits. That is the ideological driving force of health-care reform in America. Without manifest and undeniable inequalities, the whole question would generate no passion, only dull technical proposals and counterproposals, reported sporadically on the inside pages of newspapers. I have never seen an article on the way veterinary services are arranged in Britain: it is simply not a question.
…The one kind of reform that America should avoid is one that is imposed uniformly upon the whole country, with a vast central bureaucracy. No nation in the world is more fortunate than America in its suitability for testing various possible solutions. The federal government should concern itself very little in health care arrangements, and leave it almost entirely to the states. I don’t want to provoke a new war of secession but surely this is a matter of states’ rights. All judgment, said Doctor Johnson, is comparative; and while comparisons of systems as complex as those of health care are never definitive or indisputable, it is possible to make reasonable global judgments: that the French system is better than the British or Dutch, for example. Only dictators insist they know all the answers in advance of experience. Let 100—or, in the case of the U.S., 50—flowers bloom.
Selfishly, no doubt, I continue to measure the health-care system where I live by what I want for myself and those about me.
And what I want, at least for that part of my time that I spend in England, is to be a dog. I also want, wherever I am, the Americans to go on paying for the great majority of the world’s progress in medical research and technological innovation by the preposterous expense of their system: for it is a truth universally acknowledged that American clinical research has long reigned supreme, so overall, the American health-care system must have been doing something right. The rest of the world soon adopts the progress, without the pain of having had to pay for it.
Read the whole doggone thing here.
Mona Charen hits the bulls-eye:
President Obama set out to reform health care not because Americans were clamoring to profoundly change our system, but because he wishes to transform the relationship between the individual and the state.
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Dennis Prager also hits the center of the target:
…. in the early 1970s, I came to the then-tentative conclusion that I would probably never encounter a morally weaker, more cowardly group of people than college administrators.
…. What prompted this conclusion in the 1970s was seeing a handful of radical students take over classrooms at Columbia and shut down the university while professors and deans, individuals whose lives were supposedly dedicated to the open mind and to learning, did nothing.
…. I came to see the modern university as fraudulent. In theory it stood for learning and opening the mind. In practice it stood for appeasement of bullies.”
This news (“Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book”) clearly justifies that sad assessment.
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Valid point (HT to an e-mailer) on town hall consistency:
My own representative, and the House Minority Leader, John Boehner is not holding any townhalls. Add to that the district directly south of me, OH-02, which is represented by Jean Schmidt (R), and our Republican Senator George Voinovich.
The justification I’ve heard from Jean Schmidt’s communications director — that there is no one plan out there to talk about, so there’s no common frame of reference — is very weak. Why not hold a meeting that would lay out what Ms. Schmidt (and, separately, Mr. Boehner) would do to improve the system, which, despite being the best in the world, needs freedom-enhancing work?
If you’re concerned about disruptors (and there’s plenty of justification for that concern), hire security. If you’re concerned about unanticipated crowds, take advance (free) reservations limited to a reasonably-sized room on a first-come, first-served basis. I also don’t think there would be anything wrong with a “no signs” rule enforced across the board.
I think Schmidt, Boehner, and others are missing a golden opportunity to distinguish their conduct from that of the potted planters — both congressional and presidential — on the other side of the aisle.
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Cal Thomas, on how Brits are rushing to the defense of their National Health Service (NHS):
The British media are conflicted. They patriotically defend the NHS, while simultaneously acknowledging its serious shortcomings. One example: A recent Daily Mail editorial praised the NHS for its free care and universal availability, but then added, “Our survival rates for breast, prostate, ovarian and lung cancers are among the worst in Europe, despite huge additional expenditures.” Free is nice, but best is better.
And of course, it’s really anything but free, even if you callously consider lower survival rates a “cost of doing business.” If that seems an unfair characterization, then try to justify what Britain’s naughty NICE board does to ill British patients all the time.
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Oops:
After insisting no one was receiving unsolicited e-mails from the White House, officials reversed their story Monday night and blamed outside political groups for the unwanted messages from the tech-savvy operation.
Uh, doesn’t this sort of show that the White House’s geniuses aren’t as tech-savvy as advertised?
It’s never their fault.
Note that the name of Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who tried (and failed) to ridicule, intimidate, and cut off Fox’s Major Garrett for bringing the issue up, is nowhere to be found in AP’s coverage.
Here’s the exchange between Garrett and Gibbs, which heats up at about 1:00 (Update: The original vid was taken down; I have replaced with one from Fox, which should stay up for at least a while):
Given the result, Gibbs was “pwned,” and owes Garrett an apology that will surely never arrive.
If this had occurred under Bush 43, we’d be hearing about this one for days, and Nancy Pelosi would be at the head of a long line calling for an investigation. It has already been forgotten by the establishment media, and the Congressional leadership could care less.
The oil boom that began 150 years ago in this small northwestern Pennsylvania town changed the world and made countless people rich, but not the man who found the way to successfully extract black gold from the earth.
Edwin Laurentine Drake died an invalid, confined to a wheelchair and virtually penniless. In his later years, he relied on the goodwill of friends and a state pension given late in life to recognize the millions of dollars in tax revenue Pennsylvania made from his drilling method.
“As they say, sometimes the good we do benefits others and not ourselves because he certainly benefited others from his work,” said William Brice, a University of Pittsburgh professor emeritus, author of a book on Drake and the early oil industry. His “Myth, Legend, Reality, Edwin L. Drake and the Early Oil Industry” will be published this year.
Drake’s genius was to drive pipe into the ground so debris wouldn’t clog the drill hole. On Aug. 27, 1859, the method proved successful when his driller struck oil 69 1/2 feet below ground.
Brice said he’s sure that, while Drake didn’t invent the concept, he came up with it independently.
Drake, who had no drilling or engineering background, had been hired by the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Co. to oversee drilling primarily because he was a retired railroad conductor and could ride trains for free, thereby saving the company money. He’d been forced to retire in his mid-30s because of ill health and was working as a hotel clerk in New Haven, Conn., where he met James Townsend, an investor in the company. He was given the title colonel to impress Titusville residents.
The presence of oil around Titusville, then a lumber town of several hundred people, had long been known. Native Americans used it for medicinal purposes, and by the mid-19th century, it was being refined into kerosene for lamp oil.
But extracting it proved vexing. Early efforts involved digging trenches along Oil Creek or collecting it from seeps in the ground.
Drake’s early effort brought ridicule and was known derisively as “Drake’s folly,” as townsfolk doubted it would work. Eventually, he hired “Uncle” Billy Smith, an experienced saltwater driller from Tarentum, near Pittsburgh.
They started drilling in early August 1859. They drove pipe 49 feet into the ground until they struck bedrock and began percussion drilling – using a steam engine to drive a heavy iron bit into the ground to break the rock.
The work was slow going, just a couple of feet a day.
On Aug. 27, they quit for the day. The next day was a Sunday, and Drake, a devout Episcopalian, did not work. Smith stopped by the well and saw liquid. He lowered a can down the well and pulled up oil.
Soon, the valley sprouted scores of derricks. The oil boom was on.
Go here for the rest of the story.
You know this is important polling news, because the establishment media is pretending it doesn’t exist.
You can’t find a relevant reference to it in searches on “Gallup” at the New York Times, AP.org, the Washington Post, or the LA Times. A Google News search on “Gallup conservatives outnumber liberals” (not in quotes) comes up with all of eight results.
The news isn’t just that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals nationwide. That’s old hat. The big news from Gallup is that conservatives outnumber liberals in every state in the union, including supposedly uberliberal Vermont and Massachusetts.
Note the Gallup story’s clearly impertinent headline, accompanied by an absolutely wrong subheadline (HTs to LifeNews.com, CNS News [linked by Drudge], and an e-mailer):
Political Ideology: “Conservative” Label Prevails in the South
Conservatives outnumber liberals in nearly every state, but not in D.C.The strength of “conservative” over “liberal” in the realm of political labels is vividly apparent in Gallup’s state-level data, where a significantly higher percentage of Americans in most states — even some solidly Democratic ones — call themselves conservative rather than liberal.
…. Despite the Democratic Party’s political strength — seen in its majority representation in Congress and in state houses across the country — more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal. While Gallup polling has found this to be true at the national level over many years, and spanning recent Republican as well as Democratic presidential administrations, the present analysis confirms that the pattern also largely holds at the state level. Conservatives outnumber liberals by statistically significant margins in 47 of the 50 states, with the two groups statistically tied in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
The margins may not be “statistically significant,” but the reported result still shows conservatives on top in HI (+5), VT (+1) and MA (+1). I also have to wonder how you can have a 5-point or more margin of error in a poll of 160,000 people. (Update: Oh, those are for the individual states, not the entire poll; I should have known that.)
As to how Gallup’s online report was organized, the answer is “not well.” Sorry guys, it’s not exactly news that the conservative label prevails in the South, so why did you emphasize and lead with that obvious point? The news is that conservatism prevails at least slightly in each and every state; the District of Columbia, despite Democrats’ fondest wishes, is not a state. It was also “clever” of Gallup to save its 50-state table for Page 2 of its three-page report.
It’s hard not to wonder if someone at Gallup did what they did with the headline and subheadline to help ensure that establishment media outlets ignored this stunning news. I would suggest that they didn’t have to work that hard; the media would have ignored it anyway.
A final bit of good news: The poll was taken over a spread-out period from January through June. I don’t think anyone would want to bet against the percentage of self-identifying conservatives being higher at the end of the polling period than it was in the beginning.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
If you only read the Associated Press, New York Times, and Washington Post obituaries of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who died last Tuesday at age 88, you would have no idea that she was one of the last of the old Guard, pro-life Democrats who went down fighting in 1992.
That was when the party’s presidential nomination of Bill Clinton moved the party firmly into the pro-abort camp, a position from which it has never returned. Barack Obama’s presence in the White House virtually guarantees that Democrats in most quarter will either condone, support, and in some cases even celebrate the 1,000,000-plus unborn infants who perish each year.
That was not where Ms. Shriver stood, as many prolife publications noted shortly after she died. The Catholic News Agency obituary called her “distinctively Catholic,” recounting that she was “an early supporter of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List. She and her husband also supported Democrats for Life of America and Feminists for Life.”
Life News recounted three key moments when Shriver demonstrated her pro-life commitment:
In 1972, one year before the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, Shrive told a Birthright convention that abortions could be reduced if more maternity homes could be established and more adoptive mothers found. Later, she proposed a campaign called “One Million for Life” to recruit one million people to adopt unwanted children.
“How do you equate the life of an unborn infant with the social well-being of a mother, a father or a family?” Shriver asked in 1977. “If it is thought that the social well-being of the mother outweighs the rights of fetuses with congenital abnormalities, we do well to remember that more than 99 percent of abortions are done on normal fetuses.”
In 1992, Eunice and Sargent Shriver joined Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey many other influential pro-life leaders in signing a full-page ad in the New York Times protesting the Democratic Party’s embrace of the pro-abortion agenda.
‘We can choose to reaffirm our respect for human life. We can choose to extend once again the mantle of protection to all members of the human family, including the unborn. We can choose to provide effective care of mothers and children,” the ad said.
The July 14, 1992 full-page ad can be viewed here (2mb JPG). It makes some of the most powerful pro-life observations and arguments ever made, and is worth reading in its entirety, as is the list of signers. The fact that the alleged party of compassion that year became virtually unanimous in supporting real death panels and death chambers, and for all practical purposes hasn’t budged an inch since, is a true American tragedy.
Another overlooked item of historical significance is Shriver’s May 13, 1990 letter to the New York Times. In it, she took great exception to the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) using the legacy of President John F. Kennedy in an attempt to intimidate Catholic bishops into silence, and in the process became the most credible witness available supporting the idea that JFK would have been pro-life had he lived to see the idea of killing pre-born babies come under consideration:
One of the bills my brother was proudest of established the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He wanted this institute to study problems of pregnancy and early childhood development so that infants who were lost because of birth problems and lack of research on fetal life could survive. So his interest in the fetus and in children was positive and comprehensive, reflecting his moral values. Do we not understand that religious beliefs and moral values are not the same?
The right to life of a newly conceived fetus is a value held by many people who are not Catholic. This is a moral value that deserves debate, and the bishops have a right to advance this view in all of the channels of communication that are available.
I would similarly defend the rights of the abortion rights league to advance its views in these same channels. Why then do such groups object so violently when church leaders organize to communicate their values of respect for human life from its inception? This is not religious doctrine like a belief in the virgin birth, or even the sacredness of Jesus.
President Kennedy believed and practiced the value that America should offer a free marketplace for all views, even those of Catholic bishops. He would have resented his words being distorted to confuse and obscure that value. His family resents it, too.
Of course, that wasn’t in the AP, NYT, or WaPo obits either. In fact, only the WaPo’s write-up noted that she was Catholic.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
From the Canadian Press — “Overhauling health-care system tops agenda at annual meeting of Canada’s doctors.”
Money quote, from the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association: “We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize.” Will any U.S. establishment media outlet take note? Probably not: Even though the story is a day old, An AP.org search on “Canada” as of early this morning had nothing relevant.
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Via The Voice In My Head blog (HT to an e-mailer; underlying Rasmussen item is here) — “At the end of eight years, Bush’s Strongly Disapprove number was just 2% worse than Obama’s is right now, at the beginning of just his eighth month in office.”
Specifically, 41% strongly disapprove of Obama now, while 43% disapproved of Bush shortly before he left office.
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Tom Maguire — “Obama’s Talking About His Grandmother Again; People Who Listened Last Time Are Now ‘Dishonest.’”
Conclusion: “It’s Times-world – Obama can say whatever he wants and later say whatever else he wants, then denounce the people still grappling with the previous version.”
Read the whole thing.
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Arlo Guthrie, Republican (HT PJM’s Roger Simon).
He’s not a doctrinaire Republican, if there is such a thing, but he’s a Republican nonetheless. Interesting, and an indirect indication of who has the bigger intellectual tent.
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So the end-of-life horrors are supposedly being excised out of ObamaCare by a Senate Committee. That is good news on the one hand (and as Taranto at Best of the Web noted on Friday, a slam-dunk indicator of Palin Power).
But don’t forget that the stimulus bill authorized spending on the insidious “comparative effectiveness” studies that would form the basis for age-based and “productivity”-based decisions on whether and when to provide or withhold medical care. George Will caught this way back in January, saying that it “would dramatically advance government control — and rationing — of health care.” That authorization must be repealed.
Oh, and though there seems to be some she-said, he-said going on, the “public option” is supposedly off the table too. For what it’s worth, Howard Dean is not pleased (awwww).
This development is minimally nice, but doesn’t change the fact the the government-run, coverage-mandating exchanges are still there. Look at what such an exchange has done to Massachusetts:
“Will Commonwealth care cost taxpayers more? No!” So wrote Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in November 2004, the economy then still in full bloom. “Neither the state nor the taxpayers can afford to pay more.”
It’s worth pondering ex-Gov. Romney’s promises just over three years after he crossed partisan lines to reform health care in the Bay State. The Obama administration and congressional Democrats are modeling reform on the Massachusetts model, promoting bureaucratic health exchanges, increased restrictions on health insurance and vastly expanded taxpayer-subsidized care. Like Romney, they promise more coverage at lower cost, even as the evidence suggests otherwise.
….. Romney marketed the plan as a private solution. Yet it’s a massive expansion of taxpayer-subsidized care. Medicaid has increased by 76,000 enrollees and the subsidized plans by 177,000. Forty-six percent pay no premium, and another 12% are highly subsidized. Only 19,000 have signed up for the much-touted non-subsidized private plans offered through the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector.
And it comes at a steep cost. Residents are expected to spend as much as 10% of their income on premiums or face fines.
The big lie in Massachusetts was that costs and taxes would not increase. “Health insurance for all our citizens does not require new taxes,” declared Romney on the eve of the bill’s passage in 2006.
The government’s expansion has cost taxpayers far more than projected. Premium inflation in the state has not been muted by the increase in the number of insured residents, and politicians are scrambling to fund the program. Smokers got hit for $1 a pack in July 2008.
….. In the end, the only way to control costs inside a bureaucratic structure is to cut doctors’ pay, transfer patients into managed care, impose government global budgets and introduce price controls.
And that’s exactly what Bay State leaders have announced they’ll do.
There is also talk in Washington of having “co-ops” instead of the “public option.” Heritage (which pathetically helped to give intellectual cover to the Romney disaster, but appears to have gotten its senses back) caught on to the ruse in that idea several weeks ago (HT Michelle Bachmann), characterizing it, if government-sponsored, as another Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac disaster waiting to happen.
The bottom line is that just about everything in the 1,018-page monstrosity that is the working model of ObamaCare restricts freedom and choice, and that none of it should get into law. Instead, we need more freedom, not less. We can start with fully privatizing the administration and routine oversight of Medicare and Medicaid, expanding Health/Medical Savings Accounts, and speeding up the approval of life-saving drugs.
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