From an Investors Business Daily editorial:

The Environmental Protection Agency is giving funds to charitable organizations to attack GOP members of Congress. Did you know telling the truth about climate change causes childhood asthma?

We have heard the litany of horrors that climate change is said to bring about — retreating glaciers, rising sea levels, drought and flooding, disease and famine.

Now we are told that fighting the EPA’s power grab to regulate greenhouse gases will lead to an increase in childhood asthma.

The American Lung Association, considered one of America’s most credible and worthy charities, has placed four billboards in Michigan’s 6th Congressional District — including one outside the office of Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee — that feature a sickly looking girl with an oxygen mask and read, “Rep. Fred Upton, protect our kids’ health. Don’t weaken the Clean Air Act.”

But what Upton and the Republican House majority that most voters elected in November are trying to do is restore the Clean Air Act to its true meaning and congressional intent.

… This relationship between the EPA and the ALA goes back to at least the early 1990s.

As John Merline reported in IBD way back in 1997, from 1990 to 1995 the EPA gave the American Lung Association some $5 million. JunkScience.com reports that the EPA has given the ALA an additional $20 million the past decade.

In return, the ALA is putting up billboards in opposition to reining in an EPA that is guilty of at least mission creep and at worst of accumulating power not authorized by our elected representatives in Congress.

This is what a Punk President and his Gangster Government do with their power, in the name of what is on track to go down in history (assuming free people get to write it) as one of the greatest hoaxes in human history — all without a peep of objection from a state-compliant press which would be screaming bloody murder if a GOP or conservative administration were handing out money to charities for political campaigning purposes.

From Santa Anita, California (HT Daryn Kagan; bolds are mine):

March 22, 2011, 9:35 p.m.

Our television screens are filled this month with the breathtaking exploits of young men in short pants and tattoos, and for their dramatic efforts we call them heroes, and, really, we have no idea.

You want March Madness? How about an old man saving the life of a little girl by throwing himself in front of a frightened horse?

You want one shining moment? It happened a couple of weeks ago, when longtime Santa Anita paddock guard John Shear, 90, tossed a 6-year-old girl out of the path of a runaway horse just in time to be trampled.

Cinderella story? That would be when Shear walks again, which could be in a couple of months, as he is lying today in a hospital with a multiple pelvic fractures, a fractured cheekbone, and gashes above his left eye and down his left arm.

“Could have been worse,” Shear said, wincing beneath an oxygen tube during a Tuesday visit. ”Something could have happened to the little girl.”

We interrupt the annual frenzy over the NCAA basketball tournament to write about a real buzzer beater. Nobody was cheering, the video has been locked up, and the only visible reward is a mug of flowers sitting next to a thin bed in a sterile room filled with pain and worry. But when a 5-foot, 110-pound giant of an athlete makes a play that saves a life, somebody should holler about it.

“I’ve already lived most of my life, the little girl has her entire life in front of her,” Shear said. “There’s no question I would do it again.”

It was an early Saturday afternoon at Santa Anita. Shear, working his 50th year at the track, was supervising the paddock guards, making sure the huge horses don’t harm the gawking fans.

Three of those fans were a father and his two young children. The father, who has asked not to be identified because his daughter is still traumatized by the incident, was holding his young son in his arms while his 6-year-old was on his hand.

The man said his daughter was aware of being very small for her age, so he took her to the track to show her the jockeys.

“I wanted her to see that you could do great things no matter how big you were,” the father said .

While the family was standing with a crowd outside a wooden fence, a three-year-old horse named Sea and Sage reared up and began running toward them.

“Loose horse!” track workers shouted, and all but one person parted and scattered away from the one section where the fence had been replaced by a rope held by Shear.

As the 1,000-pound animal ran toward that rope, Shear noticed a solitary child standing frozen in its way.

Said her father: “I reached for her and she was gone . . . then I saw her standing by herself with the horse coming at her.”

Shear jumped in front of the horse and pushed the girl aside just as the animal knocked him to the ground. The girl immediately stood up and shouted to her father that she was fine. Then she saw the Shear lying there bleeding, and began screaming.

“If he had not protected her, that horse would have crushed every bone in her body,” said the father. “That man saved my daughter’s life.”

Shear will tell you that he wasn’t protecting a customer, he was taking care of family. For a half-century, the tracks in Southern California have been his home, the paddock has been his corner, his life devoted to the beauty and beasts of the racing game. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

From Vatican City:

Mar 21, 2011 / 04:54 pm

The Vatican has welcomed the European Court of Human Rights’ decision to overturn a ruling that would have banned the display of crucifixes in Italian public schools.

Following the March 18 ruling,Vatican Spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi stated that the court’s decision to allow the crosses to remain “has been received with satisfaction by the Holy See.”

He hailed the “historic and significant sentence” as a sign of reconciliation between the court and those who viewed its initial ruling by a lower chamber as a serious error.

“This new sentence of the Grande Chamber,” he said, “effectively contributes to re-establishing trust in the European Court of Human Rights on the part of a large number of Europeans.”

“It is thus acknowledged, at an authoritative and international juridical level, that the culture and rights of man should not be placed in contradiction with the religious foundations of European civilization, to which Christianity has made an essential contribution.”

The Vatican spokesman noted that many citizens were “convinced of the vital role played by Christian values in their history, and in the construction of European unity and its culture of rights and freedom.”

He recalled that the Italian state’s appeal against the crucifix ban had received “an unprecedented degree of support from numerous other European States as well as from many non-governmental organizations.” He described the outpouring of support as “an expression of widespread feeling” among Europeans.

The new ruling overturns a lower chamber’s 2009 judgment, which declared that the crosses violated students’ human rights and constituted religious discrimination. The case began when an Italian mother of two non-Catholic students complained about the crosses in public schools. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

In a Wednesday story at Reuters (“Bombing near Jerusalem bus stop kills woman, 30 hurt”) describing the aftermath of “a bomb planted in a bag exploded near a bus stop in a Jewish district of Jerusalem,” reporter Crispian Balmer wrote the following (bold is mine):

Medics said three people were seriously hurt by the explosion, which hit one of the main routes into central Jerusalem in the afternoon, shattering the windows of a nearby bus. A woman in her 60s died in hospital.

Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike. It was the first time Jerusalem had been hit by such a bomb since 2004.

My, my. It’s as if the word “terrorist” was invented by the Israelis just for the occasion.

Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic reacted (HT Instapundit):

Dear Reuters, You Must Be Kidding

… Those Israelis and their crazy terms! I mean, referring to a fatal bombing of civilians as a “terrorist attack”? Who are they kidding? Everyone knows that a fatal bombing of Israeli civilians should be referred to as a “teachable moment.” Or as a “venting of certain frustrations.” Or as “an understandable reaction to Jewish perfidy.” Or perhaps as “a very special episode of ‘Cheers.’” Anything but “a terrorist attack.” I suppose Reuters will mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by referring to the attacks as “an exercise in urban renewal.”

The mind reels.

That it does.

This is the same wire service which, with help from other press outlets, was treating us to so many deliberately doctored photos from Lebanon in relation to Israeli strikes against terrorists (no need for scare quotes) in 2006 that it gave rise to a new term which has made it into the Urban Dictionary — fauxtography.

Perhaps the doctoring of photos has subsided; the doctoring of news clearly hasn’t.

It’s also clear that Crispian Balmer isn’t keeping to the standard held up by Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer (HT LGF via Michelle Malkin) in the wake of the fauxtography scandal in December of 2006:

The final lesson we learned was this – more than ever the world needs a media company free from bias, independent, telling it as it really is, without the filter of national or political interest…

…Telling the story truthfully is more important than ever. Reporting it without spin and without editorializing is critical if history is to accurately record events.

If Glocer, who is still CEO, really believes this, he needs to have a talk with Crispian Balmer.

Final question: Glocer’s bio indicates that “He is a director of Merck & Co., Inc.” Conflict of interest in reporting on health care, anyone?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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Previous Related BizzyBlog Posts:
- August 12, 2006 — Pervasive and Systematic Bias in Middle East News Coverage: Now We Know Why
- August 10, 2006 — Al-Reuters Explains It All
- August 8, 2006 — A Quick Acknowledgment to Gateway Pundit (re NYT fauxtography involvement)

Words fail:

Woman Tied to 9/11, Fannie Mae on Obama’s FBI Shortlist

The Obama administration reportedly is considering former Clinton administration official Jamie Gorelick, among others, to become the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Perez first reported the news last week, citing “U.S. officials” familiar with the situation.

A commenter at Michelle Malkin’s place did have some words about Gorelick in 2008 that are as true today as they were three years ago:

Jamie Gorelick is as responsible as any American for intelligence failures related to 9/11. Then she helps loot Fannie. Nice. And she isn’t in jail because….because…

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Voting with their feet:

Detroit’s population plunged 25% in the past decade to 713,777, the lowest count since 1910, four years before Henry Ford offered $5 a day to autoworkers, sparking a boom that quadrupled the Motor City’s size in the first half of the 20th century.

The city’s population peaked at 1.85 million in 1950. Its population loss of 61% since then is a perfect storm of high crime, high taxes, and lousy schools. Note well that the city’s embrace of casino gambling during past decade has done nothing to stop the population bleed, and may have exacerbated it.

1960s black radical Rap Brown infamously said the following in the wake of the race riots that tore the city apart in 1967:

They used to called it Detroit. Now they call it Destroit.

He’s largely gotten his way.

I wish former NBA star and current Detroit Mayor Dave Bing all the luck in the world in turning the city around, but to say he has his work cut out for him is the understatement of the century. He should start by focusing less energy on the accuracy of the count and more energy on bringing the city back to life.

Update: Michael Barone — “When people ask me why I moved from being a liberal to being a conservative, my single-word answer is Detroit. The liberal policies which I hoped would make Detroit something like heaven have made it instead something more like hell.”

Update 2: At Heritage — “What happens when a city buys the liberal dream hook, line and sinker? Just take a look at the City of Detroit.”

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Related thought: Even before the new census data came out, Detroit had more registered voters than it had residents over the age of 18. In the wake of the Motor City’s population decline and in the name of clean elections, the voter rolls in Detroit need to be scoured immediately, and completely.

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Objectively Unfit “Not This Mitt Again” Romney Watch: “Mitt Rewrites Himself” (overview; detail; HT Deroy Murdock at NRO) — Mitt Romney’s 2011 paperback release of his 2009 book is more than an update. It’s partially a rewrite, as Murdock most succinctly explains:

In an inverse relationship with the cover of his book, Romney also morphs from soft to tough on health care. According to (Boston Phoenix writer David S.) Bernstein, Hardback Romney offered cautious comparisons between the president’s health-care reform plan and RomneyCare, the former Massachusetts governor’s own big-government legislation that the Wall Street Journal called “the dress rehearsal for ObamaCare.”

Once again, Paperback Romney is far more fiery and partisan, now that the February 6, 2012, Iowa Caucuses are less than a year away. “ObamaCare will not work and should be repealed,” Paperback Romney roars. “ObamaCare is an unconstitutional federal incursion into the rights of states.”

In addition to the fresh and disturbing evidence that Romney remains a constant work in progress, one wonders how dumb he thinks Americans are.

If Sarah Palin ever did something like this, she will not get the media free pass Romney has clearly received for his historical revisionism. That tells you all you need to know about who the establishment press wants to see as Barack Obama’s 2012 opponent. Once nominated, they’ll rip Romney to shreds with stuff like this.

Apparently, the only position you can count on Mitt Romney sticking to is the one that he should be our next president. Read this Concord (NH) Monitor editorial from late 2007, which is as good a takedown as any as to why that can’t be allowed to happen. Nothing has changed. As the editorial states, he “… most surely must be stopped.”

From Piura, Peru:

Mar 22, 2011 / 02:04 pm

Some 40,000 Peruvians took part in a march commemorating the Day of the Unborn Child on March 19 in the northwestern province of Piura.

During a Mass at the event, Archbishop Jose Antonio Eguren of Piura urged Catholics to “be committed to building a culture of life, which must begin with heeding the voice of every unborn child” in Peru.

“We are all responsible for what science has amazingly revealed to us to be a child from the first moment of his existence at conception,” the archbishop said. “The mother who bears him in her womb is responsible first and foremost. Then, those who are around her, the baby’s father and her family. And last but not least, civil authorities and society in general,” he said.

Authentic development demands that the “inalienable rights of the human person – especially the right to life from conception to natural death – be defended,” the archbishop continued.

Consequently, he added, the legalization of abortion in Peru “would always be an injustice and never a right. The right to kill does not exist. Only the right to life does. Abortion solves nothing. Let us pray to the Lord of Life that abortion is never allowed in Peru.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

February’s new-home sales number is the worst ever on records going back to 1963, is certainly the worst since the aftermath of World War II, and is 30% below February 2010:

One word you almost most definitely won’t see in today’s coverage of this news: “Obama.” That won’t change the fact that his administration’s policies have not only kept the housing industry in the doldrums, but have plunged it to depths heretofore unimaginable.

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UPDATE: “Unexpectedly” —

Sales fell 16.9 percent from January, delivering a shock to analysts who had expected a gain for last month.

Plus: An “unexpectedly” encore.

At the Hill (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Obama administration struggles to define American mission in Libya

The Obama administration scrambled to define the U.S. mission in Libya on Tuesday amid congressional criticism that it has not clearly explained its endgame for the war-torn country.

The White House strongly denied that regime change is part of its mission after a statement earlier in the day characterized the goal there as “installing a democratic system.”

Separately, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton struggled to respond to questions from ABC’s Diane Sawyer over whether the U.S. operation would be a success if Col. Moammar Gadhafi remains in power.

Clinton said the United Nations resolution authorizing force against Gadhafi was broad, but included nothing “about getting rid of anybody.”

At the same time, Clinton said it is “highly unlikely” a stable and peaceful Libya can be established with Gadhafi in power. She also said the U.S. mission was intended to give insurgents fighting Gadhafi a “level playing field” and a “much better chance” at toppling the dictator.

Well, we could get lucky. The rebels could topple Gadhafi. They could be legitimately interested in representative government and not in imposing sharia law. They could be free of Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist influence — Update: Despite indications to the contrary.

Well, Obama campaigned on “hope.” That’s a lot to hope for, and I fear that our leaders really have no idea how this will work out. If it works out well, it will be out of pure luck, period.

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UPDATE: Ben Stein —

Maybe I missed something, but wasn’t that The Constitution of the United States of America that we just laid to rest this weekend?

It was buried in a private ceremony by Mr. Barack Obama of Chicago as he silently signed America on to the One World Government some of us have been worried about for decades.

… when did we amend the Constitution to declare that the United Nations had control over our military? When did we abolish the part of the Constitution that said Congress had the right to declare war? Now, I well know that in recent postwar conflicts, we don’t have declarations of war. But we have Congressional debates. We have funding votes. We have a sense of the Congress or some kind of resolution.

This time, zip. Nada. Nothing. Just France and the U.K. and Norway saying that it’s time to go to war, and off America goes to war. And off Mr. and Mrs. Obama go to a South American “fact finding” trip for the POTUS and a fun sightseeing junket for the Obama girls.

(I wonder if there has ever before in history been a national leader who sent his country to war — and the same day went off on vacation. Has that ever happened before?)

UPDATE 2: Even Michael Kinsley gets it —

So how comes it that the United States is now more-or-less committed to overthrowing the Qadhafi regime, and soon? That’s not yet our official position, of course. Officially, we are merely enforcing a “no-fly zone” imposed by the United Nations, and trying to protect a dissident movement from being crushed. What’s more, we are supposedly mere participants in a multilateral effort. Supposedly, in fact,we’re not even the leader of this coalition, a role we have turned over to the British and French. (You knew the war was serious when the New York Times started to refer to our side in headlines as “the allies.”)

As for that UN resolution, it’s more a matter of “let’s you and him fight.” The US is doing all the heavy lifting. And if the US had been opposed, it would not be happening. If Qadhafi is still in power a year from now, even if he is obeying the “no fly” rules, it will be regarded world-wide as more evidence of America’s decline as a great power and regarded in America as evidence that Democrats in general and Obama and Hillary Clinton in particular are not ready to play foreign policy with the big children.

From St. Louis:

Mar 22, 2011 / 06:26 am

Doctors who performed a recent procedure on a terminally ill 13 month-old expressed hope that the treatment will provide the baby’s family with the “gift of a few more months together.”

On March 21, physicians at the SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center in St. Louis, Missouri – where baby Joseph Maraachli was recently transferred – successfully performed a tracheotomy on the infant after doctors in a Canadian hospital refused to perform the procedure.

The London Health Sciences Centre in Ontario said that the treatment– which would allow for the baby to breath on his own – was reserved for patients who needed a breathing machine long term.

Baby Joseph, who suffers from a severe and fatal neurological disorder called Leigh Syndrome, was considered to be in a vegetative state by Canadian doctors, who recommended that he have his feeding and breathing tubes removed.

However, physicians at the Catholic St. Louis hospital said in a March 21 statement that after “a thorough examination by a multi-disciplinary medical team of specialists,” and “extensive consultations” with Joseph’s parents and the hospital ethics committee, “we concluded that a tracheotomy was medically appropriate.”

St. Louis doctors said the infant “is currently in the pediatric intensive care unit, where tracheotomy patients routinely spend 7 to 10 days following the procedure.”

The hospital said that after he is discharged from SSM Cardinal Glennon, baby Joseph will moved to Ranken Jordan – a Pediatric Specialty Hospital in St. Louis – before being transported to his family home in Canada.

Fr. Frank Pavone, who heads the New York-based Priests for Life, told CNA on March 14 it was a “victory for the family” that baby Joseph was moved from the Ontario medical center to the Catholic hospital in Missouri.

Joseph’s parents – Moe and Sana Maraachli – had asked Priests for Life for help after doctors in Canada refused to transfer the child to a facility that could perform a tracheotomy on him.

Fr. Pavone said that the treatment is considered by many doctors as a “standard procedure for Joseph’s condition.”

“We and the family felt that they were making a value judgment on his life,” Fr. Pavone said. “It’s one thing to say a treatment is worthless – it’s another thing to say a life is worthless.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

First, obviously, thank goodness they’re free.

But not unharmed.

Here’s coverage from the UK Daily Mail (bolds are mine):

Sexually assaulted and told ‘You’ll die tonight’… but spared as she’s American: Female journalist’s horror at the hands of Gaddafi’s men

A female war photographer from the New York Times revealed tonight how she was repeatedly sexually assaulted during her nightmare hostage ordeal in Libya.

Lynsey Addario was one of four Times journalists have now been released after being held captive by pro-Gaddafi forces.

During their six-day detainment, the Americans were beaten and threatened with being decapitated and shot.

Miss Addario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, gave a harrowing account of her brutal treatment at the hands of their Libyan captors in an interview given just hours after her release.

After she and her colleagues were hauled out of a car at a checkpoint near the eastern city of Ajdabiya, one of the Libyans punched her in the face and laughed at her.

‘Then I started crying and he was laughing more,’ she told the Times.

One man grabbed her breasts – the start of a pattern of sexual harassment she endured over the ensuing 48 hours.

‘There was a lot of groping,’ she said. ‘Every man who came in contact with us basically felt every inch of my body short of what was under my clothes.’

As she was being driven away from Ajdabiya, she said another of her captors stroked her head and told her repeatedly that she was going to be killed.

Now let’s go to the Times’s coverage of their employees’ release.

Though the detailed descriptions are similar, readers will search in vain for any kind of reference to sexual assault. The strongest term used is in the following sentence:

“Then I started crying,” she recalled. “And he was laughing more.” One man grabbed her breasts, the beginning of a pattern of disturbing behavior she would experience from her captors over the next 48 hours.

“Disturbing behavior”? That’s a term you use to describe someone who serially sulks, or has fits of anger, not someone who commits acts of sexual aggression which are crimes in civilized society.

This search at the Times demonstrates that the paper is not generally allergic to the term “sexually assaulted.”

What’s more if you look at the search results, you’ll see that the Times didn’t hesitate on March 16, shortly after its own reporters were captured, to describe CBS correspondent Lara Logan as having been “sexually assaulted” in Cairo last month.

So why not acknowledge the obvious in Ms. Addario’s case? The Times may believe that it’s protecting its photographer’s dignity. But in the process, it is whitewashing her captors’ behavior, and exhibiting an obvious double standard while doing so.

A decade-bashing political polemic disguised as a cultural critique.
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Note: This column went up at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Sunday.
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The Left has been attempting to recast the reality of the 1980s since at least the middle of that decade. David Sirota is the latest to go on offense — stealthily.

Here are four of the more important things I remember from the 1980s:

• In 1980 or 1981, while driving to lunch with a CPA firm coworker through the area where I had grown up, I said something like, “You know, we might as well get used to gazing at these homes from the outside, because there’s no way we’re ever going to be able to own one of them.” My rider agreed without hesitation. At the time, inflation hovered at around 13%. Interest rates were out of control; the prime rate was at times over 20%. Unemployment was high, and getting worse.
• Being proven wrong by buying a home in 1983.
• Being proven wrong again, this time buying a new home in 1986 after an 18-month out-of-town assignment.
• In what I believe was January 1985, before Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration, watching an extraordinarily bitter and spiteful Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter telling CBS News (probably on 60 Minutes) that Reagan had in essence (possibly paraphrasing) “made it okay to be a racist again.”

After the Carters’ conniption, I turned my back on the Democratic Party, and have seen no reason to change my mind in the subsequent quarter-century.

The fact that the 1980s were going rather well was not lost on director Oliver Stone, whose 1987 movie Wall Street was deliberately written not to chronicle the truth, but to maliciously depict the decade as one of unfettered avarice, and its active participants as a collection of conscience-free robber barons.

The latest and perhaps most underhanded attempt to rewrite the decade, aided and abetted by a gullible, cooperative establishment press, comes from the moonbat mind of David Sirota.

Sirota’s book, Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now–Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything, just came out on Tuesday — and no, I’m not interested in putting any money in the guy’s pocket by buying it. I don’t have to, because Sirota’s background and the “clever” media coverage he is receiving give away his game.

Sirota is a longtime far-left Democratic activist. His Wikipedia entry, which “may have been edited by a person who has a conflict of interest with the subject matter” (imagine that), indicates, among many other lefty labors, that he has spent time at the Center for American Progress, as a press aide and spokesperson for Vermont Socialist Congressman (now Senator) Bernie Sanders, as a regular columnist at The Nation, and as a political consultant for Ned Lamont’s ultimately losing 2006 attempt to take out usually liberal but Iraq War-supporting Senator Joe Lieberman. Sirota also has had a morning drive talk show since November 2009 at KKZN, Denver’s 27th-rated “progressive” station.

Almost none of the aforementioned information about Sirota got into USA Today’s March 10 PR piece — er, I mean, report — on his then-impending book. You will search in vain for the words “Democrat,” “progressive,” or even “liberal.” USAT reporter Craig Wilson merely informs us that Sirota is “a syndicated columnist, author and radio talk-show host.” Sirota is also 35, which would have made him 13 or 14 at the end of the decade over which he claims expertise.

His core premise about the 1980s is as childish as his age during that decade — not that he’s upfront about that premise. Oh, there are a couple of slip-ups. USAT’s front-page tease tells us: “Charlie Sheen is big again” (Sheen starred in Wall Street), and “so is greed and anti-government feeling.” Wilson laughably writes: “The Cold War loomed.” Actually, Craig, it was over before 1989 ended.

If you get halfway through the video at the online version of USA Today’s article, you get a taste of what you will see in the book; Sirota says as much in one of the article excerpts below.

In the video, David takes viewers to his childhood bedroom, which is “inadvertently a museum to the 1980s. It really honors the 1980s.” After showing off some of his memorabilia, Sirota lays out the following 1980s honorifics, conveying a predictably perverse “progressive” perspective (bolds are mine):

• “Video games militarized our thinking.”
• “We were going in one direction as a country for a while before we hit the ’80s. And the 1980s intensified things that we were moving away from before the 1980s. It intensified militarism, it intensified racism, it intensified greed, it intensified narcissism, embedded in its pop culture. That’s what the 1980s did, when you look at that historical era.”
• “The reason to look back on the actual 1980s is to see exactly how that change happened. Because if we want something different from those things — if we want something different than racism, narcissism, greed, and the like, then we have to realize that those things are a departure from where we were going.”
• “[W]hat I’m trying to say in the book (is that) the calendar may not say 1980s, but we are still looking at the world in many cases through an ’80s mindset. … You had a 1950s, you had a 1960s, you had a 1970s, and the then the rest of it moving forward has been the 1980s in the way we look at race, the militarism, narcissism, our sense of community. All of these things remain informed by the ’80s.”

Racism? As I demonstrated several weeks ago, blacks and Hispanics made unprecedented economic progress during the decade. Additionally, graphs such as this one at James Lindgren’s recent Daily Caller column on the topic show that the 1980s was a decade of sharp declines in racism across the board — with white Democrats, as is still the case today, betraying a bit more racism than white Republicans. Sirota’s spider and the fly strategy on race is especially galling. He wants to lure you into the book with newspaper platitudes like “(the fact) that race was being publicly discussed and black cultural figures were ascending in the ’80s was a good thing,” so he can hit you over the head with his racism rants once you buy.

Narcissism? I can think of two presidents — one from the 1990s and another who currently occupies the Oval Office — whose pictures might as well be next to that word in the dictionary.

Militarism? Reagan rebuilt the military and ended the Cold War after his predecessor had allowed our capabilities to dangerously decay. Sirota and leftists are still insufferable ingrates after all these years.

Greed? It took off in corporate suites after 1993, thanks to ridiculous tax-law changes that made executive salaries over $1 million nondeductible. In came the era of out-of-control stock options.

Sirota is right about one thing: We were indeed “going in one direction as a country … before we hit the ’80s.” That direction, as seen in the economic conditions I cited earlier and in Jimmy Carter’s timid, naive, hollow presidency, was “straight down the tubes.” Thank God Ronald Reagan and the 1980s changed that.

Unfortunately, we currently have a president who is determined to run the country even worse than it was run during the late 1970s. If David Sirota thought we were going in a good direction during the Carter era, he should be positively thrilled with where we’re headed now. Very few others are.

From an Investors Business Daily editorial yesterday (bolds are mine):

Baby Joseph Is Going Home

A Canada court had ruled that under socialized medicine their baby must die in the hospital. Now he’s in the U.S., getting the care his parents, not the bureaucrats, want.

Joseph Maraachli, who’d been set to have his ventilator removed against his parents’ wishes at an Ontario hospital last month, got a tracheotomy Monday morning and is doing well, his family says. The procedure was denied him under a system of medicine that may be coming to a hospital near you courtesy of ObamaCare.

His parents, Moe Maraachli and Sana Nader, took Joseph to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center in St. Louis on Sunday after trying unsuccessfully to get him the simple procedure at London Health Sciences Centre, a hospital in Ontario, Canada. Doctors report he is resting comfortably.

His parents will soon be able to take him home, which was their initial wish.… the parents have spent precious time battling courts and medical boards as to just how and where their son should die.

“He’s a human,” Moe Maraachli told Fox News. “He has a right to fight.”

But Ontario Superior Court Justice Helen Rady recently ordered the couple to agree to take Joseph off his ventilator. The court was upholding a decision already made by Ontario’s Consent and Capacity Board, which some here might call a death panel.

… His parents defied the court order to consent to the removal of the breathing tube. They feared Joseph would die a painful death if taken off the ventilator and wanted a tracheotomy performed so they could take Joseph home. If he is to die, they said, he should die in his own home in his own bed surrounded by those who love him.

… The passage of ObamaCare here immediately raised concerns that decisions regarding what medical care will be available and who will get it, even to the point of deciding whether a person’s life is worth the expense, will be decided by uncaring bureaucrats more concerned with cost effectiveness.

Don’t think the case of baby Joseph can’t happen here. Unless ObamaCare is repealed, the day will rapidly come when bureaucrats, not patients and parents, will not only decide what care we get, if any, but also how, where and when we should die.

“You can’t have your baby back. He must stay here, and he must die here.”

Outrageous — and coming to a hospital near you, if Obamacare is not stopped.

Parental control over treatment decisions for their children = Liberty.

Government-run health care, where bureaucrats decide = Tyranny (“arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority”).