Lucid Links (090909, Morning)

Camille Paglia mostly gets it about Obama’s school speech yesterday, with a larger point (bold is mine):

Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?

…. An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president’s innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to “help” the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare?

The “mostly” part is that the school speech was inappropriate in the first place. Those who point to a Reagan speech to kids in November 1988 as a counter-example forget that someone else had been elected the next president already, and that the Gipper’s work, with the help of Thatcher and Walesa and John Paul II, that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union less than a year later, was already done.

But Paglia’s bolded points are critical, and tie together. In general, government has no business being in the health care business, because as with virtually everything except the military, they screw it up. There is little doubt we’d be better off as a nation today if Medicare had never passed — is that $50 trillion-plus unfunded liability an unfortunate bug or a statist feature (forcing us to retain the program even when it’s bankrupting us)?.

But the people in this administration are especially pathetic. They can’t orchestrate a school speech without, in their determination to politicize and indoctrinate, botching it. They can’t run a simple auto-purchase rebate program without creating paperwork snafus and chronically late payments. They think that managing a “stimulus” project consists of putting up gaudy self-promotional highway signs (properly characterized as “the president’s marketing plan“) while absolutely nothing happens for weeks and weeks (see Reed Hartman Highway in the Cincinnati suburb of Blue Ash for just one of many such examples).

Of course, government shouldn’t be in the business of rationing health care in the first place. But putting the largely incompetent ideologues in this administration in charge of rationing, especially given that authoritarian utilitarians like Zeke the Bleak Emanuel and John Holdren would be hanging around, is sheer madness.

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About the Obama birth certificate issue, I wrote on July 20 that:

I think that either the concerns being raised are valid — or that this is the Mother Of All Sucker-Punches, in which case the full release of proof, if ever deemed necessary, will be delivered when the crescendo hits its db peak to maximize embarrassment. I wish I knew which one it is.

We may be closer to finding out which one it is (“Judge orders trial on eligibility issue”). The judge involved, who “tentatively scheduled a trial for Jan. 26, 2010,” is David O. Carter, a United States District Court Judge for the Central District of California.

Delicious fact of the day: Judge Carter is a Clinton appointee.

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As has been the case for quite a while, Fox News wiped the floor with the other three cable news channels on the Friday before Labor Day. The big news is that Glenn Beck’s 5 PM show led the Fox parade by a mile, not only overall, but also in the 25-54 demographic.

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Yet another reason why the United Nations can’t be taken seriously (and shouldn’t have been by George W. Bush in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War) — “UN Declares Fidel Castro the “World Hero of Solidarity.”

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In advance of the ObamaCare speech tonight, I guess it’s time to bring back the June questions nobody would answer a while ago about a so-called public option insurance arrangement “competing” with private companies who already provide it. The questions illustrate just how absurd and unfair out of the gate the whole idea is.

Here they are:

1. Will the “public plan” pay income and other taxes like the companies who run private plans must? (Example: Aetna alone incurred $790 million in income tax expenses in calendar 2008, and over $3.5 billion in the past four years. The company’s most recent 10-K indicates that this expense is almost entirely related to its Health Care and Group Insurance.)
2. What will anyone do to keep the “public plan” from taking advantage of other unfair breaks, which could at least include general government absorption of administrative costs, sales-tax exemptions, property-tax exemptions, “public service” advertising, and much more?
3. Will the “public plan” be just as vulnerable to class-action and no-limit malpractice lawsuits as private plans currently are?
4. If the answers to Question 1, 2, or 3 are “no” or “I don’t know,” how can you possibly claim to know that the “public plan’s” competition against private plans will be conducted on a level playing field?

The dirty little secret that doesn’t survive five seconds of scrutiny is that “public option” isn’t about “competition,” it’s about elimination of private health insurance coverage under rules of the game that are so obviously unfair it’s amazing that anyone can take the blather about it seriously.