Readers may be wondering why I haven’t said anything about the Dow reaching 10,000.

First, it’s less than halfway back to its all time peak of 14164 on October 9, 2007 from its March 9, 2009 trough of 6547.

Second, as the graph below shows, the price-dividend ratio of the Dow has fallen, and hasn’t gotten back up (Update — Instapundit originally put up a graph I referred to that he mislabeled (tardy and apologetic HT to an e-mailer) and I was not able to properly identify, so I’ve gone to one that I can; I should have recognized that the numbers in the Instapundit graph were too high to be “PEs” from the get-go, and apologize for that error; what’s impressive about all three graphs that have been presented here at some point is that they all support the narrative that follows):

This graph goes to 8/31/09, when the Dow was just below 9500, so the value is a bit higher now.

The markets began noticing that the GOP’s slate of candidates to succeed George W. Bush was particularly pathetic by the late summer/early fall of 2007. The slide began, and then halted a bit in the Spring of 2008 as the economy looked to be recovering from a rough first quarter.

But when Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid began talking and taking down the economy in the summer of 2008, the decline returned, and accelerated. There was a slight flattening just before the presidential election, as the markets hoped that John McCain and Sarah Palin might somehow drag themselves over the finish line. Alas, it was not to be, and the plunge into the abyss continued for several months after the election.

We’re not much above where we were on Election Day in early October of last year. Big whoop.

I would not be surprised if the situation is even worse for small caps, which generally have smaller dividend yields to begin with. A rent-seeking, crony capitalism economy tends to favor big companies over small ones.

Those are my added notes about the market’s anticipations and reactions. I just wanted to make it clear why we are where we are.

The duration of the decline illustrated above, and of the 53.8% decline in the Dow from its peak, and of the frightening increase in unemployment that appears destined to linger for quite a while, regardless of whether the equity markets recover, represents what frequent BizzyBlog commenter JoeC so accurately pegged and accurately predicted on October 3, 2007 as “the Democrat effect”:

With the prospects of Democrats in power, the smart money (i.e. businesses and capital) is preparing a year ahead of time for the coming punishment. At minimum the tiny tax rate cuts of 2001 and 2003 that saved the US from the perfect storm of insults to the economy need to be made permanent. REAL tax relief is needed, but that ain’t gonna happen when the economic Grim Reapers are in charge.

I would also add that October 2007 marked the beginning of the first full budget year under the legislative control of the majority-Democrat Congress elected in November of 2006. After the GOP actually contained spending in its last year of control, spending went out of control from October 2007 forward. The concomitant market slide is no coincidence.

The working definition of “the Democrat effect” is “the rational response by firms to prepare for the inevitable insult to the economy from unsurmountable regulation, litigation, and taxation to come (and which is now largely here) – which started on election night ‘06.” It took the markets, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and investors a while to believe that the Democrat-controlled Congress and now the Obama administration aren’t merely indifferent to free-market capitalism and the prosperity it brings. It is hostile to it. Now they know.

The following characterization is sadly, objectively true.

The media’s complicity in the apparently “successful” campaign against Rush Limbaugh’s involvement with NFL team ownership, and not even as the lead person, was right out of the Stalinist handbook.

The allegedly racist quote attributed to Rush has been proven — PROVEN — to be totally made-up. When caught, the media response has in essence been, “Well, he didn’t say that, but he’s said plenty of other racist things” — without naming them. This is show-trial reporting.

One of the worst among many examples is Yahoo Sports reporter Adrian Wojnarowski, who told Jim Rome on Rome’s ESPN show that “He’s a racist. He’s a bigot. He’s shown it for years.”

Wojnarowski then added:

I mean, are you going to allow him to make an NFL, an African-American NFL assistant, with the Rooney rule, who has to sit in his office for what’s essentially going to be a token interview and patronize that guy?

Martin Finkelstein correctly states that “Wojnarowski was clearly claiming that Rush would never hire a black coach.”

I guess Rush, who rarely has guests, demonstrated his obvious racism when he gave two segments of his program to an over 3500-word in-person interview with former Tampa Bay and Indianapolis head coach Tony Dungy back in late January. Rush wrapped the interview by saying:

Coach, thank you so much. This has been a real thrill for me. I’ve wanted to meet you and talk to you for the longest time and I can now say I’ve done it.

Oh, but Rush would neeeeeeever hire Tony Dungy as a coach, because Dungy is African-American. (/sarc)

Wojnarowski owes Limbaugh an apology that will surely never come. Wojnarowski should himself be fired — not for expressing his views, but for lying.

Limbaugh’s opponents have a larger goal. Plainly stated, it is to marginalize anyone and everyone holding sensible conservative views from the mainstream of American life as much as humanly possible, and to employ whatever tactics are necessary to do that. The American people are being sent a clear message that holding such views could be dangerous to your career, your success in life, and the well-being of others you love. And heaven help you if you express those views.

If that’s not Stalinist, I don’t know what is.

That’s why the establishment media’s usually firm grip on the flow of “discussion” in matters such as these must be broken.

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The wonders of having a NATO coalition supposedly fighting a war:

French troops were killed after Italy hushed up ‘bribes’ to Taleban

When ten French soldiers were killed last year in an ambush by Afghan insurgents in what had seemed a relatively peaceful area, the French public were horrified.

…. What the grieving nation did not know was that in the months before the French soldiers arrived in mid-2008, the Italian secret service had been paying tens of thousands of dollars to Taleban commanders and local warlords to keep the area quiet, The Times has learnt. The clandestine payments, whose existence was hidden from the incoming French forces, were disclosed by Western military officials.

…. Western officials say that because the French knew nothing of the payments they made a catastrophically incorrect threat assessment.

The US-led coalition in Iraq achieved victory is because we were running it with the help of other nations. Nobody will admit the dirty little secret that Afghanistan came back as a problem after the initial U.S. ouster of the Taliban in 2001 because we allowed NATO and the UN to have more involvement and control than they should have. The mission turned into a muddle. It seems that some troops from at least one nation set a goal of conflict avoidance instead of victory, or even real containment.

It looks like drugs may not be the only reason the Taliban are reportedly in good financial shape.

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There would be one word to describe a Republican congressman with the “problems” of Democrat Charlie Rangel:

The powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee recently revised six years of financial disclosure statements, revealing more than $600,000 in previously unreported assets and tens of thousands of dollars in unreported income. Among the holdings Rangel failed to report, an investment account and a checking account, each worth at least $250,000. Rangel also has admitted that he failed to report and pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income on this villa in the Dominican Republic.

That word is “gone.”

From Los Angeles:

Oct 15, 2009 / 03:54 am

A South Carolina priest bested an NBA basketball star and two professional poker players, including former world champion Daniel Negreanu, to win $100,000 in a poker tournament and qualify for a competition with a $1 million grand prize.

Fr. Andrew Trapp, associate pastor of St. Michael’s Church in Garden City, played in the PokerStars.net Million Dollar Challenge held in Los Angeles, California. Among his opponents were retired NBA star John Salley, Team PokerStars.Net pro Vanessa Rousso and Negreanu, a four-time World of Series of Poker bracelet winner.

The young priest, who Fox News says is known as “Father Rambo” for his love of paintball, at one point held rosary beads while in a big hand against Salley. Fr. Trapp defeated Salley and Rousso before defeating Negreanu.Playing the final hand of a game of Texas Hold’em, the priest was dealt a Jack of clubs and an eight of diamonds while Negreanu took a six of spades and a five of diamonds.

The flop, the game’s first three community cards, consisted of an eight of spades, a four of diamonds and a two of clubs. This gave the priest a pair of eights, while Negreanu could make a straight with any seven or three among the next two community cards.

Fr. Trapp lived up to his name when he went “all-in,” putting all his poker chips on the line.

“I wish you wouldn’t have done that,” Negreanu told the priest.

“You told me to be aggressive, so I’m trying,” Fr. Trapp replied..

“You’re bluffing right now, right, you don’t have an eight?” the poker pro asked. “You have a pair of eights? You don’t have to answer that…”

“My gut says I’m going to hit it,” he continued. “I call.”

The priest again took out his rosary. The next card was a jack of hearts, giving him two pair.

The final card, a two of diamonds, secured Fr. Trapp’s win.

“It’s one of those ‘Thank you, Lord!’ moments,” the priest explained to the show announcer after his victory. He also thanked Negreanu for teaching him how to play poker. ….

Go here for the rest of the story

Yesterday, the New York Times’s Prescriptions blog cited a claim by MIT professor Jon Gruber that a PricewaterhouseCoopers study predicting steep increases in health insurance premiums as a result of the BaucusCare iteration of ObamaCare ignored the supposed fact that administrative costs would come way down under care managed by government exchanges.

The problem for Gruber, who the Washington Post cited as the Democratic Party’s most influential health care expert, is that, as the Heritage Foundation has shown that when all admin costs are accounted for, the government has not demonstrated any previous ability to keep admin costs low. Heritage found the government’s fully-loaded cost per beneficiary of administering Medicare is higher than that of private sector health insurance carriers, even though you might expect Medicare’s admin costs to be significantly lower because of potential economies of scale.

Of course, the NYT blog didn’t cite Gruber’s Democratic pedigree, or the fact that he gave $2,000 to John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004.

Bruce Kesler at Maggie’s Farm  found something else yesterday that the Times and the rest of the media have missed. In 2007, Gruber, with Kosali Simon, co-authored a study supporting a core, common-sense claim made by those who oppose statist expansions of health care. That study found that past government efforts to ensure wider health care coverage have instead largely crowded out private sector plans.

The study found that 60% of new enrollees in government plans, most through S-CHIP and other Medicaid expansions, previously had employer-provided coverage. A disproportionate percentage of the defectors to government plans previously had family (as opposed to individual) coverage.

That’s an interesting finding, given the fact that ObamaCare/BaucusCare advocates still bitterly cling to the notion that private plans won’t be materially affected by a so-called government option, or by the implementation of government insurance exchanges. The track record cited by the study Gruber co-authored says they will, bigtime.

From the study’s conclusions, it seems that Gruber and Simon believe that government officials want to do something to prevent crowding out, thereby ensuring that only people who really need it get enrolled in government-funded health care expansions:

The highest priority should clearly be to explore further the issues raised in Section IV about how the design of public insurance expansions affects take-up and crowd-out. More generally, as states experiment more broadly with alternatives such as private purchasing pools, understanding the degree of substitutability between private and publicly subsidized insurance, and how that features with the nature of the publicly-subsidized insurance, becomes a critical area for future research.

Geez, not only is this guy from all appearances a political hack for hire, he’s also unbelievably naive. Statists don’t consider crowd-out a bug; they think it’s a great feature, an intermediate step towards their ultimate goal of controlling the entire system.

I’m not claiming that. I’m quoting it:

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UPDATE: Oh and by the way, Gruber also seems to have a bit of an ego problem. In the study cited, he claims, along with a different co-author of a previous work, to have been the first to employ the term “crowd-out” in a health insurance context:

The notion that public insurance expansions simply erode private insurance coverage, rather than providing coverage to those otherwise uninsured, is known as “crowd-out”. This term was first used by Cutler and Gruber (1996) ten years ago, and they proceeded to suggest that crowd-out was sizeable for public insurance expansions over the late 1980s and early 1990s.

My response, after seeing this Google News Archive result is “horse manure” (search was on “crowd-out health insurance private,” input without quotes from 1980 to 1995).

Here’s one such listing in the Google Archive results, the seventh on the first page:

Pay-Per-View – Crain’s Cleveland Business – HighBeam Research – Apr 20, 1992
EBRI Suggests CHIP Programs May Crowd Out Private Insurers. … Private insurers may have to…members pay for health insurance of their …

Gruber’s only wiggle room is that he is taking credit for hyphenating the term. Are you kidding me?

Thanks to Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner for noting my late-September BizzyBlog/NewBusters post (“ACORN Question for Local Media: What in the World Are These People Really Doing?”) on Sunday. I also appreciate Maggie Thurber’s nice write-up.

It’s becoming pretty obvious that whatever ACORN’s people have really been doing is mostly not what they say they’ve been doing.

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I’d be surprised if the nation could be so lucky, but a just-fired 37-year ACORN executive in Louisiana said that ACORN national is “going out of business.”

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Useful reminder (HT Hot Air): “There are believed to be dozens of other Americans living in Cuba beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. Most of them have been holed in Cuba for decades.” Any attempts at “normalization” of relations with Cuba, which I think is a bad idea anyway, should include extraditions of those involved.

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Here yesterday’s runner-up for howler of the day, from Reuters:

A key U.S. Senate committee endorsed a sweeping healthcare overhaul on Tuesday, gaining the support of an influential Republican and delivering President Barack Obama a victory on his top domestic priority.

Olympia Snowe is a lot of things. Her voter registration is presumably Republican. She can be said to be “influential” in some ways. But one thing she is not is influential as a Republican. When’s the last time anyone besides media elitists gave a rip about her take on Republican Party positions the Republican Party should hold, or the general party’s general direction of the party? Crickets chirp ….

The real howler is in the first sentence of an AP report by Laurie Kellman. Put your drink down first and go there (it’s OK; it’s the Breitbart link). Update: I expanded on Kellman’s nonsense in a NewsBusters post this morning.

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Canadians against ObamaCare — There are two especially interesting quotes in this well-done vid, which is part of a series at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy:

“Those who are in a position of influence, they usually don’t wait for services. They’ll deny it, but it’s true.”

“If the U.S. changes its medical system, where are Canadians like us going to go for surgery?”

From Vatican City:

Oct 12, 2009 / 08:00 pm (CNA).- Pope Benedict prayed a Rosary with university students from both Rome and Africa on Saturday night at the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall. Following the Marian prayer, the Holy Father remarked that students must be “passionate seekers of truth.”

Synod Fathers from the ongoing Synod for Africa, Roman university students and via satellite, university students from eight African cities: Cairo, Egypt; Nairobi, Kenya; Khartoum, Sudan; Johannesburg, South Africa; Onitsha, Nigeria; Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo; Maputo, Mozambique, and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso participated in the event.

Following the Rosary, Benedict XVI spoke to the students and asked them to be “workers of intellectual charity” in both the Church and society. Living out this call is “so necessary if we are to face up to the great challenges of the present time,” the Pope said.

While at the university, he continued, the students must be “passionate seeks of truth,” and must build “academic communities of the highest intellectual standard, where it is possible to exercise and enjoy that open and all-embracing rationality which paves the way to the meeting with God.”

Go here for the rest of the story.

Matt Welch at Reason has a read-the-whole-thing piece at Reason Online (HT Hot Air Headlines) about American media elites’ deliberate underplay of the events of 1989, up to and including the fall of the Berlin Wall, and how the nation that brought it about is slipping into statist authoritarianism (I deleted references in the following excerpt to other articles in Reason’s most recent print edition):

The Unknown War
The defeat of communism 20 years ago was the most liberating moment in history. So why don’t we talk about it more?

November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe. At a time that fairly cries out for historical perspective about the follies of central planning, Americans are ignoring the fundamental conflict of the postwar world, and instead leapfrogging back to what Steve Forbes describes as the “Jurassic Park statism” of the 1930s. There have been more Hollywood hagiographies of the revolutionary communist Che Guevara in the last five years than there have been studio pictures in the last two decades about the revolutionary anti-communists who dramatically toppled totalitarians from Tallin to Prague. And what little general-nonfiction interest there is in the superpower struggle remains stuck in the same Reagan vs. Gorby frame that made the 1980s so intellectually shallow the first time around.

The consensus Year of Revolution for most of our lifetimes has been 1968, with its political assassinations, its Parisian protests, and a youth-culture rebellion that the baby boomers will never tire of telling us about. But as the preeminent modern Central European historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in a 2008 essay, 1989 “ended communism in Europe, the Soviet empire, the division of Germany, and an ideological and geopolitical struggle…that had shaped world politics for half a century. It was, in its geopolitical results, as big as 1945 or 1914. By comparison, ’68 was a molehill.”

…. And even these numbers only begin to capture the magnitude of the change. The abject failure of top-down central planning as an economic organizing model had a profound impact even on the few communist governments that survived the ’90s. Vietnam, while maintaining a one-party grip on power, launched radical market reforms in 1990, resulting in some of the world’s highest economic growth in the last two decades. Cuba, economically desperate after the Soviet spigot was cut off, legalized foreign investment and private commerce. And in perhaps the single most dramatic geopolitical story in recent years, the country that most symbolized state repression in 1989 has used capitalism to pull off history’s most successful anti-poverty campaign. Although Chinese market reforms began in the late ’70s, and were temporarily stalled by the Tiananmen Square massacre (which, counterintuitively, emboldened anti-communists in Europe), China’s post-Soviet recognition that private enterprise should trump the state sector helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty.

…. In the long fight between Karl Marx and Milton Friedman, even the democratic socialists of Europe had to admit that Friedman won in a landslide. Although media attention was rightly focused on the dramatic economic changes transforming Asia and the former East Bloc, fully half of the world’s privatization in the first dozen years after the Cold War, as measured by revenue, took place in Western Europe. European political and monetary integration, widely derided as statist by the Anglo-American right, has turned out to be one of the biggest engines for economic liberty in modern history. It was no accident that, in the midst of Washington’s illegal and ill-fated bailout of U.S. automakers, Swedish Enterprise Minister Maud Olofsson, when asked about the fate of struggling Saab, tersely announced, “The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories.”

That said, Welch misses the mark in his final paragraph:

Ironically, the one consistent lesson U.S. officials claim to have learned about the Cold War is the one that has the least applicability outside the East Bloc: that aggressive and even violent confrontation with evil regimes will lead to various springtimes for democracy. It is telling that the victors of an epic economic and spiritual struggle take away conclusions that are primarily military. Telling, and tragic.

Well, at least he admits that it’s a lesson. But it has plenty of applicability outside the East Bloc, as I explained to an unfortunately misled person on the right a few weeks ago. This person in essence told an e-mail group that the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries were destined to fall on their own because they had all run out of central-planning gas and cited some scholarly work that supposedly proved it.

My response refuted that claim and exposed its historical ignorance:

C’mon. You’re smarter than this.

Cuba and North Korea have “fallen apart” too, and to a far more serious extent than the Soviet Union and its satellites ever did — but you’ll note that even after 5 decades, they haven’t fallen.

To fall, they will have to be pushed. As of now, no one will do it. They will not fall until someone does.

To fall, despite having “fallen apart,” the Soviet Union had to be pushed. Reagan, John Paul, Thatcher, Walesa, and others on the inside pushed. Otherwise, the fall wouldn’t have happened.

No, it didn’t take a full-blown military conflict to win the Cold War. It took the decidedly firm, consistent, and persistent group just identified to stand their ground while those on the inside did the pushing, knowing that the West had their backs.

In nine months of the new administration we have had little firmness, no consistency, and almost no persistence. For them, the dissident movement in Iran might as well not exist; it’s as if they prefer that it not exist. North Korea is an annoyance best kicked down the road to the next administration. Cuba, whose people deserve liberation, will more than likely endure as a totalitarian state even after its head totalitarian dies. Venezuela grows ever more militant, and it’s of no concern.

If this doesn’t change, the postures just described, combined with the domestic monstrosities that have been and are being foisted on us, may well lead future historians to declare 2009 a turning point towards authoritarianism, and perhaps even towards the ascendancy of terrorism.

Let’s see. A Big 4 independent public accounting firm vs. the Democratic Party’s go-to health care economics guy. Who has more presumptive credibility?

It’s more than a little offensive to see the people whose party gave us entitlement programs with multitrillion-dollar unfunded liabilities (Social Security and Medicare), pension plans that are completely unsustainable (the federal government and many states), and year-over-year budget increases that almost always dwarf inflation — in other words, people with absolutely no record of financial credibility on matters big and small — go after Big 4 accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and its “industry-funded” study on what would happen to insurance premiums under the BaucusCare iteration of ObamaCare with the eager assistance of their media apparatchiks.

Understand this: When PwC prepares a report for the health insurance industry projecting, in the Wall Street Journal’s words, that “the Senate Finance Committee’s big health-care bill would raise health insurance premiums by thousands of dollars a year,” one can be confident that it is based on exhaustively researched and thoroughly reviewed work.

Here’s the whiny Democratic reaction to the firm’s report:

“Distorted and flawed,” said White House spokeswoman Linda Douglass. “Fundamentally dishonest,” said AARP’s senior policy strategist, John Rother. “A hatchet job,” said a spokesman for Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.

One indication of the impotence of the response is the fact that the only “substantive” objection thus far is from an “MIT economist” who claims that “the industry report failed to take into account administrative overhead costs that he said will “fall enormously” once insurance polices are sold through new government-regulated marketplaces, or exchanges.”

There’s only one “little” problem: Economist Jon Gruber is hardly “independent.” Did you know that Gruber’s Wikipedia entry begins by noting that he has been “called the Democratic Party’s ‘most influential health-care expert’ by the Washington Post“? The New York Times Prescriptions blog “somehow forgot” to share that little tidbit with its readers. Imagine that. (UPDATE: Here’s another “little” problem also not disclosed by the Times — Gruber gave $2,000 to John Kerry’s presidential effort in 2004.)

PwC, by stark contrast, is an independent entity both in appearance and fact. The firm asserts that “Regulators have cited the PwC online independence system as the model for the profession.” It and other public accounting firms go to extraordinary lengths to avoid conflicts of interest, and subject their reports to intense scrutiny before they are released.

Even without the professional help of PwC, common sense tells us that Gruber’s contention is highly questionable.

This is supposedly how overhead will “fall enormously” under Max “Hatchet Job” Baucus’s Senate bill:

Or perhaps you prefer this “fall enormously” model, courtesy of what is contained in House Bill 3200:

If you think these massive, unwieldy, out-of-control contraptions are going to enormously lower “administrative overhead” in the entire system, I want what you’re smoking.

Oh sure, the government might (emphasis might) keep its own admin costs low — by shifting the overwhelming share of the burden onto providers, intermediaries, and patients. Providers will be stuck doing work that will distract them from their primary caregiving tasks, and patients will have to navigate the byzantine mazes shown above. Both of those factors will work work to limit the supply of available time and resources for patient care and/or increase the cost of providing it because of having to employ more administrative help. Combine that with an increase in demand driven by overutilization of what will have become a supposedly “free” good for a large numbers citizens (and non-citizens), and you have the recipe for the very increases PWC cited.

If you don’t believe PwC, all you have to do is look at the real-world disaster of CommonwealthCare aka RomneyCare in Massachusetts. As I noted in this previous post, costs have exploded, of course including administrative costs, while the system is on verge of imposing serious rationing of care.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE: Non-shocking non-disclosure of the day — Gruber gave $2,000 to John Kerry’s presidential effort in 2004. Perhaps that’s the going price of admission for becoming the designated “health care economist.” The NYT’s blog missed that bit of info too. Imagine that.

UPDATE 2: Heritage showed back in late June (HT Patterico) that Medicare’s administrative costs per beneficiary is actually higher, despite myriad obvious advantages (broader base, not having to pay income and other taxes, etc.) than that of private insurers.

That’s very helpful. It would have been even more helpful if Heritage hadn’t played a misguided role in creating the RomneyCare monster forming the foundation for the statists’ current push.

From Rome, in an article written shortly before Father Damien was canonized:

Oct 9, 2009 / 06:24 am

As the October 11 canonization of Fr. Damien de Veuster approaches, an art teacher is leading a small group from Hawaii to Rome to present Pope Benedict XVI with a portrait of the saint painted by an artist paralyzed by Lou Gehrig’s Disease, also known as ALS.

Fr. Damien, a hero to Hawaiians, ministered to a major leper colony on Molokai where he contracted and eventually succumbed to leprosy in the late nineteenth century.

The late artist Peggy Chun had created the artwork with the help of schoolchildren at Holy Trinity School in Honolulu. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) had affected her to the point where she could only move her eyes.

Shelly Mecum, an art teacher at the school and a friend of Peggy, spoke with CNA from Rome in a Thursday phone interview about the portrait and its creator.

She described Peggy as an “invincible artist” who wouldn’t let ALS stop her from creating.

“When she couldn’t paint with her left hand, she used her right. When she couldn’t paint with her right, she used her mouth.”

According to Mecum, ALS completely “entombs” its victims.

“That’s what Peggy said it felt like, being buried alive in your own body.”

Despite her crippling symptoms, which led to her death on Nov. 19, 2008, Peggy used an ERICA eye response computer to communicate. She also used a device that would read her brainwaves.

“She was the first brainwave artist on the planet,” Mecum told CNA.

Peggy painted her portrait of Fr. Damien, titled “The Damien,” by directing others. She trained her apprentices in her brushstroke “just like Renaissance artists.” The work is part painting and part mosaic.

She spent 18 months giving directions week by week to paint the 50,000 quarter-inch squares that would be used in the eight-foot by four-foot painting.

She was assisted by 142 children from Holy Trinity school over a period of 18 months. The students, who ranged in age from 5 to 13, understood themselves as “Peggy’s hands.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

I suppose President Obama is still running around telling everyone who will listen, along with anyone else who won’t, that “If you like your doctors and medical providers, you can keep them.”

It would also not surprise me to learn that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is still singing the praises of CommonwealthCare, the state-run system conservatives also deride as RomneyCare, so named after Mitt Romney, Patrick’s allegedly Republican predecessor who brought it into being. Patrick even wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed column several weeks ago that called CommonwealthCare a “model for national reform.”

As an apparently pivotal Senate committee vote on imposing statist health care on the entire country looms, the Boston Globe’s Liz Kowalczyk has inconveniently reminded statists (HT Hot Air) that the alleged wonders of the Bay State’s care regimen are instead leading it inexorably into serious rationing, and to a direct contradiction of Obama’s and Patrick’s core claims. Currently on the horizon are serious limitations on choice of care providers and annual capitated payments to those providers. Kowalczyk would probably protest that she never uses the word “rationing,” but it really doesn’t matter. Anyone with even a modicum of sense will recognize these moves for what they are.

Here are some of the key paragraphs in Kowalczyk’s Sunday report:

The state’s ambitious plan to shake up how providers are paid could have a hidden price for patients: Controlling Massachusetts’ soaring medical costs, many health care leaders believe, may require residents to give up their nearly unlimited freedom to go to any hospital and specialist they want.

…. a growing number of hospital officials and physician lead ers warn that the new payment system proposed by a state commission would not work without restrictions on where patients receive care – an issue some providers say the commission and the Patrick administration have glossed over.

“You can’t reap these savings without limiting patients’ choices in some way,’’ said Paul Levy, chief executive of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “It’s a huge issue, it’s huge.” Dr. James Mongan, president of Partners HealthCare, a Beth Israel Deaconess competitor, agreed that it wouldn’t “work without some restriction on choice.”

A state commission recommended in July that insurers largely scrap the current fee-for-service system – in which insurers pay doctors, hospitals, and other providers a negotiated fee for each procedure and visit – and instead pay providers a per-patient annual fee to cover all of the patient’s medical care.

…. The Massachusetts proposal would involve a more ambitious restructuring of health care than any of the cost-cutting ideas being discussed in Washington. Under a global payment system, doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, and other providers would form large networks, called accountable care organizations, that would provide most of the care for individual patients and divvy up the payments. Doctors would try to coordinate patients’ care within these networks, which would share electronic medical records and treatment plans. And to manage costs, they would try to direct patients to the hospital within the network that could provide good-quality care at the lowest cost, while generally using teaching hospitals for advanced care.

…. Sarah Iselin, head of the state Division of Health Care Finance and Policy and cochair of the payment commission, said the (commission) panel understood the importance of addressing the effect of its recommendations on patient choice, but “felt these issues could be figured out” later by a board that would be created to oversee the transition to a new payment system.

Well, if CommonwealthCare is indeed the model, then its imminent rationing should also be seen as a preview of things to come nationwide, regardless of the pie-in-the-sky contraptions Congress is attempting to cobble together. When theses messes meet reality, they invariably lead to rationing accompanied by a shocking degree of bureaucratic control over the minutiae of medicine.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air adds this question:

This is a microcosm of what we can expect on a national basis if ObamaCare gets enacted. Will the media start reporting this in that context?

When indeed?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

A New York Times article by Nick Bunkley on Friday targeted for print on Saturday about the status of contract talks between Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers piqued my interest in a previously neglected but important matter.

Ford and the UAW are apparently close to an agreement. In describing what Ford workers are being asked to give up, Bunkley wrote the following (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Ford executives have said the company needs more concessions to keep G.M. and Chrysler from having an advantage.

…. The deal that U.A.W. workers at Ford approved in March got rid of cost-of-living pay increases and performance bonuses through 2010 and eliminated the jobs bank program, which allows laid-off workers to continue receiving most of their pay. In addition to those concessions, G.M. and Chrysler workers agreed to work-rule changes and a provision that bars them from striking.

What? From press coverage at the time, you would have thought that unionized GM and Chrysler workers made ginormous, humungous, unprecedented sacrifices to enable their companies to get through bankruptcy and to emerge as lean, mean vehicle-making machines.

Uh, no. What follows is a picture of the top portion of the first page of a “contract outline” presented by the union to its members shortly before the changes therein were ratified (full outline in PDF format is here; HT WSJ’s Deal Journal blog):

Let me repeat the key sentences found inside the red box:

For our active members, these tentative changes mean no loss in your base hourly pay, no reduction in your health care, and no reduction in pensions.

…. Unfortunately, in this process our retirees are required to make difficult sacrifices as is explained later in the summary.

In other words, the UAW protected its currently working members, the ones who get to vote on contracts, from any meaningful sacrifice, while hosing its retirees, who don’t get to vote.

How hard were retirees hit? This hard, according to a May local news report out of Detroit:

(UAW President Ron) Gettelfinger said the contract is a difficult one for the active members and retirees, who will give up some 25% of their health care benefits. “This was a matter of salvation as much as we possibly could for our retirees. I am regretful that we had to do anything and I think it’s a disgrace we had to do anything,” Gettelfinger said.

Spare us the pseudo-tough talk, Ron.

Even given the opportunity to cleanse all sins in bankruptcy, GM and Chrysler ended up doing very little to change their U.S. manufacturing day-to-day cost structure. Thanks to press coverage that has been almost completely derelict, almost no one knows this. Nick Bunkley’s piece above continues in that truth-obscuring tradition.

What really happened between the two companies and the UAW confirms and extends what I noted last week (first item at link) when items about post-bankruptcy restructurings began to appear:

In each case, it looks like the bankruptcy plan really consisted of the following:

• “Let’s steal as much as we can from disfavored stakeholders.” In Chrysler’s case, with the help of government intimidation, first-lien non-TARP lenders were fleeced.” At GM, it happened to the unsecured bondholders.
• “Let’s cut things back just enough to make us look like we’re serious, but not enough to be able to emerge profitably.
• “Let’s hope for a miracle in the marketplace.”

It looks like retirees were treated by their UAW “brothers and sisters” as yet another set of “disfavored stakeholders.”

Meanwhile, the marketplace miracle necessary for all of this to even have a chance of working is nowhere to be found, and tens of billions of our tax dollars appear to be headed for a big, fat write-off.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

As usual, there are at least 10 times as many items out there than I can get to.

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“U.S. sales chief leaves GM as restructuring goes on” — As noted here previously (first item at link), getting all of the “restructuring” done was supposedly the point of going through bankruptcy. Instead, the company is having to keep doing it post-bankruptcy for two reasons.

First, and in its partial defense, it underestimated the ongoing negative impact of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy, now the POR Recession/”Repression” as Normal People Define It, that brought the vehicle market to its knees during the last half of 2008 and has basically kept it there. As long as this administration thinks (or pretends to think) that “stimulus,” otherwise known as thinly disguised crony capitalism larded with economically unproductive transfer payments, is the way to economic recovery, consumers will resist making major purchases like new vehicles out of sheer self-defense.

Second, the company and the UAW (with the help of the press) misled the public about the seriousness of the concessions the UAW made in contract renegotiations. Here’s a quote from UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger from the first page of union’s outline of the contract modifications (PDF saved at my host):

For our active members these tentative changes mean no loss in your base hourly pay, no reduction in your health care, and no reduction in pensions.

Thus, it would appear that at least 90% of the compensation package for current employees was off-limits from the very start. The “concessions” heralded by the three parties involved (GM, UAW, and almost all of the press) amounted to nibbling around the edges for current workers and, as the union itself admitted in the document’s next paragraph, hitting retirees hard (not coincidentally, retirees don’t get to vote on contracts or contract changes).

So the company and the union avoided meaningful concessions while they, with the government’s unlimited legal assistance, shafted unsecured bondholders. Despite the PR, the company appears to have done little about its bloated cost structure, and is now forced to continue to “restructure” mere months after coming out of bankruptcy. Your tax dollars (and your kids’, and your grandkids’, and ….) at work.

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The previous item probably goes a long way towards explaining why Ford and the UAW may be near an agreement with relatively little contentiousness. Again despite the press facade, Ford workers more than likely had to give up very little — perhaps almost nothing — to come down to parity with GM.

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This is reporting? Here’s Nick Bunkley at the New York Times in an item on the Ford-UAW situation:

Ford executives have said the company needs more concessions to keep G.M. and Chrysler from having an advantage. However, Ford might be hard-pressed to show U.A.W. members that such a deal was necessary after posting a $2.3 billion profit in the second quarter, even though much of that was the result of a major debt restructuring.

One good quarter, and the company is supposedly in fat city — never mind that it lost $30 billion in the three years ended 2008. Bunkley is feeding readers a bunch of bunk.

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Thank you, Bob Kerrey (bolds are mine):

…. (I) fear that American political leaders are about to talk themselves into breaking yet another foreign policy commitment.

…. (in 2007) against all reasonable predictions, President Bush chose to increase rather than decrease our military commitment. The “surge,” as it became known, worked. Victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat.

…. While success in Afghanistan may not look the same as it does in Iraq, I believe there is a very good chance that a stable democracy can survive there. If it does, it would be good for the Afghan people, good for the security of the region, and good for the United States.

…. If he chooses this politically safe route and does not give his military commander on the ground the resources needed to win, history will judge him harshly. Great American leaders of our past have ignored popular sentiment and pressed on during the darkest hours, even when setbacks give rhetorical ammunition to the skeptics.

…. our leaders must remain focused on the fact that success in Afghanistan bolsters our national security and yes, our moral reputation. This war is not Vietnam. The Taliban are not popular and have very little support other than what they secure through terror.

Afghanistan is also not Iraq. No serious leader in Kabul is asking us to leave. Instead we are being asked to withdraw by American leaders who begin their analysis with the presumption that victory is not possible. They seem to want to ensure defeat by leaving at the very moment when our military leader on the ground has laid out a coherent and compelling strategy for victory.

When it comes to foreign policy, almost nothing matters more than your friends and your enemies knowing you will keep your word and follow through on your commitments. This is the real test of presidential leadership. I hope that President Obama—soon to be a Nobel laureate—passes with flying colors.

So do I. The last Democratic president to keep America’s word in wartime was Harry Truman — and even he stopped doing so in Korea. Breaking a 60-year tradition of appeasement will not be easy. Prayer is in order.