To say that there’s good reason not to be impressed with quite a few U.S. Senators is to state the obvious.

But I hope Dana Milbank either hasn’t read or really doesn’t remember A Streetcar Named Desire. Because in his coverage of the Senate vote last night to go forward to debate on its health care bill, the alleged journalist stooped well below the level of most of the blogosphere by in essence calling the United States Senate the House of 100 Prostitutes — and worse.

Yes he did. (Tim Graham at NewsBusters has added the point at that post that Milbank’s work is at the top of WaPo’s front page.)

After observing the opportunistic, advantage-taking machinations of Democratic Senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas in return for the final two “yes” votes needed for passage, Milbank wrote the following:

Landrieu and Lincoln got the attention because they were the last to decide, but the Senate really has 100 Blanche DuBoises, a full house of characters inclined toward the narcissistic.

The health-care debate was worse than most. With all 40 Republicans in lockstep opposition, all 60 members of the Democratic caucus had to vote yes — and that gave each one an opportunity to extract concessions from Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid.

In Streetcar (plot overview here), Blanche DuBois’s past in Laurel, Mississippi, before arriving in New Orleans at the play’s start, involved far more than narcissistic inclinations:

…. Blanche moved into a fleabag motel from which she was eventually evicted because of her numerous sexual liaisons. Also, she was fired from her job as a schoolteacher because the principal discovered that she was having an affair with a teenage student.

If Milbank wants to make a case for Senators prostituting themselves based on last night’s activities, he would at a minimum have to stop at 60, because the other 40, some of whom surely have surely heard buy-off overtures in previous months, refused to give in.

But much more to the point, Milbank engages in stereotyping, up to and including, (based on his invocation of DuBois) willingness to engage in adult-child sex under the right conditions, of the kind he would be likely be among the first to decry if he heard it anywhere else — especially if written or uttered by an eeeeeevil conservative.

How would Milbank and Post management feel if someone wrote that “the Washington Post really has hundreds of Walter Durantys“? Or Janet Cookes?

Milbank’s intemperance in what is supposed to be one of the newspapers of record is reprehensible, and cries out for an apology and disciplinary action. It also makes one wonder where the Post’s layers of fact-checkers and editors were.

There is precedent from 2003 for dishing out some discipline:

Boston Globe sports columnist Bob Ryan was suspended for one month without pay after saying on television that the wife of New Jersey Nets guard Jason Kidd, who was allegedly the victim of domestic abuse, needed someone to “smack her.”

“Bob Ryan’s comments were a clear and egregious violation of the standards of The Boston Globe,” editor Martin Baron said in a statement. “Bob has been told in no uncertain terms that his remarks were offensive and unacceptable.”

The columnist was also barred from appearing on radio or television for one month.

Ryan was “only” referring to one woman’s situation (the fact that Kidd’s wife was a domestic abuse victim is really irrelevant to the offensiveness of the comment). Milbank has slandered 100 Senators — yes, including those like Landrieu and Lincoln who deserve intense criticism for putting a price on their votes.

If Milbank really remembers Streetcar, and really believes what he wrote in describing all 100 U.S. Senators, I would suggest that the Post consider finding someone else who can actually see that there really are politicians legitimately interested in serving their constituents and their country — not enough of them by any stretch — and who hasn’t been totally blinded by cynicism.

So will the Post, which frequently in its own pages decried the supposedly overheated rhetoric from the right, do the right thing?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Vatican City:

Pope Benedict met artists from around the world in the Sistine Chapel on Saturday and urged them to inject spirituality into their work, saying contemporary beauty was often “illusory and deceitful.”

The Pope told the gathering of hundreds of painters, sculptors, architects, poets and directors, held beneath the vaulted ceiling of the chapel painted by Michelangelo, that he wanted to “renew the Church’s friendship with the world of art.”

“Beauty … can become a path toward the transcendent, toward the ultimate Mystery, toward God,” Benedict said.

The Vatican said it invited some 500 artists to the event, regardless of religious, political or stylistic allegiances.

More than 250 accepted, mostly from Italy, including singer Andrea Bocelli and award-winning film composer Ennio Morricone.

Amongst the other guests were Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid, whose Maxxi modern art museum has just opened in Rome, and F. Murray Abraham, the American actor who won an Oscar for his role as Salieri in the Mozart film, Amadeus, in 1985.

The Pope told them that in a world lacking in hope, with increasing signs of aggression and despair, there was an ever greater need for a return to spirituality in art.

“Too often … the beauty thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful … it imprisons man within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy,” he said.

Against the backdrop of Michelangelo’s vast fresco of the Last Judgment, which adorns the chapel’s altar wall, Benedict lamented that the once-close cooperation between the Church and the artistic community had weakened.

“Faith takes nothing away from your genius or art,” he said. “On the contrary, it exalts them and nourishes them.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

Not that he set out to do it, but Mr. Wright has brilliantly explained (HT A Traditional Life Lived):

1. Why my call that the economy’s condition since the summer of 2008 is almost solely the fault of Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid is absolutely correct.
2. Why the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy really began when I said it did, i.e., why “going Galt got going” when it did.
3. Why all of Dear Leader’s horses and all of Dear Leader’s men won’t be able to put what we used to know as the entrepreneurial American economy together again, unless they set aside their current mindset.

Key paragraphs of Wright’s must-read (bolds are mine):

…. politicians are equally ill-equipped to run the auto industry or the health industry or the lending industry or the insurance industry — and their determination to do so is sucking all the dynamism from the entrepreneurial class in this country.

With the threat of this administration and congress, what is the possible motivation for anyone with ideas and capital to invest his time, talent, and money into a risky endeavor? There appears to be none. In fact, there appear to be powerful incentives not to invest any time or treasure — thus an economy with almost zero creative inertia.

For Obama voters, almost zero creative inertia means almost no one is having bright ideas, starting businesses based on them, and hiring employees to help share the dream.

…. it’s different now, and there is no denying it. The (American) dream itself is being killed by legal and regulatory micromanagement. Washington is determined to employ policies to cure something that can be cured only by government getting the hell out of the way.

A small business summit in the White House will accomplish nothing unless the invitees include unions and lawyers and bureaucrats, in which case it will be devastating. When did a union or a lawyer or a bureaucrat ever start a business? How many times a day do they kill one?

And that’s the climate entrepreneurs see. Unions, lawyers, and bureaucrats gain more power and leverage every day. The big opportunity now is to spend government money: an eighteen-million-dollar government contract to create an awful Recovery.org website, SEIU union jobs in ObamaCare, bankruptcy lawyers, and perhaps carbon credit trades coming. There are ACORN-style crony contracts to be had, not to mention all the jobs created by the David Axelrod astroturfing media escapades. If you are connected or if your dream is to enrich yourself by killing the dreams of others, then the field is ripe for you.

But if you simply want to live some iteration of building a better mousetrap, this is not currently the country for you. And entrepreneurs can sense it. This is not about tax policy. It is not about health care. It is not about cap-and-trade. These are all terrible and need to be stopped, but most importantly, the dying American dream is in trouble. We now have a class of people in Washington now that will relentlessly pursue these ruinous initiatives, and a never-ending stream of similarly un-American agendas, until they are removed from power.

The businessmen are under attack, and they know it. This kind of economy cannot work — not until pigs fly, or until Barney Frank dunks on Lebron James.

The tipping point when entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and investors could sense everything Wright has described was reached in June-July 2008. Quite simply, that’s when enough of them to matter saw what was coming if Barack Obama won the presidency, and estimated that he would be the more likely winner.

Given the points Wright makes, it’s no surprise that the malaise turned into a rout at bailout time in late September and early October 2008. Pelosi, Obama, and Reid fully supported the creation of TARP, while others were dragged and/or hoodwinked into giving in to what their instincts screamed was a bad thing (and shame on all of them for doing so). Tim Geithner created the conditions that made it look necessary by, among other things, letting Lehman go under. Then of course it got even worse after Obama won and Democrats built a larger congressional majority.

Since mid-2008, it’s been their POR Economy; we’re just living and, as a country, underachieving in it.

Multiply the seriousness of every problem Wright cites by a large number if statist health care passes.

At this point, there should be little doubt that there is a concerted attempt underway to use the war in Afghanistan as a justification for punitively taxing high earners.

Last weekend (noted at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the New York Times discovered that wars cost money. It cited Wisconsin Democratic Congressman David Obey’s concern that funding the Afghanistan effort at the level requested months ago by General Stanley A. McChrystal would “devour virtually any other priorities that the president or anyone in Congress had.”

Thursday, as reported by AFP (noted last night at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), House Democratic heavy-hitters Barney Frank, John Murtha, and (no surprise) Obey announced the “Share The Sacrifice Act of 2010,” an income-tax surcharge that overwhelmingly targets high-income earners.

Now Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin has weighed in. Bloomberg dutifully carried his water, as seen in this graphic containing the first four paragraphs of the report:

Levin, as is the custom of his party, confuses “wealth” with “income.” The Michigan Senator also attempts to perpetuate the rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer income-inequality myth, which is indeed a myth, at least as of 2007. Since Democrats took over Congress and Barack Obama has become president, that may have changed. Income inequality increased during Bill Clinton’s 2nd through 8th years in office.

Levin’s idea further supports my take on all of this, mentioned yesterday:

…. the administration is putting the idea out there now as a prelude to justifying what it and Democrats in general have been referring to as an end to the Bush tax cuts — something that should really be seen as a tax increase above what everyone has gotten used to during the past six years — as necessary to pay for the Afghanistan War, and to try to rhetorically hogtie gullible conservatives into acquiescing to it (“You do want our soldier to have what they need, do you not? Then you’ll just have to agree to let taxes increase”).

The likelihood that all three parties involved — the Times, the House members, and Senator Levin — all had independent “Eureka!” moments leading suddenly to the notion that taxing “the rich” to pay for the war is the way to go is very, very tiny.

The likelihood that anyone in the establishment media will look into and confirm that there is an orchestrated campaign to tie the war effort to a tax hike on high earners, and to see who is behind it, is even tinier.

What would really be worth knowing is whether President Obama’s obvious dithering on an Afghanistan War troop deployment decision has been purposeful. Has he been biding his time all these months specifically for the purpose of pushing a year-end “war-related” tax increase”? The likelihood that the establishment media will ever look into this possibility is miniscule to non-existent.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

___________________________________________________

UPDATE: Just remembered a minor dust-up over inequality from August of last year ago that had to do with an early 1990s Gini coefficient change. The sentence about the Clinton years has been changed to reflect that.

From Norfolk, VA:

A merchant sea captain who was captured and held by Somali pirates in April reunited Thursday with the U.S. Navy crew and captain who were part of his daring rescue, thanking them for saving him.

“You are the true patriots,” Capt. Richard Phillips said on the fantail of the USS Bainbridge, addressing a crew standing at attention in dress blues. “You are the heroes in the story involving me. And I just want to thank the true heroes of my incident and that’s you, the crew of the USS Bainbridge.”

Despite his ordeal in April, Phillips, 54, said he plans to return to the Maersk Alabama in March. Wednesday, pirates attacked Phillips’ old ship for the second time in seven months but were turned away. Phillips declined to talk specifically about the latest attack on the Maersk Alabama.

“I’ve never had misgivings about going to sea,” Phillips, who lives in Vermont, said later at a news conference conducted in front of the orange, boot-shaped lifeboat where he was held by pirates for five days after they boarded his ship.

Navy SEALs ended Phillips’ captivity in April with three pinpoint shots that killed three pirates in the lifeboat. The SEALs, who are not members of the ship’s crew, did not attend Thursday’s reunion on the Bainbridge.

Phillips arrived at the ceremony on the guided-missile destroyer with his wife, mother and sister-in-law. He handed out commemorative coins to some members of the crew, which totals nearly 300. He also received gifts from the city of Norfolk.

“Under different circumstances and without the job that you did, I would not be here today,” Phillips said. “I firmly believe that.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

It seems like a long shot, but Buckeye Staters who want this country to be saved from statist health care ought to pursue it any way.

After spending 25 minutes on hold waiting to talk to someone at Sherrod Brown’s Washington Office, I was told that the Senator has not decided on whether to support the Senate vote on Saturday that would be designed to “move the issue forward to debate.”

Given that Brown has previously expressed support for the so-called “public option” as a necessary element of any legislation, and for inclusion of taxpayer-funded abortion coverage, this alleged non-commitment seems like a ploy to keep furious callers at bay.

But just in case he is reading the polls, the outraged op-eds, and paying attention to his calls and e-mails, and beginning to waver, I would suggest contacting his office (202-224-2315) or e-mailing him (contact form here), or doing both, at once.

Having reminded the Brown staffer that no less than the Dean of the Harvard Medical school in so many words came out and opposed ObamaCare today in the Wall Street Journal (“I’d give it a failing grade …. Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problems of cost, access and quality. But that’s not true.”), I let him know that I expect a “no” vote.

Let Senator Brown’s staff know that hundreds of thousands of Ohioans will work as hard as they possibly can to remove him from office in 2012, if not sooner (which sadly does not appear possible), if he supports this statist takeover.

Also, while I’m posting, let me remind the never-reliable Senator Voinovich (202-224-3353; contact form) that we expect a vocal “no” from him.

___________________________________________________

UPDATE: It might be worth letting Senator Brown know that Ohio’s 10.5% unemployment rate is already way too high, and that statist health care will only make it worse.

UPDATE 2, Nov. 22: Here’s the roll call. Straight party line. As Bill pointed out in the comments, Voinovich didn’t vote. His fingers were broken?

You’ve got to hand it to the propagandists at the AFP. When heavy-hitting members of the party they favor announce an idea whose main purpose is, as the New York Times suddenly “discovered” last weekend, to remind people that wars cost money and distract from supposedly more important priorities, the wire service leaps into action.

Even AFP acknowledges that the tax proposal by several top-tier Democrats has no chance of becoming law. But again, that’s not the point. Their proposal’s purpose is to remind people that spending money on wars supposedly takes money out of the mouths of children and other living things, even those in non-existent congressional districts, and to attempt to make the climate for increasing taxes in the near future more favorable.

Here are key paragraphs of the unbylined report (bolds are mine):

US lawmakers: New tax should pay for Afghan war

Influential US lawmakers on Thursday called for levying a new income tax to pay for the war in Afghanistan, warning its costs pose a mortal threat to efforts like a sweeping health care overhaul.

“Regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for,” the lawmakers, all prominent Democratic allies of President Barack Obama, said in a joint statement.

The proposed “Share The Sacrifice Act of 2010″ came with Obama set to announce within weeks his decision on whether to send more US troops to fight the war, now in its ninth year.

The group included House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey; Representative John Murtha, who chair that panel’s defense subcommittee; and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank.

The proposal, a heavily symbolic measure seen as having next to no chance of becoming law, would impose a war surtax on income beginning in 2011 — though it would allow the president to delay implementation by one year upon deciding the US economy is too weak to sustain such a tax shift.

….. If the war is not paid for, its costs “will devour money that could be used to rebuild our economy by fixing our broken health care system, expanding educational opportunities and job training possibilities, attacking our long term energy problems and building stronger communities,” they said.

The measure would create a three-tiered change in income tax with the goal of paying for all of the war’s costs. Couples earning up to 150,000 dollars per year would see a one-percent increase in their regular tax level, from 15 percent currently to 15.15 percent.

For those making between 150,000-250,000 dollars per year or 250,000 dollars or above, the president would have to set the rate increase high enough to pay for the remaining war costs, and in such a way that the middle-tier earners pay half what the top earners do.

Currently, the war costs roughly 68 billion dollars per year, which would mean that the middle tier would see its rate rise from 28 percent to 29.5 percent, while the top would climb from 33 percent to 36.6 percent, according to a person familiar with the plan.

The numbers and spin in the final paragraph would appear to indicate that the administration is putting the idea out there now as a prelude to justifying what it and Democrats in general have been referring to as an end to the Bush tax cuts — something that should really be seen as a tax increase above what everyone has gotten used to during the past six years — as necessary to pay for the Afghanistan War, and to try to rhetorically hogtie gullible conservatives into acquiescing to it (“You do want our soldier to have what they need, do you not? Then you’ll just have to agree to let taxes increase”).

AFP is clearly willing to play along and try to set the stage for that.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Two months ago, there was the “Dog Ate My Global Warming Data” episode. As noted at NewsBusters and at BizzyBlog (original source: National Review Online), we learned that important original information forming the underpinning of global warming alarmists’ claims about the earth heating up has vanished. It is longer available and apparently can’t be reverse engineered.

Today, e-mails hacked from a UK climate research facility appear at a minimum to indicate a willingness by scientists to fudge the data to make alleged warming trends more clear and convincing. At worst, the whole enterprise could be totally discredited.

Important and damming passages from certain of the e-mails have been acknowledged as authentic.

The Australian Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims, as paraphrased by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, that “that those e-mails expose a conspiracy to hide detrimental information from the public that argues against global warming.”

Here are key paragraphs from Bolt’s blog post (presented out of order because of frequent updates at that post):

Hackers have broken into the data base of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – one of the world’s leading alarmist centres – and put the files they stole on the Internet, on the grounds that the science is too important to be kept under wraps.

The ethics of this are dubious, to say the least. But the files suggest, on a very preliminary glance, some other very dubious practices, too, and a lot of collusion – sometimes called “peer review”. Or even conspiracy.

(excerpt from a hacked e-mail; bold is Bolt’s–Ed.)

From: Phil Jones

To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX

Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement

Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000

Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

(end excerpted e-mail)

Surely these emails can’t be genuine. Surely the world’s most prominent alarmist scientists aren’t secretly exchanging emails like this, admitting privately they can’t find the warming they’ve been so loudly predicting?:

(a second excerpt from a different e-mail; I removed most of Bolt’s bolds in this instance–Ed.)

From: Kevin Trenberth

To: Michael Mann

Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600

Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

….. The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

(end excerpted e-mail)

This has to be a forgery, surely. Because if it isn’t, we’re about to see the unpicking of a huge scandal.

I mean, the media will follow this up, right? In the meantime, use with care.

(in an Update)

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science.

Well, the UK Guardian, of all places, has followed up to an extent:

Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists

Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world’s leading climate scientists over the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the UK’s University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege that they provide “smoking gun” evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind. So far the veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

The files, which in total amount to 61MB of data, were first uploaded onto a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: “We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

The Guardian hedged on the e-mails’ authenticity, but that question seems to have been for the most part settled, i.e., they have been acknowledged by their authors as genuine.

So perhaps global warming really is a bunch of what yours truly and others have called “globaloney” for years.

I get the sense that the fun has just begun, with or without U.S. media coverage. I would strike a cautionary note that it all seems too perfect. But maybe they are really are that dumb to leave such obvious tracks.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

___________________________________________________

UPDATE: Real Climate’s “yeah, right” statement of the day –

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

Yeah, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” is sooooo lacking in “context.”

The problem is that it isn’t the only response, guys, and you know it. Cherry-pick this (HT Global Climate Scam).

Mitt Romney, call your office (emphasis mine).

Remember Mitt? The guy who keeps insisting that he could make RomneyCare work nationally?

From Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal…

By JEFFREY S. FLIER
As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I’d give it a failing grade.

Instead of forthrightly dealing with the fundamental problems, discussion is dominated by rival factions struggling to enact or defeat President Barack Obama’s agenda. The rhetoric on both sides is exaggerated and often deceptive. Those of us for whom the central issue is health—not politics—have been left in the lurch. And as controversy heads toward a conclusion in Washington, it appears that the people who favor the legislation are engaged in collective denial.

…Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problems of cost, access and quality. But that’s not true. The various bills do deal with access by expanding Medicaid and mandating subsidized insurance at substantial cost—and thus addresses an important social goal. However, there are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to qualify as reform.

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care’s dysfunctional delivery system. The system we have now promotes fragmented care and makes it more difficult than it should be to assess outcomes and patient satisfaction. The true costs of health care are disguised, competition based on price and quality are almost impossible, and patients lose their ability to be the ultimate judges of value.

…There are important lessons to be learned from recent experience with reform in Massachusetts. Here, insurance mandates similar to those proposed in the federal legislation succeeded in expanding coverage but—despite initial predictions—increased total spending.

A “Special Commission on the Health Care Payment System” recently declared that the Massachusetts health-care payment system must be changed over the next five years, most likely to one involving “capitated” payments instead of the traditional fee-for-service system. Capitation means that newly created organizations of physicians and other health-care providers will be given limited dollars per patient for all of their care, allowing for shared savings if spending is below the targets. Unfortunately, the details of this massive change—necessitated by skyrocketing costs and a desire to improve quality—are completely unspecified by the commission, although a new Massachusetts state bureaucracy clearly will be required.

…Selling an uncertain and potentially unwelcome outcome such as this to the public would be a challenging task. It is easier to assert, confidently but disingenuously, that decreased costs and enhanced quality would result from the current legislation.

So the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.

We should not be making public policy in such a crucial area by keeping the electorate ignorant of the actual road ahead.

Read the entire post here. Perhaps now that someone from “Haaaavad” has defined the fatal flaws in this whole power grab, someone will listen?

Yeah, I won’t hold my breath either.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Sunday morning (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

______________________

Supplement: The column points out what should be obvious, but isn’t to many — Where government goes, trouble follows.

Of course there are private boondoggles too, but I don’t think anyone can cite a case of not government-assisted property development efforts result in dozens of property owners forced out against their will, $78 million in spending …. and a vacant wasteland.

I also don’t think anyone can name a private manufacturer that still loses money bigtime after walking away from about $30 billion in debt and receiving almost $50 billion in gifts (make that two; less-visible Chrysler is probably as bad or worse in proportion to its shrinking size).

The final example cited in the column, the Obama administration’s misnamed “stimulus” plan, appears destined for the top spot in the all-time Waste, Fraud, and Abuse Hall of Shame.

Ohioans should and I suspect will never forget that Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown flew into DC on a chartered jet after his mother’s funeral just so he could cast the decisive final vote needed to pass this monstrosity.

Instead of logically concluding that the government can’t, won’t, and almost never will perform as well as the private sector and creating an environment where the economy and business can thrive, power-hungry statists want more.

This weekend they’re coming for health care. What conceivable reason would anyone have to believe this initiative, if passed, would would turn out any differently?

From Washington:

Nov 20, 2009 / 01:21 am

An unprecedented coalition of prominent Christian clergy, ministry leaders, and scholars has crafted a 4,700-word declaration addressing the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty. The declaration issues “a clarion call” to Christians to adhere to their convictions and informs civil authorities that the signers will not “under any circumstance” abandon their Christian consciences.

The statement, called “the Manhattan Declaration,” has been signed by more than 125 Catholic, Evangelical Christian, and Orthodox leaders, and will be made fully public at a noon press conference in the National Press Club in Washington DC on Friday.

“We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense of these truths. We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence,” the statement says.

“We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral,” the signatories explain.

But they also made clear that “we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriage or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.”

The Manhattan Declaration is the result of several months of dialogue among Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christian leaders culminating in a gathering of approximately 100 leaders in New York City on September 28, 2009.

Attendees considered an early draft of the “Manhattan Declaration, A Call of Christian Conscience,” but the document was entrusted to a drafting committee that included Dr. Timothy George of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, Dr. Robert P. George of Princeton University, and renowned Evangelical leader Charles Colson.

The signatories explained that they speak now because in order “to defend principles of justice and the common good that are now under assault.”

“We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but we will under no circumstances render to Caesar what is God’s.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

Really, who knew?

In what appears to be the opening round of a rearguard action against what leftists used to call “the good war” (only because they felt they needed to pretend they had pro-war bona fides to make their anti-Iraq War arguments look stronger to the general populace), the New York Times’s Christopher Drew reported last Saturday for the Sunday print edition that sending more troops to Afghanistan as General Stanley A. McChrystal has requested might cost tens of billions of dollars.

Imagine that:

High Costs Weigh on Troop Debate for Afghan War

While President Obama’s decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan is primarily a military one, it also has substantial budget implications that are adding pressure to limit the commitment, senior administration officials say.

The latest internal government estimates place the cost of adding 40,000 American troops and sharply expanding the Afghan security forces, as favored by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, at $40 billion to $54 billion a year, the officials said.

Even if fewer troops are sent, or their mission is modified, the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier a year, appears almost constant.

So even if Mr. Obama opts for a lower troop commitment, Afghanistan’s new costs could wash out the projected $26 billion expected to be saved in 2010 from withdrawing troops from Iraq. And the overall military budget could rise to as much as $734 billion, or 10 percent more than the peak of $667 billion under the Bush administration.

Such an escalation in military spending would be a politically volatile issue for Mr. Obama at a time when the government budget deficit is soaring, the economy is weak and he is trying to pass a costly health care plan.

…. At a stop at a military base in Alaska on Thursday, Mr. Obama told a gathering of soldiers that he would not risk more lives “unless it is necessary to America’s vital interests.” He added during his visit to Tokyo on Friday that he wanted to avoid taking any step that could be seen as an “open-ended commitment.”

The administration said Friday that it planned to cut up to 5 percent at domestic agencies in fiscal 2011 as part of an effort to reduce the federal budget deficit, which rose to $1.4 trillion with the economic stimulus and financial bailouts.

All of a sudden the administration has found a place where spending money is a problem. They’re quibbling over a net spending increase of $14-$28 billion (between $40 billion and 54 billion minus $26 billion), a net amount that would be about 0.4%-0.7% of the government’s annual spending rate of $3.5 trillion per year.

Oh, it’s not a problem when hundreds of billions go into a “stimulus” program that hasn’t stimulated anything except howls of outrage over misdirected funds, exaggerated results, and reports of billions going to non-existent congressional districts. It’s not a problem when discussing having the government take over health care. It’s not a problem when funneling funds into two failing car manufacturers, one of which just reported a “managerial net loss” of $1.2 billion in its first period under government control despite having walked away from almost $30 billion in debt and getting at least $50 billion in government aid, the vast majority of which was taken into income by its bankrupt predecessor.

And of course the administration has coupled this with telegraphed plans for significant cuts elsewhere that no one believes will ever happen, and the mere mention of which will bring out howls of protest from bureaucrats and leftist constituencies who will make sure they never happen.

This should be seen as yet another stage in the seemingly endless Afghanistan dither that has been on since summer. The president seems to want to find something, no matter how specious and contrived, to justify not giving McChrystal what he wants. That the Times is providing boot-licking assistance should surprise no one.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.