South Dakota Politics

The Polanski Exception for Rapists

I have so little interest in celebrity that I didn't know exactly what he had done when I read that he was arrested in Switzerland. I knew vaguely that it had something to do with sex with an underage girl. I admit with some embarrassment that I was momentarily swayed by the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum, who opinion I respect. She has this:

Polanski's crime -- statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl -- was committed in 1977. The girl, now 45, has said more than once that she forgives him, that she can live with the memory, that she does not want him to be put back in court or in jail, and that a new trial will hurt her husband and children. There is evidence of judicial misconduct in the original trial. There is evidence that Polanski did not know her real age.

Reading that a second time, there are all kinds of things wrong with it. But the worst is that it gives the reader no idea what Mr. Polanski really did. Kate Harding at Salon fills in the details. Warning gentle reader: this is not pleasant reading.

Let's keep in mind that Roman Polanski gave a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude and champagne, then raped her, before we start discussing whether the victim looked older than her 13 years, or that she now says she'd rather not see him prosecuted because she can't stand the media attention. Before we discuss how awesome his movies are or what the now-deceased judge did wrong at his trial, let's take a moment to recall that according to the victim's grand jury testimony, Roman Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she said no and asked him to stop; performed cunnilingus on her as she said no and asked him to stop; put his penis in her vagina as she said no and asked him to stop; asked if he could penetrate her anally, to which she replied, "No," then went ahead and did it anyway, until he had an orgasm.

In a perverse turn, the fact that the victim in question was underage has somewhat shielded the great director. It allows his defenders to do what Ms. Applebaum did, and apparently what Mr. Polanski did in court: cop a plea. Hollywood is terrible distraught that this man is being so victimized. From Fox News:

Actors and actresses from Harrison Ford to Debra Winger have reportedly joined the growing throng of liberal celebrities calling for Polanski to be released following his arrest in Switzerland last week… Scores of American film icons from Woody Allen to Martin Scorsese have signed a petition demanding "the immediate release of Roman Polanski," saying they were "dismayed" by his arrest.

There are at least two things going on here, both of them bad. One is that a lot of people in Hollywood and, apparently, France, think that presumed genius and celebrity confer some kind of immunity to ordinary legal and moral facts. Well, you can understand why Woody Allen thinks geniuses are exempt.  Jessica Grose at Double X says that the reason Polanski escaped justice so long is that he thinks that ordinary rules do not apply to him, and he's been right up until now.  That is a scandal all by itself. 

The other thing is that Ms. Applebaum and others seem to think that the time elapsed or the forgiveness of the victim somehow amount to a pardon. Neither is true. The one would amount to a rule that you get off if you get away with it long enough. The other commits a grave error about justice. Mr. Polanski did not just commit a crime against the young lady, though he surely did that. He raped her. Even if it had been only statutory rape, that would have been a serious crime. But it was, as some are now calling it, "rape-rape." This was a crime against the State of California, a violation of the rights of women and fathers and mothers everywhere.

It may be true, as Ms. Applebaum says, that Mr. Polanski has paid dearly for his crime. But rapists and other criminals do not get to design their own punishments or release themselves on their own recognizance. If Polanski had submitted himself to justice back in 1977 rather than fleeing the country, this all would have been long over.

What Polanski did was brutal, terrible, and unpardonable, and so neither his celebrity nor the time elapsed can pardon it. If he must spend the rest of his life in jail rather than being wined and feted by the French, this seems to me to be no miscarriage of justice.

ps.  These words were spoken by Polanski in an interview just after he fled the country: 

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

Germany Goes Right

The Germans just held an election, and some of us pay attention to such things. It was conventional wisdom just a few months ago that the world economic crisis would lead to the invigoration of the world left. Well, it didn't, quite. Here is a chart of the election results:

The two major parties in Germany are the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). They are rough equivalents of the conservative and labor parties in Britain. The largest party, the CDU, is moderately conservative by European standards, rejecting both socialism and "laissez-faire" economics. Basically it wants to reconcile the welfare state with pro-growth policies, and Chancellor Angela Merkel had pushed for some deregulation and tax cuts. The SPD has been valiantly trying to reconcile Leftist policies and trade union interests with planet Earth realties. The result of that was a split in the Left that cost the SPD a lot of its natural support. It remains the second largest party, but it suffered a crushing defeat in this election.

The Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) is made up of a gaggle of socialist and communists that defected from the SPD. It increased its vote a bit, but it is of no use to the SPD in forming a coalition as it is not large enough to make a difference and besides, it's socialist. That is a poison the SPD has been trying to purge form its system, only to find out that it doesn't have much of a system left. I almost forgot the Greens. They are opposed to nuclear power and in favor of same sex marriage.

The big winner in the election was the Free Democratic Party (FDP). They are a genuinely conservative party—pro business and free market, and generally libertarian on individual rights.

One big difference between the U.S. system and parliamentary systems is that in the former coalitions are built in advance of elections. If you are a libertarian like Ron Paul, you run as a Republican. If you are a socialist like the late Paul Wellstone, you become a Democrat. In Germany, if you are a communist, you leave the SPD and join the PDS. The parties get seats depending on their proportion of the vote. The government will be formed from a coalition of parties.

Until this election, the German government consisted of a "grand coalition" of the two major parties. That was broad to be sure, but the junior partner, the SPD, severely limited what Chancellor Merkel's CDU could do to reform Germany's economy.

The next government will be black (CDU) and yellow (FDP). The FDP will likely push the government where the SDP pulled it back. We could see real free market reform.

The German election is unambiguous evidence that the European left is moribund. The Greens and the Left (PDS) both increased their vote, but neither has a popular set of policies around which to organize a government. Whether the right can do better remains to be seen. But socialism is an idea with a great future behind it.

ps.  The FDP leader is Guido Westerwelle.  Guido? 

Hope is Alive

The Twins two games behind the Tigers.  I believe.  I believe.  It's silly, but I believe. 

Canadian Healthcare Going Private?

If you think that a public option is essential to healthcare reform, and perhaps you believe that a single payer system like Canada would be the ideal, you might want to note that Canada seems to be going in the opposite direction from our Congress.

Kim Murphy begins her reports at the LA Times with a horror story:

Reporting from Vancouver, Canada - When the pain in Christina Woodkey's legs became so severe that she could no long hike or cross-country ski, she went to her local health clinic. The Calgary resident was told she'd need to see a hip specialist. Because the problem was not life-threatening, however, she'd have to wait about a year.

So wait she did. In January, the hip doctor told her that a narrowing of the spine was compressing her nerves and causing the pain. She needed a back specialist. The appointment was scheduled for Sept. 30.

"When I was given that date, I asked when could I expect to have surgery," said Woodkey, 72. "They said it would be a year and a half after I had seen this doctor."

So earlier this month, she drove across the border into Montana and got the $50,000 surgery done in two days.

"I don't have insurance. We're not allowed to have private health insurance in Canada," Woodkey said. "It's not going to be easy to come up with the money. But I'm happy to say the pain is almost all gone."

One response to this is the appearance of a number of private healthcare clinics in Canada.

Hoping to capitalize on patients who might otherwise travel to the U.S. for speedier healthcare, a network of technically illegal private clinics and surgical centers has sprung up in British Columbia, echoing a trend in Quebec. In October, the courts will be asked to decide whether the budding system should be sanctioned.

Call me paranoid if makes you feel better, and if it's legal if you're in Canada, but I consider it a serious loss of liberty where private health insurance should be illegal and clinics that dispense timely treatment to suffering septuagenarians have the status of a medical marijuana center in the U.S. To be sure, at this stage of the game, no one in Congress is talking about prohibiting private insurance. But bringing private insurance under a very tight regulatory control, such that it may not survive or be able to freely operate, is part of the current legislative proposals.

A little Googling turned up this 2006 article by Clifford Kraus from none other than the New York Times:

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Feb. 23 — The Cambie Surgery Center, Canada's most prominent private hospital, may be considered a rogue enterprise.

Accepting money from patients for operations they would otherwise receive free of charge in a public hospital is technically prohibited in this country, even in cases where patients would wait months or even years before receiving treatment.

But no one is about to arrest Dr. Brian Day, who is president and medical director of the center, or any of the 120 doctors who work there. Public hospitals are sending him growing numbers of patients they are too busy to treat, and his center is advertising that patients do not have to wait to replace their aching knees.

The country's publicly financed health insurance system — frequently described as the third rail of its political system and a core value of its national identity — is gradually breaking down. Private clinics are opening around the country by an estimated one a week, and private insurance companies are about to find a gold mine.

Consider the force of the highlighted words: Canada's "publicly financed health insurance system is gradually breaking down."

Julie Hirschfeld Davis at Real Clear Politics notes that the fears of America's seniors are a major element in the current debate. They had better be, in a democracy where the elderly are disproportionately likely to vote. It is reasonable to worry how much and in what ways ObamaCare will move us toward something like the Canadian system. If the answer is a lot and in all the wrong ways, America's seniors will not have the option Ms. Woodkey had. But if Montana falls, well, there's always Mexico.

Obama and The West Bank

The current issue of The Economist encourages President Obama not to give up on The West Bank. Although, it says, he has so far "failed to show evidence of even a whiff of progress," he can show some if he "spells out his own vision" and becomes personally involved in negotiations. The Economist also suggests that if Obama were to consider reducing aid to Israel until it complies with his wishes, he might be able to further the peace process.

President Obama is, I think, unlikely to heed the former recommendations. He has not shown himself particularly able to form his own vision at home, much less abroad. Consider the healthcare debate. Obama has spoken vaguely of a healthcare plan, but he is not sure exactly what it will look like. The house and senate have been mulling over several ideas, and have produced several versions of a healthcare bill and some have turned to Max Baucus for ideas. Yet, there is no real Obama vision – or, if there is, he has failed to express it clearly.

The president might, however, take The Economist's last piece of advice. The Economist criticizes the US for its knee-jerk support of Israel in forums like the UN. But Obama has shown none of this knee-jerkiness toward our other traditional allies. I have written before about his poor treatment of the UK and of Gordon Brown, as well as his recent desertion of Bush's plan for a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. It is very possible, then, that Obama will take The Economist's advice. I hope he will not. This would be a bad time for such a move. Iran has just been accused of developing a nuclear warhead. Although some in Iran have declared the United States to be Iran's number one enemy, Israel is closer and hated greatly. She could use an ally now.

Obama Makes a Brilliant Play

I am not engaging in sarcasm, I mean it. The Administration's announcement at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh of a previously unpublicized nuclear facility in Tehran looks like a stroke of genius. There is some indication that it was not planned. Apparently we have known about the site since the Bush Administration. According to Politico:

Interviews with administration and international officials, diplomats, non-proliferation and Iran experts suggest the administration had no plans to announce its suspicions before beginning international talks with Iran next week. But its hand was forced after learning some time during the week of a letter Iran had sent the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency in Vienna acknowledging construction of a previously undisclosed facility.

Why did this Administration and the previous one sit on this bit of intelligence? I think of two reasons. First, if the Iranians didn't know we knew about it, they might not take steps to harden the target. Second, we are keeping it as a hole card for just such an occasion as this. The Administration made the announcement only when it became clear that the IAEA knew about it, though apparently the IAEA wasn't inclined to blab.

To be sure I am not inclined to give the Administration the benefit of the doubt, and I don't think it has earned it. But I really do hope that this was planned, if not for now then for just before the coming international talks. I can appreciate a good play, and I genuinely hope the Administration succeeds in its policy for that is clearly in the national interests. Besides, the rules of the game are that Obama gets credit.

Why was the release of this story such a good play? Again, there are two reasons. It provides dramatic reinforcement of Washington's case. We have been warning all of you that Tehran is trying to go nuclear. Now you see that it's even worse than we have been saying. That's the kind of dramatic event that might not mean a lot in itself, but can tip the scales of action by its psychological effect.

Second, it gives our allies more reason for vigorously backing our play, and more importantly, it gives the Russians and the Chinese a "pretext" for shifting from resistance to reluctant support of the President's policy if indeed they are willing to do so. In international relations, that is what a brilliant play looks like.

According to the WaPo, the Administration has given up on its hugs and kisses approach to Tehran.

The effort to directly engage Iran was a hallmark of the early months of the administration, with President Obama offering a televised greeting in honor of the Persian New Year and sending private letters to the country's supreme leader. But the gestures went largely unreciprocated. Now, while not shutting the door on engagement entirely, the United States and its allies plan to forcefully press the case that Tehran has been caught, red-handed, in yet another violation of international rules. Officials hope that the pressure -- to be applied at previously scheduled talks Thursday in Geneva -- will force Iran into a broader discussion about its program and then into a serious set of negotiations.

I don't like all the weakness implied in that paragraph, but the Administration clearly has in mind the threat of serious sanctions imposed by the world community. For example, Iran is heavily dependent upon importing refined gasoline. A real embargo, if such could be arranged, would put a severe economic crisis on top of the political one that the Ayatollahs are currently dealing with.

But it is well to remember that a superbly executed double play doesn't mean anything unless you win the ballgame. London and Paris are talking very tough right now, and even Moscow seems to be acknowledging the need for serious pressure on Iran. However, Beijing has been steadfast against sanctions, and it is hard to believe that they will not find reasons to remain so.

I am not optimistic that the Russians and the Chinese will really support tough economic sanctions. And even if they do, there is no guarantee that such sanctions will work. We applied them for more than a decade against Saddam. The Administration has wisely refused to take military action off the table. But I have a hard time imagining that this Administration pulling the trigger. More likely, I am afraid, are watered down sanctions and more waiting while the centrifuges spin.

But just right now the Administration has played a strong card at the right time.

Obama Rhetoric-Bush Policies

One of the chief themes of President Obama's first year in office is "repairing America's battered image," i.e., battered by George W. Bush. If you don't believe me, ask the New York Times:

With his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, President Obama took another step toward repairing America's battered image.

This theme depends largely on a confidence in the power of rhetoric. The idea is that Obama can repair America's image by a certain kind of speech, less "bombastic and bullying," perhaps less arrogant, than that of our 43^rd President. I am an admirer of great rhetoric, and maybe it has that power, but one should think that actions count for something. Here is the Times again, slavishly imitating Obama's rhetoric:

Let's be clear: Mr. Obama has made enormous progress in the short eight months since he took office. He has overturned some of the most odious Bush-era policies: banning torture and pledging to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He has persuaded the world once again to hear, and to listen to, what America has to say, but he is still figuring out how to fully capitalize on that good will and credibility.

Let's be clear: what is mentioned here is scarcely evidence of "enormous progress." For the sake of argument, let's accept the "banning torture" item. The only other actual difference between Bush policy and Obama policy is "pledging to close the prison at Guantánamo." Does a pledge, in the absence of action or a coherent plan of action, amount to progress?

Isn't it more important that President Obama has decided to continue the Bush Administration policy on which the Guantánamo detentions were based? Here is the Washington Post:

The Obama administration has decided not to seek legislation to establish a new system of preventive detention to hold terrorism suspects and will instead rely on a 2001 congressional resolution authorizing military force against al-Qaeda and the Taliban to continue to detain people indefinitely and without charge, according to administration officials.

We have a lot of detainees at Gitmo who, for various reasons, can't be tried in an ordinary court, but are too dangerous to release. The Administration had announced its intention to seek new legislation from Congress cover such a situation, but quickly discovered that the activist core of his own party was vehemently opposed to that. So it has decided to fall back on the Bush Administration policy, one based on the 2001 authorization of military force. We are going to keep these people in the slammer (which slammer remains to be determined) indefinitely without charges or trial.

It is interesting that the Hard Left in America considers this a victory. See The American Prospect:

This development marks a pretty significant victory--if not the end of the war--for civil liberties advocates, who had been fighting furiously against any attempt to pass a new preventive detention law.

This is what civil liberties advocates consider a victory? Obama morphing into Dubya? Anyway, it seems to shine a new light on the President's nearly famous lines:

So for those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions that we have taken in just nine months.

Well, this was a concrete action, and it cemented the policy of his predecessor on something important. If we want to believe that the President has redeemed America in the eyes of the world, we will have to trust to his words rather than his deeds.

The President’s Speech

Conservatives have been pretty brutal about President Obama's speech to the UN. For an example, see the commentary at my favorite non-SDP blog, Powerline. While I agree that there is a lot of silliness in the address, that is to be expected. But there is also a lot of good strong rhetoric, and on the whole I didn't think it was a bad piece of work.

I think conservative critics were right to point out the narcissistic element in the President's rhetoric. Here is the passage that is getting the most attention:

We know the future will be forged by deeds and not simply words. Speeches alone will not solve our problems - it will take persistent action. So for those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions that we have taken in just nine months.

On my first day in office, I prohibited - without exception or equivocation - the use of torture by the United States of America. I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed, and we are doing the hard work of forging a framework to combat extremism within the rule of law. Every nation must know: America will live its values, and we will lead by example.

It does seem to me that it's breathtakingly bad form to say to the world: if you don't believe in America, ignore the last two hundred years of its history and just look at what Barack Obama has done. Obama thinks he has redeemed America.

Well, okay, he banned torture. Maybe that will make a lot of governments who routinely torture their dissidents, or routinely murder dissident journalists, feel a lot better about us. I expect it will. But isn't it a little premature to brag about closing Guantanamo Bay when he hasn't closed it yet and has no plan that anyone knows about to get it closed?

On the other hand, I liked this bit:

Like all of you, my responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologize for defending those interests.

That's quite good and strong. This was pretty good as well:

The United Nations was born of the belief that the people of the world can live their lives, raise their families, and resolve their differences peacefully. And yet we know that in too many parts of the world, this ideal remains an abstraction. We can either accept that outcome as inevitable, and tolerate constant and crippling conflict. Or we can recognize that the yearning for peace is universal, and reassert our resolve to end conflicts around the world.

That effort must begin with an unshakeable determination that the murder of innocent men, women and children will never be tolerated. On this, there can be no dispute. The violent extremists who promote conflict by distorting faith have discredited and isolated themselves. They offer nothing but hatred and destruction. In confronting them, America will forge lasting partnerships to target terrorists, share intelligence, coordinate law enforcement, and protect our people. We will permit no safe-haven for al Qaeda to launch attacks from Afghanistan or any other nation. We will stand by our friends on the front lines, as we and many nations will do in pledging support for the Pakistani people tomorrow.

That "on this there can be no dispute" is exactly the kind of rhetoric that was called for.

The trouble is, no one takes the President seriously on any of this. It's great to say that he will stand by our friends, but he just left Poland and the Czech Republic feeling like they have been sold to the Russians. It's great to say that we will permit no safe haven for al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but he is obviously wavering on his commitment to victory in Afghanistan.

That may be why two of his biggest fans at the UN are Muammar Gaddafi and Fidel Castro. Neil Gardiner at the British Telegraph puts it this way:

It is not hard to see why a standing ovation awaits the president at Turtle Bay. Obama's popularity at the UN boils down essentially to his willingness to downplay American global power. He is the first American president who has made an art form out of apologizing for the United States, which he has done on numerous occasions on foreign soil, from Strasbourg to Cairo. The Obama mantra appears to be – ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do to atone for your country. This is a message that goes down very well in a world that is still seething with anti-Americanism.

I think the most important statement in his speech was this one line:

I am not naïve.

But he is. He really believes that the desire for peace is universal, and that he can bring the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians around if he just convinces them that peace is what he really wants. I am reminded of Mark Twain's remarks about one unfortunate target of his wit: "it's not what he thinks that bothers me, it's all the things he knows that ain't true."

A Feeble Foreign Policy

I have been pretty hard on our President and his party in recent posts. In an effort to be fair, let me state that executive agendas are usually constrained by the larger cultures in which they play out. Nowhere is this so true as in foreign policy. It would take an extraordinary man to take command of the culture of foreign policy instead of being taken in by it. Neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush was such a man. Barack Obama has never risen above a culture in his life.

To be sure, President Obama might have chosen some other day than the anniversary of the Soviet Invasion of Poland to announce that he was leaving our Central European allies high and dry on defense. That looks like studied incompetence. But the general idea behind the policy—give the Russians something they want so they will help us with Iran—is pure State Department culture. There is no reason to think it will work, and it openly insults nations that have stood by us in trying times, but hey you got to believe in reaching out!

On Afghanistan, it was pretty certain that as soon as Dubya left D.C. the good war would suddenly become another quagmire in the eyes of right thinking Democrats and State Department luminaries. They may be right this time, but that would be a mere coincidence. So Obama is currently playing Hamlet on the Potomac with regard to a war he promised to prosecute. He hasn't caved in yet!

And then there is global warming. The President urged the nations of the world to act now on Climate Change, before it becomes irreversible. But action would require that they and we intentionally hobble our economies at a point when they are already limping along. If the history of the Kyoto Protocol is any indication, they ain't and neither are we. China and India sure ain't. So President Obama is left exercising world leadership by urging nations to do what none of them is going to do. It is easy to blame him for his, and say he should go back to the drawing board, but world political culture doesn't put that button on the webpage.

And then there is the Middle East. The President greeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and leader of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas in New York this week. He wants them to come to some sort of agreement so the thorny problem of Palestine can be dethorned. He has long been arguing that this problem is at the root of the regional troubles, and if he could solve it then it would make it easier to deal with problems like the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Except that he can't, and it wouldn't.

Consider the figure of Abbas. Is he a leader? Is the Palestinian Authority an authority? No, and no. Abbas exists because the Israelis and the U.S. provide him with protection. He lost the civil war in Gaza, the only territory where Palestinians control anything. He has nominal authority in the West Bank territory (see comments on protection). Abbas has no power to make peace, nor does anyone else among the Palestinians. And Hamas, which does have some power, has not the slightest inclination to make peace.

And even if the problem of Palestine was somehow miraculously settled, it wouldn't help with Iran one bit. The Iranians are building nukes because they care about Palestine? No.  They are building nukes because they want to be a regional power that the U.S. can't touch.

The President's foreign policy is pure State Department fantasy. It is very feeble, and that is why the President finds himself in New York with no clout at all.

Animosity & Presidential Credibility

The widely scattered accusations of racism against the President's opposition don't always bother with any kind of argument, but when they do it usually goes like this: the intensity of anti-Obama passion proves racist motives. My favorite example is my Keloland Colleague, David Newquist, who concedes that a lot of Democrats hated George W. Bush about as much as a lot of Republicans hate President Obama. But that, he argues, is because Bush betrayed the country. Since Obama didn't, the anti-Obama passion must be racist. I think I got his argument right. If I didn't, I apologize in advance.

One trouble with that argument is that is amounts to this: our passions are okay, your passions are suspect. Another problem is that it is forgets the fact that all this has happened before. Bill Clinton was the focus of almost as much animosity as his two predecessors. I remember conservatives that I know claiming that Clinton had arranged murders back in Arkansas. Some also argued that Clinton had used the State Highway Patrol to act as procurers for his sexual appetites. Oh wait, that one turned out to be true. Anyway, the collapse of the Clinton's health care reform generated enough animosity for anyone.  Despite some rumors to the contrary, Bill Clinton was White. 

I do not and never have hated any of these Presidents. How could I? They keep me ceaselessly entertained. I thought that the animosity against all three was frequently over the top. But what does explain the animosity against the current President?

Mickey Kaus at Slate has an explanation:

The more I think about it, the more the townhall anti-Obama anger isn't explained completely by the issues. There's also something about Obama himself-. But that something (or the main something) isn't his race. It's that he's a relative newcomer, as Presidents go--an unknown quantity, an enigma, with a short track record and patches of that record left fuzzy. That means opponents can fill in the blanks with ominous possibilities. It makes paranoia more rational, if you will.

I certainly think that is part of it. Obama is more of a blank that Presidents usually are. When people can't figure out what someone is doing or saying, they often figure that that's because the person is question is hiding something unpleasant.

But I think a more important reason is that President Obama has given us a lot of reasons to doubt his credibility. Stephanie Condon at CBS News has a list of five health care promises that Obama doesn't intend to keep. For example, candidate Obama promised that there wouldn't be an individual mandate to purchase health insurance. He surely isn't going to keep that one, if the Baucus plan passes!

But if he is willing to break a lot of the promises he made when campaigning, what about the promises he is making now? Many Americans think that you can't believe anything the President says, and they have a point.

And then there was his manifest refusal to be honest about taxation during his flurry of appearances this weekend. Ricardo Alonso-zaldivar (AP and Real Clear Politics) has this:

Memo to President Barack Obama: It's a tax. Obama insisted this weekend on national television that requiring people to carry health insurance — and fining them if they don't — isn't the same thing as a tax increase. But the language of Democratic bills to revamp the nation's health care system doesn't quibble. Both the House bill and the Senate Finance Committee proposal clearly state that the fines would be a tax.

And the reason the fines are in the legislation is to enforce the coverage requirement.

"If you put something in the Internal Revenue Code, and you tell the IRS to collect it, I think that's a tax," said Clint Stretch, head of the tax policy group for Deloitte, a major accounting firm. "If you don't pay, the person who's going to come and get it is going to be from the IRS."

The President's Clintonesque refusal to acknowledge the plain meaning of the word "tax" in an exchange with George Stephanopoulos is a mini-comic routine. You can get it at the Wall Street Journal. If you require someone to pay money to the government, that's a tax, even if the money is spent only on you. If part of the money raised is spent on anyone or anything else, that is undeniably a tax. But the President steadfastly denied that a tax was a tax.

We all think we don't like to be lied to. Most of us, maybe, don't mind it nearly as much when someone is telling us what we want to hear. When they aren't, that is reason enough to get very angry. A lot of the animosity toward the President comes from the fact that he has no idea how to talk to us honestly, or how not to make promises he can't keep.

Campaign Finance Regulation Unravels

From the Washington Post:

A federal appeals court overturned hard-fought campaign finance reform regulations in a ruling on Friday that will make it easier for independent political groups to raise and spend money to influence elections.

The three-judge panel struck down regulations intended to blunt the power of such organizations, including the controversial Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn.org, which drew heavy criticism for spending tens of millions of dollars on aggressive advertisements during the 2004 presidential campaign.

The ruling, if it stands, could provide a boost to Republicans and their allies as they try to win back Congress in 2010 and the White House in 2012. Outside conservative groups could become particularly important in countering the fundraising juggernaut of President Obama, who shattered past records by raising more than $750 million during his 2008 campaign.

Well, it's nice to know that the appeals court is working to free conservatives to bag more scalps. But of course the party bringing the suit was brought by an organization that isn't exactly conservative, as we learn several paragraphs down the page.

The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit came in a lawsuit brought by Emily's List, a nonprofit political organization that backs female Democratic candidates who support abortion rights.

There's a little goose and gander for you in this story. I gather that two of the judges rested their decision both on the federal law that the FEC (Federal Election Commission) was interpreting, and on the Constitution. One of the judges would have restricted the decision to an interpretation of the statutes. That is a big difference for the obvious reason that the Constitution trumps all other regulation.

We have a statutory regime that heavily regulates the raising and spending of hard money (by campaign organizations) and soft money (by parties and independent political organizations). The purpose of such regulations is to limit the influence of money (unions, corporations, etc.) in American elections. But such regulation clearly works by limiting political speech.

If someone says "Obama is a Nazi" in a public forum, that is protected speech under the First Amendment. If he buys a can of paint, a brush, and a poster board and writes the same slogan, both the purchases and the calligraphy are protected speech. But what if a bunch of his buddies get together, pool their cash, and buy airtime on the local radio station to advertise the same message? Now they are potentially subject to FEC regulation. The FEC can limit their ability to raise money and run ads in order to influence an election.

Here is what United States District Court for the District of Columbia said:

The First Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, protects the right of individual citizens to spend unlimited amounts to express their views about policy issues and candidates for public office. Similarly, the First Amendment, as the Court has construed it, safeguards the right of citizens to band together and pool their resources as an unincorporated group or non-profit organization in order to express their views about policy issues and candidates for public office. We agree with EMILY's List that the new FEC regulations contravene those principles and violate the First Amendment.

Well…yes. All incorporated or unincorporated groups are groups: individuals who poll their resources but retain their rights under the Constitution. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that they are free to express their views in any public forum.

The USDCDC got it right. I just hope the Supreme Court confirms it.

oops.

The Dirty Politics of the Race Card

It is an article of faith among many Democrats that the Bush Administration in particular or Republicans in general, questioned the patriotism of anyone who criticized the Iraq War or the war on terrorism. I have occasionally challenged those who made such a claim to show where and when such "questioning" occurred. Most recently this happened in a comment exchange below. I am still waiting for a genuine case where someone in the Bush Administration made the claim that anyone who questioned the war or criticized Bush policies was unpatriotic, let alone guilty of treason. Nor have I seen any evidence that conservatives pundits made such a charge. Given the extraordinary number of Americans who today can express their thoughts online, it is rather amazing that you can't find one example.

But let us state categorically that such an accusation would be very dirty politics. Whatever one thinks about Bush 43's policies, including the war, to say that anyone who criticizes those policies is unpatriotic would be reprehensible and dense, given the meaning of American patriotism. The flag that Americans love is all about the right to hold contrary opinions and to say whatever we think about the people in office.

So what are we to think of the many Democrats who accuse a lot of Americans of racism, or more recently, homophobia, because they passionately criticize the President of the United States? The most prominent example is President Jimmy Carter. From CNN:

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," Carter told "NBC Nightly News."

Now that is a very serious charge. It is clearly intended to discredit the "overwhelming portion" of the President's critics. A decent man would provide some evidence of it. Carter does point out that a lot of the signs carried by anti-Obama protesters have been ridiculously extreme. But so were the signs carried by anti-Bush protesters. Yes, President Obama has been compared with Hitler, and yes, that is absurd. But the Bush = Hitler meme was just as frequent among anti-war protesters. That is the kind of thing that happens when a lot of ordinary people gather to express their opinions. Carter provides no evidence at all that racism is a significant factor in the popular opposition to Obama's policies. I think that makes him a liar of the worst kind.

He wasn't the first to make that charge. Maureen Dowd, of the New York Times, has her own evidence that racism motivates Obama's critics:

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men's club — Joe Wilson yelled "You lie!" at a president who didn't.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

So Dowd's evidence of racism was the racial make-up of a section of seats around Joe Wilson (guilt by association with White persons) and the fact that she apparently hears voices that no one else does.

Paul Waldman at the liberal Washington Monthly makes the same charge in more detail but with no more evidence. Other liberal voices have chimed in behind Carter, as for example Kai Wright at The Root, and Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post.

To the credit of the Left, there are some reasonable voices. Joe Klein thinks there is racism in the protests, but he goes to some trouble to explain that it's complicated. Jim Sleeper, a reasonable voice on the left if ever there was one, argues that appeals to racism are a mistake. Sleeper is no doubt right about strategy: most polls suggest that Americans are offended by the race charge.

I have no doubt that some of those who march in protest against the President and his party, and create offensive posters, are motivated by racism. Some of those who organized protests against the war were Kim Jong il loving communists. But to call people who criticize the President racists just because they are genuinely mad at him is every bit as reprehensible as calling someone who criticizes the war a traitor.

But it is really hard to find examples of the latter. The former, on the other hand, is flamboyantly evident. The American Left is far more irresponsible on this score than the American Right.

Alienating Poland

President Bush was often criticized by his detractors for alienating America's allies. Yet Obama seems to be getting a pass for doing the same thing. In an earlier post, I mentioned Obama's poor treatment of the UK's Gordon Brown. Apparently, the UK is not the only ally that the president has chosen to snub. Today, on the anniversary of the soviet's attack on Poland, Obama announced his intention to scrap plans to build a missile shield based in Poland and the Czech Republic. According to Reuters writer Gabriela Baczynska, Obama means to shelve the plans in order to improve ties with Russia. If so, that is quite a blow to a nation that was one of America's strongest allies against communism.

Some have suggested that Obama means to improve relations with Russia to enlist its help in fighting Iran's nuclear development. I do not think such a move will help. Unless Russia has already agreed to put pressure on Iran in exchange for this favor, I can think of no reason that it would bother to do anything other than what it pleases. Furthermore, by doing this without securing any sort of agreement, we lose a bargaining chip in negotiations with Moscow, while alienating those who are already our allies. Indeed, according to The Wall Street Journal, "Russia, on Thursday welcomed the news but said it saw no reason to offer concessions in return."

Yet, according to the WSJ, The Obama administration justifies the move by saying the following because it believes that "a redesigned defensive system would be cheaper, quicker and more effective against the threat from Iranian missiles." Maybe so. But I hope the new design isn't as convoluted and difficult for the administration to explain as the new design for healthcare. The Obama administration gives one more reason for scrapping the Bush administration's plans. According to the WSJ:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the decision to abandon the Bush administration's plans came about because of a change in the U.S. perception of the threat posed by Iran. Mr. Gates said intelligence experts concluded the short- and medium-range missiles were "developing more rapidly than previously projected" in Iran.

But, says the WSJ, Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says the following:

We believed that the emergence of the intercontinental ballistic missile would come much faster than it did. The reality is, it has not come as fast as we thought it would come.

There is, therefore, some debate over whether or not Obama's assumption is correct. Were he Bush, I suspect this would have been enough to cause quite a bit of howling from the American left. But Iran clearly is a threat to the United States and I would not object to the president taking measures against Iran's nuclear program. Still, it would have been nice if he could have waited a week or two, rather than springing this change on Poland during such a solemn day or found a way to include the missile shield in his plans.

Cap & Trade is Dead

I have been certain for a while that Cap & Trade legislation wouldn't pass in any significant form. I just couldn't see Congress passing a bill that would only work by hobbling the American economy at a moment when it already limping and raising the price of damn near everything just as everyone was already tightening their belts. Well, now we have this astonishing report from CBS:

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

A second memorandum, which was prepared for Obama's transition team after the November election, says this about climate change policies: "Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation."

The documents (PDF) were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute and released on Tuesday.

Cap and Trade is, after healthcare reform and the stimulus bill, the Obama Administration's third signature piece of legislation. In theory it will save the planet by reducing future CO² emissions in the United States. This strikes me as a loony policy. The problem is that, even if it works here, it would just mean that production would shift to countries like China and India that aren't about to make real sacrifices for abstract goals like curbing global warming.

But apart from the sense of the policy if it works, look at the numbers that have to be swallowed before it can be passed into law: $200 billion a year in new taxes; a hike in the personal income tax of 15%; $1,761 a year per American household. What would be the political consequences of this when Americans see the bill?

It is clear from the above that the Administration knew about this from the early days and yet forged ahead anyway. Okay, saving the planet is important. But at some point don't you have to worry about selling the plan to the voters? We know about this now because of a freedom of information act request by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. That means that they weren't tell us what they knew at the start. Didn't it occur to anyone in the Administration that, sooner or later, we would find out?

And didn't someone consider how Cap & Trade would work together with healthcare reform? Imagine the fellow who discovers he has been fined $3,800 bucks for not buying health insurance for his family. Now he opens the next letter from Washington and discovers he has to shell out another $1700 so the polar bears will have plenty of ice to drink coke on. Did anyone in the Administration consider that?

We have a government that seems to be altogether untethered from reality.

Democrats in Disarray 3

Just right now the position of Congressional Democrats and the White House looks very bad. Here are some of the reasons:

First, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Montana) went before the press to present his healthcare bill, and he did so all alone.   USA Today announced that Baucus unveiled his bill without Republicans.  Yes, and with Democrats, either. 

I have seen a lot of these things over the years, and I can't remember anything quite like this. The Baucus bill, by most accounts, is honest. It would extend insurance to most uninsured Americans, and would do so without adding to the budget. So what does it mean that not a single Democrat, let alone a Republicans, was standing behind him?

I can think of two possibilities. One is this is some kind of clever stratagem. Democrats will gradually drag themselves behind his bill and dare the Republicans to remain the party of no. If that happens, and they can offer the Republicans some real compromises like real tort reform and insurance sales across state borders, it could make it very hard on Republicans. It might make it political possible for the Democrats to pass the bill by means of reconciliation (thus avoiding a filibuster). But that would assume that the Democrats are clever indeed.

The second and more likely possibility is that the first coherent plan to extend healthcare insurance has succeeded in uniting both sides against the middle. It is certain that Republicans don't want to pass such a thing, and a lot of Democrats keep saying that no bill without a public option can pass. I thought they must be kidding, but Baucus was awfully lonely up there.

It looks like a lot of Democrats are afraid to pass a bill that will force a lot of Americans who right now are uninsured because they choose not to pay for insurance to suddenly pay a hefty chunk of their income for that purpose. I am not saying that's a bad idea, I am saying that it requires more courage than may be in supply.

Second, Some prominent Democrats are now accusing Joe Wilson and a lot of other Americans of racism, because of their vehement opposition to President Obama's agenda. I think the accusation is ludicrous and offensive, but what is significant here is that making it is political debilitating. It is clear that large numbers of Americans are concerned about the cost of Obama Administration policies, and about the expansion of government that those policies entail. Does it really help build support by accusing anyone who strongly disagrees with the President of being defective in character? President Obama has disavowed any such view, but he hasn't repudiated the persons making such charges. It looks like a distraction that he can ill-afford.

Third, the Wilson Reprimand. Joe Wilson gave the Democrats a great gift when he yelped during the President's speech. Then he went to the President with his tail between his legs, and the latter graciously accepted Wilson's apology. The obvious thing to do was let it slide and then use the clip for fundraising. The move to officially scold Wilson made the Democrats looked vindictive, and probably raised Wilson to heroic status back home. Now Wilson will be using clips of his defiance.

Worse still, it focused the public attention on such questions as illegal immigration and abortion, not exactly where the Democrats wanted to focus attention.

All this looks like a party that has no idea what to do and is not in possession of itself. At this point I think it very unlikely that any substantial healthcare reform will pass during this Congress. If I am right, Democrats will say it was the evil Republicans and evil Insurance agents that killed it. But it wasn't. The Democrats were more than capable of failing all by themselves.

ACORN 2

At first glance it looked like the New York Times had finally put a reporter on the ACORN story. But that is not the story that Scott Shane did.

WASHINGTON — For months during last year's presidential race, conservatives sought to tar the Obama campaign with accusations of voter fraud and other transgressions by the national community organizing group Acorn, which had done some work for the campaign.

But it took amateur actors, posing as a prostitute and a pimp and recorded on hidden cameras in visits to Acorn offices, to send government officials scrambling in recent days to sever ties with the organization.

Conservative advocates and broadcasters were gleeful about the success of the tactics in exposing Acorn workers, who appeared to blithely encourage prostitution and tax evasion. It was, in effect, the latest scalp claimed by those on the right who have made no secret of their hope to weaken the Obama administration by attacking allies and appointees they view as leftist.

It is a general rule of journalism that a story is about what its first paragraph is about. This story is about conservatives hunting for leftist scalps. I think all the basic facts of the ACORN story are there, but that opening makes ACORN look like the victims.

The New York Times always manages to rise to the occasion.

ACORN & the Yellowed Press

The recent scandal involving ACORN, which you know all about if you read Fox or other conservative news sites, is appalling enough on the face of it. From Rich Lowery @ RealClearPolitics:

The radical activist group ACORN is the E. F. Hutton of prostitution. It stands ready to provide discreet advice on setting up a brothel and engaging in other, associated acts of criminality. When ACORN talks, pimps and hookers listen.

This has been established by an audacious video sting operation undertaken by guerrilla conservative documentarian James O'Keefe, 25, and his sidekick Hannah Giles, 20. O'Keefe posed as a pimp and Giles as a prostitute seeking help getting a mortgage for a brothel. In cities around the country, workers for ACORN - the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - happily obliged.

Now chew on that for a bit. I don't know anything about O'Keefe and his accomplice, but I am guessing that ACORN has an army of researchers and detectives on that right now. But they entered a number of ACORN offices in their disguises, secretly filmed the employees as they were advised on how to defraud the federal government. To make things better, they openly said that the brothels would employ underage girls from El Salvador. That didn't seem to disturb the community organizers for reform now.

In Baltimore, ACORN staff assured O'Keefe and Giles that the group doesn't "discriminate" - i.e., has no standards whatsoever. Giles is told if she makes $96,000 a year selling sex, she should tell the government she only makes $9,600. Her occupation, meanwhile, should be reported as "performing artist." If the conversation had gone longer, surely she would have been advised how to apply for a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

O'Keefe notes that they want a house for 13 underage girls who will be imported from El Salvador to work as prostitutes. Only three - not all 13 - of the girls can be listed as dependents, ACORN prudently advises. And so long as they are under 16, they will make O'Keefe and his partner eligible for the child tax credit.

To be fair, we can't know how broad this corruption is at ACORN. The organization specializes in getting housing for the poor (including, apparently, poor $96,000 a year hookers), and in voter registration. Republicans have complained for years about ACORN mischief with regard to the latter. The organization itself confirmed this when it turned in 11 of its own employees for voter registration fraud. That's civic responsibility!

But it's still something of a shock to learn that several ACORN offices in several different states gave the above sort of advice. ACORN has received about $53 million in federal funds, and who knows how much in state and local money, since 1994. It looks now like some of that money was consumed by a culture of crime. Until recently, ACORN was involved in the census proceedings. The Census Bureau has now severed ties. The Senate has voted to rescind all federal funds from the organization. The House may be about to follow suit. I note that Senators Patrick Leahy and Dick Durban (among others) voted against the measure.

As creepy as the story is on its face, it is not the real scandal. The real scandal is the neglect of the story by the mainstream press. I did a quick Lexus-Nexus search today, and I can't find any evidence that the story has been mentioned by ABC, NBC, or CBS on their news shows. Going to the online sites, ABC has no link on its home page, though it does have a link to an article about Bernie Madoff's many houses. CBS finally has something up about the loss of funds going to ACORN. Well, at least they care about that. MSNBC has a link on its front page to a story about a dog who sniffs out inmate cell phones, but no link to the ACORN story.

Neither the Washington Post, nor the New York Times, nor USA Today has run its own story on the scandal, all of them relying on the same Associated Press story. The Minneapolis Star Tribune also put the AP story in its website, but buried it without a lead. You have to use the search engine.

This is ridiculous. We have a story here of a major organization, receiving a half a billion in public dollars, participating in defrauding the federal government in order to promote child prostitution, and none of the major newspapers has put a single reporter on it! Aren't any of these gray ladies the least bit interested in how far this thing goes?

Or are they very intent to make sure it doesn't go any farther? The major newspapers and news networks have been in financial trouble for some time. Now they are trying to spike a story that has all the ingredients of a blockbuster. They are obviously trying to protect the Democrats against bad news at a critical moment, even at the cost of their own self-interest. They are sacrificing what could be a very sellable story, and at the same time sacrificing their professional responsibility. The whole point of having a "mainstream press" is to have a body of publications that one can rely on. Maybe the reason that the newspapers are failing is not just that people prefer iPods. Maybe it is that everyone can see that the MSM is unreliable.

Correction: I just found Megan Greenwell's story from the Washington Post.  It ran on Saturday, the 12th, which was plenty timely. 

Tariffs and International Relations

President Clinton and both presidents Bush embraced globalism, international cooperation and free-trade. They all seemed to share a belief that increasing trade and interaction among nations would lead to greater stability throughout the world, and, perhaps, more democratic rule. Each of these Presidents placed some faith in international organizations and the ability of these organizations to foster peace and interaction (some more than others).

President Obama seems to have a different view of the world. He does not seem as inclined as his predecessors to build relationships with allied nations. President Clinton and President Bush forged close friendships with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, inviting the Prime Minister to Camp David and conversing with him often. Obama has not seemed as interested in forming such a friendship with Gordon Brown.

No, indeed, he returned the bust of Winston Churchill that Tony Blair lent Bush and presented Prime Minister Brown with insulting gifts. Perhaps he did not intend to offend the Prime Minister, but he certainly did not go out of his way to make Brown feel welcome. Furthermore, The Washington Post's Dana Milbank says that he refused Brown the "customary honour of standing beside him in front of the two nations flags for the TV cameras." According to Milbank, Obama's reception of Brown was, "a surprisingly cool reception for an ally."

The latest sign that Obama may not value international cooperation as much as his predecessors is his move to impose tariffs on tires manufactured in China. The Economist says the following:

ALTHOUGH Barack Obama alarmed free traders last year with protectionist-sounding pronouncements on the campaign trail, such as one about the need to renegotiate NAFTA, optimists among them dismissed this as mere posturing designed to placate restive trade unions. Yet a decision by the White House to impose punitive tariffs (35% for the first year, falling by five percentage points a year, to 25% in the third year) on Chinese-made pneumatic tyres now raises serious doubts about Mr Obama's commitment to free trade.

These moves certainly mark a departure from the ideologies of Obama's predecessors, but are that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe not. International cooperation has not always worked in the way its proponents thought it would. Although it has increased trade, I am not sure it has always furthered the cause of peace. UN forces, for instance, could have prevented the Rwandan genocide. Indeed, many troops wanted to, but the organizations would not let them act. This was a spectacular failure.

Meanwhile, in spite of assurances by many neo-conservatives that bringing unstable nations into the global market place will make the world a more stable, less violent place, many nations involved in international trade and organizations continue to war amongst themselves and each other. As countries worldwide face economic struggles and Iran and North Korea pursue their weapons programs, it is hard to think that the world is stable place. Maybe, then, international cooperation isn't such a good thing. Maybe it doesn't work.

Furthermore, one can understand the attraction of tariffs as workers in the U.S. struggle to make a living and China profits for providing cheap alternatives to US produced goods. But The Economist argues that, historically, "global co-operation has been crucial amid efforts to encourage economic recovery." And, indeed, tariffs do seem to have a history of hurting the economy. The US, for instance, passed the Smoot-Hawley Act shortly after the stock market crash. The act was originally intended to protect farmers from foreign competitors, but it wasn't long before other industries wanted equal protection. The government gave in, passing a bill that created the highest tariffs America had ever imposed. This triggered retaliation from countries around the world. According to The Guardian:

It was the Smoot Hartley Act penalising imports into America which set off a worldwide round of tariff increases in 1931, making a dire economic situation even worse and creating the conditions for the Depression.

Imposing a tariff on Chinese-made tires does not, by itself, seem like a major problem. Indeed, because many Americans oppose the Chinese government for social, economic and political reasons, placing a tariff on some Chinese products even seems like a good idea. Furthermore, it does not necessarily follow that because once, imposing tariffs lead to worldwide pandemonium that every imposition of a tariff will lead to a disaster. Nevertheless, because we know that that such a thing can and has happened, we ought to tread very carefully.

The Moral Hazard of the MSM

I think the criticism of the President's speech to America's school children was overblown. That is the conclusion the MSM drew. But you might not know, if you don't watch Fox or survey the conservative blogosphere, that Democrats reacted just as hysterically, if not more, to a similar speech by Bush 41. An honest press would have pointed that out. If it did, I missed it.

Likewise with the man of the hour Joe Wilson of South Carolina. Wilson's outburst, "You lie!" was well covered by the MSM, and has been elevated to a major housekeeping issue in the House that is kept by Nancy Pelosi. It is apparently a House rule that the President cannot be called a liar in that chamber. That sounds to me like a good rule. It promotes decorum, which is one of the thing that keeps civil society civil. But one might note that President Obama accused certain unnamed parties of lying in his speech, and that the previous President was called a liar by Democrat Pete Stark. Did the MSM do that?

Joe Wilson has been celebrated by liberal pundits, and is now about to be crowned for his excess. Though Wilson apologized to the President, and the President accepted his apology (something to be ascribed to President Obama's credit), the House leadership is moving to discipline the wayward wailer. This looks to me like bad strategy. Wilson shouldn't have yelled out his insult. See remarks on decorum above.

He also shouldn't have done it because it creates problems for his party and his own political fortunes. It gives ammunition to the other side, which wishes to paint all critics of Obama and the Democrats as hysterical yahoos. It apparently allowed a potential opponent to raise $1 million in contributions in about 48 hours. But it also allowed Wilson to raise about the same amount of money at the same time. By moving against Wilson after his apology, the Democrats are turning him into a right wing hero. I am guessing he might profit from that.

Right now Americans have a very poor opinion of the American Press. This comes at a moment when that press is facing potentially mortal financial problems. I don't know how to fix the later problem, but the former might be addressed by acting more responsibly and by defending such nonpartisan notions as decorum in a nonpartisan way. If one side behaves badly, point it out. But take the other side to task as well, even when that means criticizing Democrats.

Which brings me to Glen Beck. I am not a fan of Beck. Most of what I have seen of him I have seen while waiting for the five o'clock Fox News. He strikes me as Fox's answer to Lou Dobbs, which is a much better Dobbs, and Fox's answer to its own Bill O'Rielly, which is a not so good O'Reilly.

But Glen Beck dramatically increased the value of his own stock by taking down Van Jones. Maybe you think that Jones was railroaded. I don't. But there was a legitimate story here and the MSM resolutely ignored it. Howard Kurtz has the story, on his WaPo website:

By the time White House environmental adviser Van Jones resigned over Labor Day weekend, the New York Times had not run a single story. Neither had USA Today, which also didn't cover the resignation. The Washington Post had done one piece, on the day before he quit. The Los Angeles Times had carried a short article the previous week questioning Glenn Beck's assault on the White House aide. There had been nothing on the network newscasts.

Kurtz is right. One doesn't expect better from the New York Times, but surely one of the other newspapers or the major network news organs might have bother to inform the public of a problem that would in short order lead to the resignation of one of President Obama's Czars. Why didn't they? The answer is pretty obvious: they were acting in a partisan fashion to try to protect the President when he was busy with healthcare reform. This is journalistic malpractice.

There was a time when a few network organs could kill a story by ignoring it. That time has passed. The contemporary news world is much more democratic, and that means a lot of angry voices are now audible. Beck didn't do his work alone. Most of the much that was raked up against Jones was raked up by Beck fans by means of Google.

If the Main Stream Press doesn't like such persons as Beck pushing into their territory, if it thinks it is above gotcha journalism, then it can't afford to leave gaping holes for Beck to move into. This might be a moment for the MSM to begin to redeem itself. If it wants to defend decorum, and it should, it has to defend it against all assaults from the left as well as the right. If it wants to stand above the Becks and Dobbs that nip at its heels (and occasionally, its jugular), it can't afford to let the latter do its work for them.

UPDATE: A reply to Cory's post at Madville Times: Obama's Right: No Benefits for Illegal Immigrants in H.R. 3200

This discussion shows why calling people a liar in such cases is a breech of decorum. What is at stake here is not truth or falsehood in speech, but differing interpretations and expectations.

Does the Bill explicitly extend health care coverage to illegal aliens? You say no and provide text. I am inclined to believe you.

Does the bill provide any actual mechanisms to prevent illegal aliens from enjoying it's benefits? As I understand it, Republicans pushed for such mechanisms and Democrats refused. Why?

Will the bill actually extend coverage to illegal aliens once enacted, regardless of what it explicitly says? Yes. Even with verification mechanisms that would happen. Without them it will happen frequently. Consider the recent ACORN scandal. You don't think that there will be a lot of community organizers out there instructing illegals on how to game the system?

Joe Wilson shouldn't have called the President a liar. It was bad taste in that setting. The President shouldn't have talked about the lies of unnamed others because it isn't the lies that are the real issue here. It is such questions as I raise above.

And by the way, I think we should extend health care insurance to everyone regardless of immigration status. But I understand that that won't sell.

The Electoral Landscape

Unless something changes pretty quickly, Republicans are going to win the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. The press is saying that these elections turn on local issues and not larger, national ones, which is what you say when you don't like the trend. That is truer in New Jersey, with its corruption scandals, but in both states the economy is a big reason for grief and that is a national issue.

Unless something changes over the next fourteen months, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Harry Reid of Nevada are going to lose their senate seats. Either of those would be a big blow to the Democrats, but the latter would be especially grievous. For a second Senate Democratic leader to lose his seat in less than a decade is one of those facts that gets people's attention. But the big bucks are riding on Congress in general. Beth Fouhy at AP has this:

Despite sweeping Democratic successes in the past two national elections, continuing job losses and President Barack Obama's slipping support could lead to double-digit losses for the party in next year's congressional races and may even threaten their House control.

In the House of Representatives the Democrats have two big structural disadvantages. One is that the party that holds the White House generally does poorly in off-year elections. Another is that Democrats won a lot of generally Republican leaning districts over the last two elections. Others won swing districts that, well, tend to swing. That success reflected general tides that swept heavily against the GOP. If the tide is indeed going in the other direction, a lot of those seats will return to the Republicans in 2010.

Then of course, there is the economy and the Democrat's legislative agenda. A weak economy generally hurts the party in power. The economy is unlikely to feel a lot better by next year. A lot of House Democrats who voted for the stimulus package and for Cap and Trade have gotten grief over the one and the other. Finally there is the healthcare thing.

Perhaps the President's firm talk last week will firm up the public support. But the basic problem for the Democrat's is a strong and general anxiety among the public. The President was supposed to clarify things, and present us with a plan that we could understand and evaluate. He didn't do that. Here is the Washington Post:

WHEN POLITICIANS start talking about paying for programs by cutting "waste and abuse," you should get nervous. When they don't provide specifics -- and when the amounts under discussion are in the hundreds of billions of dollars -- you should get even more nervous.

The WaPo goes on to list the questions to which the President provided no answers. I submit that waiting for such answer from this Administration is like waiting for Godot. He ain't showin'.

There is a reciprocal relationship between the legislative agenda and the electoral fortunes of the parties. If people are uncertain about your agenda, your electoral outlook is grim. If your electoral outlook is grim, it's hard to pass your agenda. So far, I see little to encourage the Democrats.

I don't know what will happen next year, and the cycle has favored Democrats in one respect. Up until this summer, the tide still seemed to be with them and that helped them build a list of very competitive candidates. The GOP has only recently had enough encouraging news to tempt the best and brightest to throw their hats in the ring. But that's about the only good news the Democrats have right now.

Death Note is Excellent J-Horror

I have posted a lot about J-Horror and A-Horror over the last several years. Beginning in the 1990's Japanese, Korean, and Chinese film makers produced a number of extraordinarily good horror movies: the Ring, the Grudge, Pulse, Spiral, The Eye, were all masterpieces of the genre, and all have been remade for the American market.

Lately, that fountain of grim has produced almost nothing of value. But yesterday I watched Death Note. It was so good I sat there hurting for almost a half hour because I didn't want to push the damn pause button and go pee.

Death Note originated as a manga written by Tsugumi Ohba with art by Takeshi Obata. Manga are Japanese comic books published in paperback form and serialized. I haven't read the manga, nor have I seen and earlier video done in cartoon form. Translating a manga or any other comic book into a live action movie is always a very difficult business, but when it works well it produces a superior product. Some of the aforementioned movies were published as manga before they were filmed.

A young man, Light Yagami, wants to go into law to follow the footsteps of his father, who is a detective. Light wants to bring bad guys to justice, but he is naive. He discovers, to his dismay, that bad guys often get away scot free when witnesses refuse to testify or some other technicality prevents conviction. He suffers a crisis of faith.

At that moment a small book is dropped from the sky and lands before him, somehow protected from the moody rain that is drenching everything else. It turns out to look like something you would buy at Barnes and Noble. Inside the cover are instructions: write the name of someone, and imagine that person's face, and the person will die. Of course the book works as promised, and Light immediately sets about righting the wrongs that disturb him.

The book was dropped by Ryuk, a shinigami, one of the death gods. Ryuk survives by getting all the years of life that would have been enjoyed by someone written into the book. He is a fantastic creature with a sort of devil-mask, clownish face and tattered but effective wings. He likes apples. In the movie, Ryuk is computer generated to look just like the image from the manga. That is the only special effect that the movie employs.

Light goes about his business with vigor, and soon everyone realizes that someone is killing off a lot of rapists, murderers, and general scoundrels. The mysterious avenger is known in popular (i.e. internet) culture as Kira. Because of this, in part, Light quickly develops a God complex, and becomes absolutely ruthless. The police also realize that there is a vigilante working, and organize an investigation. They turn to "L", a mysterious person who, for much of the movie, communicates with them only via a lap top and distorted voice. This is key, of course, because without a name or face, L cannot be targeted by Kira. Most of the action of the movie turns on the game between L and Kira.

To give you a little taste of the action, L analyzes the timing of the mysterious deaths and plots them on a single page chart. It looks like a college student's schedule. L determines correctly that Kira is a college student who was not killing anyone when he was in class. That's pretty good action for a comic book movie.

Two hours in I realized that the story couldn't be resolved in the time left. Sure enough, it ends in the middle. I cursed the TV and rushed to order the second part from Netflix.

Death Note contains some useful reflections on the nature of justice and the corruption that can come from wanting to do justice. But it doesn't go very deep into those questions. It does something as good or better for a movie: it builds the action on those reflections. The plot is frequently marred by too much explanation, but that is about its only flaw. It features a lot of death, but no gore at all. The actors are all superb, by the standards of the genre. They are selected largely because they look like manga figures, with a lot of long, straight hair partially obscuring their faces.

Best of all, the battle is a battle of wits. The action almost totally consists of the stratagems of the two main characters. One of the detectives, who looks a lot like Jack Lord in Hawaii Five-O, keeps admonishing L that "this is not a game!" But of course, that is precisely what it is.

Death Note is delicious, if you like this sort of thing. I really do.

9/11

My SDP colleague posts below, very well, on the anniversary of the worst attack on American soil ever launched by a foreign power. I will add a meditation of my own. On the one hand, the destruction of the Twin Towers demonstrated the weakness of our enemies. To get at us, they had to hijack our own aircraft. They can't produce any of their own. They are culturally and technologically retarded.

On the other hand, the attack revealed the vulnerability of modern civilization. I continue to think that the Oklahoma City bombing was the most frightening terrorist event to date. The 9/11 attack showed brilliance on the part of the terrorists, but it also depended on a safe haven in Afghanistan and big purse that could be stored in the world banking system. Those were things that the Bush Administration could get at, and it did.

But Timothy McVeigh, with help from Terry Nichols, blew a hole in the heartland and killed 168 people. That one nutcase could do that is a sign of how vulnerable all of us are.

The thing is, neither of these events really scared us. New York City is a long way away for most Americans, and the Oklahoma City bombing still feels like one of those occasional catastrophes. Let's hope that it stays that way. If we really do get scared, everything might change.

They Can’t Get There From Here

Yesterday I tried to drive from the Aberdeen Forestry office, in the old High School building, to the Federal Credit Union. I discovered that it couldn't be done. City road workers have managed to block off nearly every connection between the west and east parts of town. Since I am a man on planet earth, I kept trying. But all I managed to do was go in circles. I passed lots of other drivers with astonished looks on their faces, like lost souls trying to find an exit from Dante's Inferno.

Democrats trying to achieve universal healthcare are finding themselves in a similar position. They think they know where they are and where they want to go, but somehow they can't find a route from the one to the other.

An indication of this is this line from the President's Wednesday speech (New York Times):

Here's what you need to know. First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period. And to prove that I'm serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don't materialize. Part of the reason I faced a trillion dollar deficit when I walked in the door of the White House is because too many initiatives over the last decade were not paid for – from the Iraq War to tax breaks for the wealthy. I will not make that same mistake with health care.

The President understands that a deep concern about the costs of the proposed legislation, both among the public and for that reason among members of his own party in Congress, is the biggest obstacle he faces. So he gives us this reassurance.

Unfortunately, it isn't very reassuring. Such provisions are very easy to insert in bills, and just as easy to amend or ignore when the time comes. Moreover, if this were serious, it would mean that the program might squeeze out vital spending across the budget. Either way, the results could be very dire. It is also an example of one of the President's most serious character defects, his tendency to shirk responsibility by blaming his predecessors.

David Brooks has the best thing I have yet read on the President's speech. On the above passage:

This sound bite kills the House health care bill. That bill would add $220 billion (that's 2.2 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the first 10 years and another $1 trillion (10 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the next 10 years.

There is no way to get from the House bill to deficit neutrality. The president's speech guarantees that the more moderate Senate Finance Committee bill will be the basis for the negotiations to come.

But of course the House Committee is still busy working on the bill that Brooks says has just been killed by the President. We are hearing a lot of good news about re-energized Democrats, but it doesn't look like the arrangement of anxieties in Congress has changed at all. From the Miami Herald:

Predictably, Democratic leaders of Congress praised Obama's speech effusively, and Republicans in both chambers remained unmoved. However, several rank-and-file Democrats said that the president made only incremental progress, at best, toward moving health care legislation forward, and that lawmakers could backslide at any time.

"Of course you'll get a bounce now, but two weeks from now, we are likely to be just where we are, negotiating among ourselves," said Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., who's a liberal.

The whole point of the President's speech, we were told, was to clear things up and provide details. This from Bloomberg:

So far, White House officials have offered few details on how they intend to pay for the plan. Instead, they've deferred to Congress on the issue, saying they'll consider all options.

With Obama this week declaring ownership of the plan to enact the most extensive changes in health care in more than four decades, the White House's reluctance to break down how it would finance the measure is rankling some lawmakers.

So in fact we still don't have any details, or any clear picture of how the reform is supposed to work. The White House is clearly incapable of providing leadership. The various factions in Congress are driving around in circles on a hot day, but they can't get there from here. I recognize the looks on their faces.

Remembering 9/11

Today is the anniversary of the September 11^th attacks and it would not be right to ignore it.

I did not know anyone who perished in the attacks, but I remember how horrifying the news and the images that came with it were. I remember how the members of Congress sang God Bless America on the Capitol steps. I also remember the way people in America and around the world came together in vigils, with songs, with tears and with memories of those whose lives were taken away. Finally, I remember the kind wishes that poured in from friends and even former enemies across the globe.

To those who lost loved ones - my thoughts and prayers are with you. To those who are now fighting in defense of this country - thank you. And to those around the globe who still support us, even though doing so has not been popular - thank you too.

Liberals & the Authoritarian Temptation

A conservative may lament that the rest of fellow citizens do not endorse, nor does his government apply, what seems to him sound and obvious principles. But he is not particularly distressed by that fact, as it more or less confirms his view of the world. Man is a mess, and all human things are compromised and fall short of perfection.

It's tougher, I suspect, to be a liberal. The latter is firmly convinced that the world would be much better if only people like him were in charge. Of course, people like him sometimes are in charge, but in liberal democracies, they have to deal with silly things like procedure and consensus, and so it seems like they are never in charge enough. Maybe the way to save the world is just to give Al Gore whatever powers he thinks he needs to, well, save the world.

Perhaps this explains the authoritarian temptation to which good liberals are sometimes susceptible. Case in point: one Thomas L. Friedman, esquire, luminary of the New York Times. Here is how Squire Friedman compares the governments of the United States and China:

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Our one-party democracy is worse.

I am not sure that this is the stupidest or most morally irresponsible passage of comparable length that I have seen in any serious newspaper, or even in the New York Times. I am sure it is a contender. It is demonstrably stupid because it so readily invites posts like mine. It is stupid and morally irresponsible because it actually says, flamboyantly and unambiguously, that the government of Communist China is better than that of the United States.

One wonders for a moment if Squire Friedman has any idea what his lot would be if he were a citizen of China. He would spend his time, if he were very lucky, writing about how the latest plan from the central government was producing economic miracles. Wait a minute, that's what he's doing now. Okay, so maybe his lot would be not much worse. Less income and a smaller house, perhaps.

He doesn't have to worry what would be the plight of people who actually think and dare to question the party line or the government's agenda. He is certainly contemptuous of Americans who do that. So when the reasonably enlightened government of China slaps a guy in the slammer for thirteen years for trying to organize an alternative political party, well they are saving China from decaying into American style democracy.

Friedman is a moron. No liberal who cares about the future of that tradition should ever take him seriously again.

The Two Patients

 

During his speech, President Obama told two heartwrenching stories of medical patients who had had their health insurance unfairly ripped away from them with devastating consequences. The first is as follows:

One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn't reported gallstones that he didn't even know about. They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.

This is infuriating, if true. But is it? Unless Obama is talking about a case other than that of Otto Raddatz, whose sister Peggy testified before Congress on his behalf, then, no. It isn't. On June 16, 2009, CNN wrote this about the Raddatz case:

Peggy Raddatz testified on behalf of her brother, who was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin's type lymphoma. In the midst of his chemotherapy treatment, his coverage was rescinded and he was not able to receive the stem cell transplant needed to save his life.

Raddatz's brother was told his coverage was canceled for failing to disclose that, unknown to him, a doctor had once noted in his file that a CT scan showed a small aneurysm and some insignificant gallstones.

But this is not where the story ends. Indeed, according to the CNN article:    

Peggy Raddatz worked with the Illinois attorney general's office and eventually was able, after two appeals, to get her brother's coverage reinstated.

But if Otto Raddatz had had his coverage reinstated, why did his sister have to testify in his behalf? Did he die, as Obama said? Well, yes, he died - three years later. Was it because of the problem with his insurance? No. Peggy Raddatz asserted that his insurance had been "reinstated without any lapse." Furthermore, according to the hearing transcript:

The company relented and Otto received his stem cell transplant. He was able to live 3 more years before passing away earlier this year.

So Obama's tale isn't exactly true. What about the other story? Here's how Obama tells it:

Another woman from Texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company cancelled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne. By the time she had her insurance reinstated, her breast cancer had more than doubled in size. That is heart-breaking, it is wrong, and no one should be treated that way in the United States of America.

Interestingly enough, a case identical to this one appeared CNN article. I rather suspect that it is the one Obama is talking about. Here's what it says:

Robin Beaton found out last June she had an aggressive form of breast cancer and needed surgery -- immediately. Her insurance carrier precertified her for a double mastectomy and hospital stay. But three days before the operation, the insurance company called and told her they had red-flagged her chart and she would not be able to have her surgery.

The reason? In May 2008, Beaton had visited a dermatologist for acne. A word written on her chart was interpreted to mean precancerous, so the insurance company decided to launch an investigation into her medical history.

Well, that sounds pretty bad. But CNN also says the following:

Beaton had listed her weight incorrectly. She also didn't disclose medication she had taken for a pre-existing heart condition -- medicine she wasn't taking when she originally applied for coverage.

So was Beaton's insurance really just rescinded because she had acne? No. It was rescinded because it looked like she had failed to report precancerous acne and when the insurance company launched an investigation of her medical history; they found out that she hadn't reported information about a pre-existing heart condition. According to CNN, she hadn't been taking that medication when she applied for coverage. Perhaps that is why Beaton was able to, with help from her representative, have her care reinstated.

In any case, it is important to note that both patients had their problems resolved in the Status Quo. And in the Status Quo, if someone has a problem with their insurance company, they can go to the government for help. But let's say the government is your insurance company. What is your recourse if it wrongs you? Where does a patient go then?

How to Mail Yourself Out of Prison

While we are waiting to see how the President's speech played in Peoria, here is a useful tale from France:

Embarrassed officials were at a loss to explain how Jean-Pierre Treiber, 45, a double murder suspect, managed to elude detection in the box he had built himself at a workshop in the high security prison of Auxerre, Burgundy.

With its hidden human cargo, the box was loaded with dozens of others onto a lorry for delivery to the Yonne region, southeast of Paris.

During the 100-mile journey, he broke free and leapt from the lorry. The driver only realised there was a problem once he had reached his destination, when he spotted a hole in the tarpaulin covering the boxes, some of which were flattened.

I understand that the "officials" are embarrassed. But isn't this thing self-explanatory? The heck with vulgar and well-worn strategies of the past like digging tunnels or building a hang glider and soaring over the walls. Jean-Pierre Treiber mailed himself out of the hoosegow. How do you write "handle with care" en Français.

Police have sealed off roads and a huge area of woodland in the hunt for Treiber using helicopters and sniffer dogs.

Maybe they should let the French Post Office look for him. But here is what I really find disturbing:

Treiber has been in prison awaiting trial since 2004, charged with murdering French actor Roland Giraud's daughter Geraldine, and her friend Katia Lherbier. He is due to stand trial early next year in a case that shocked France.

Treiber apparently committed a grizzly pair of murders, and I hope they catch him. But six years in prison while awaiting trial? What if he didn't do it? That ain't swift justice.

The President’s Speech: 1st Glance

The President went before Congress in a perilously weak state. According to a new AP poll, his overall job approval rating stands at 50%, with 49% disapproving. That represents a drop of five percentage points in about six weeks, and a drop of almost 25 points since the beginning of the year. Perhaps more important is the strong approval/strong disapproval stats: 24% to 35%. That ten point deficit could be a real killer, as it represents weakness in his base and intensity in his opponents.

On the economy generally and healthcare specifically, the news was just as bad. Overall approval/disapproval of his handling of the economy is 44/52%, and on healthcare 42/52%. That's the hole he's in, and the question is whether he began to dig himself out, or just kept on digging.

As a speech, I thought it was about as good as I've seen him give. He grappled with one issue after another, gave a lot of specifics, used a lot of compelling contrasts, and presented a pretty good general defense of the idea of healthcare reform. Maybe this is one of those Star Trek moments, where Captain Kirk can make a great speech and convince the evil computer to destroy itself or two alien races locked in mortal combat to look at each other and say: "common, let's give us a hug!" If it is one of those moments, this may have done it.

We won't know for a couple of weeks or so how much good the President did for himself. But I see reason to doubt. The President's supporters think the problem has been his presentation, and if that were true a truly effective speech could make a difference. But I think that the real problem has always been that the various parts of the policy didn't add up. I am not sure that changed tonight.

For example, the President reaffirmed his commitment to the public option with this argument. The public option must be there to cover people who can't afford private insurance or for some reason lose their insurance. It will be entirely funded by fees paid in, and so will not draw revenue from the rest of the budget. He also projected that no more than two percent of the people will sign up for such an option. Is it my imagination or is there a problem here? How can the public option fund itself if the people using it can't afford to pay for it? Can 2% of the population, and not the best off 2%, really support the public option? He certainly made it sound like the public option would support itself, but I just don't see how that could be true.

There also seems to be a contradiction between two ways that the President presents the problem. He tells us, plausibly, that we are already paying for healthcare for the needy, in emergency rooms and elsewhere. So we can just shift from paying badly to paying smartly. But he also wants us to feel deep compassion for all the people who are being left behind, who don't get care because they can't pay for. Maybe that's true, but doesn't it mean we are going to have to pay for more care than anyone is now paying for? Doesn't that mean the reform will require additional revenue?

But the bigger problem is that the President claims that his healthcare plan (which seems to be Senator Max Baucus' plan) will be revenue neutral. It will pay for itself by eliminating waste and inefficiency, and by new taxes on insurance agencies, businesses, and penalties on people who refuse to buy health insurance. The difficulty with that is twofold. First, you have to believe that Washington is somehow going to become much more competent at managing things. The same government that allowed so much waste in the current Medicare system will suddenly root all that waste out. Second, you have to believe that the Administration will honestly and accurately estimate the future costs and revenues of the program and so keep it revenue neutral. This, from the same Administration that recently revised its deficit estimates over the next decade upward by two trillion dollars.

The Administration began its push for healthcare reform by claiming that reform was necessary to get our financial house in order. The agenda has been in deep trouble ever since the CBO reported that the House plan would in fact add massively to the budget deficit. From that moment on, the Democrats in Congress, and the White House, have suffered from a credibility deficit. It is the lack of credibility that produced the dismal and dismally stable polls reported above. I am uncertain that the President did much tonight to restore his credibility.

The rest of the story

I read the president's speech today and there was nothing in it that seemed to justify pulling kids out of school. Indeed, I saw much to appreciate in it. Students may very well benefit from the president's encouragement and his advice to work hard. They might well take heart in his message that sometimes people who have failed succeed later on. Those from poorer families might be inspired by Obama's "rags to riches" story. The only problem with that one is that isn't entirely true – or rather – it isn't the whole truth.

During part of his speech, Obama divulges to his audience that his father deserted his mother when he was two-years-old. He also asserts that he was raised by a single mother who couldn't afford to give him the things other kids had or to send him to school where the American kids went. Therefore, he says, she taught him at home.

That is partially true. Obama's father did leave when he was two, and his mother did give him school lessons at home. But, Obama's parents divorced in 1964 and by 1967, his mother had married Lolo Soetoro. Soetoro worked for the Indonesian government and later for a U.S. oil company. According to the Sun Times, Dunham and Soetoro divorced in the late 1970s. But by 1970, Obama's mother had already sent Obama to live with his grandparents, who enrolled him in the prestigious Punahou School. He attended Punahou until his graduation in 1979. Furthermore, even while Obama's mother was single, she did not care for him alone. Indeed, she had assistance from her parents, particularly her mother Madelyn. It was Madelyn who paid for most of his tuition. Obama's mother may very well have struggled, but most people do. And it didn't keep her from pursuing her own educational goals. She graduated from Harvard. In truth, most kids do not have the kinds of privileges Obama has had. Indeed, many South Dakotan students have had a harder time than he. Most do not have two Harvard graduates for parents. Most do not attend prestigious, private college prep schools. Some do not have wealthy grandparents who can pay for that kind of tuition.

What is sadder is that the real story is more inspiring than the story Obama chose to tell. According to The Washington Post, Madelyn Dunham, who had no college degree, took a job at a bank to help pay for the costs of Obama's birth. She made her way from teller to vice president, and used the money she earned to further Obama's education. Obama himself mentioned that Madelyn Dunham was a little bit afraid of blacks and sometimes made him cringe with her racial stereotyping, but in spite of that, she did everything she could to help him succeed. That is an inspiring story. I wish the kids had been able to hear it.

Global Warming On Hold. Again.

I have never thought of myself as much of a global warming skeptic (not that there's anything wrong with that!). I have over several years of following the issue, mostly accepted the following propositions:

1. The world has been in a long term warming trend; and
2. Human activities are contributing to that warming.

Of course the devil is in the qualifications: whether the trend continues, and how much effect we have. I still hold to number one, but number two has become rather less certain as more research comes online. Weather is the textbook case of a chaotic system, and that means that precise determinations are impossible.

I have also believed in these propositions:

1. We don't know whether further warming will be good or bad on the whole.
2. We just aren't going to do anything significant to arrest the human activities that are said to be driving global warming.
3. The only practical policies are those that are directed toward dealing with climate change, whatever it may be.

Well, number one is addressed in a recent piece in The New Scientist:

Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world's top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.

Now in fact, standard readings of global climate change has been flat or cooling for over a decade. But never mind that. Here is someone who knows his stuff and expects cooling for the next two decades. Now two decades of cooling is a blip on the screen in the long term, but this contradicts everything that we have been told to expect. Did any of the climate projection models project it?

"I am not one of the sceptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it."

… Latif predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans. The cooling would be down to cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. "But how much? The jury is still out," he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a colder phase.

I like those bits about "nasty questions" and "climate-change orthodoxy." In case you are wondering, nasty questions are precisely those that challenge an orthodoxy.

In fact, this undermines the case for anthropogenic global warming over recent decades, which is pretty much the entire case for AGW. And then there is this:

Another favourite climate nostrum was upturned when [Vicky] Pope [from the UK Met Office] warned that the dramatic Arctic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming. Preliminary reports suggest there has been much less melting this year than in 2007 or 2008.

In candid mood, climate scientists avoided blaming nature for their faltering predictions, however. "Model biases are also still a serious problem. We have a long way to go to get them right. They are hurting our forecasts," said Tim Stockdale of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK.

Remember all those frightening stories about ice sheets melting and San Francisco drowning and how it was all our fault? Well, apparently they aren't, and probably it isn't.

And you can't help but love that bit about model biases. The climate change legislation in Europe and Cap and Trade in Congress are based entirely on climate change models. There is no reason any sane person should have such confidence in those models.

The world is unusually warm right now. That is a very good thing. Most of the history of this ball of dirt has been a rather nastier story. We are overdue for an ice age. I will worry about that after the health care bills go down.

There are sensible reasons to be concerned about the effect of human activity on the global climate. The Al Gore Global Warming Orthodoxy has nothing to do with that.

Inspector Lewis Returns to Masterpiece Mystery

For many years House Blanchard turned to public television every Thursday night for Mystery! That British-produced show managed to do something consistently that American film making finds nearly impossible: bring literary characters to life in ways that not only satisfy their original fans but pleasantly surprise and enrich the presence of those characters. David Suchet's perfect Hercule Poirot, Jeremy Brett's exquisite Sherlock Holmes, Roy Marsden as Adam Dalgliesh, all stand out. But my favorite was John Thaw as Colin Dexter's Morse.

Thaw played the brooding and cranky Oxford detective in more films that Dexter wrote stories, I think. I have to say that I think that the ghost written episodes were generally better than Dexter's novels.

Morse had a sidekick: Robbie Lewis. Characteristically, they were opposites. Morse was over-educated, overly enthusiastic about opera, and was overly fond of English beer. He was also bitterly unhappy. Lewis was as unrefined as a bag of fish and chips, but married and generally content with his life. I loved the series from its quirky opening music to the way Morse scowled Lewis's name. The series finally perished with the primary actor.

I have blogged once before about the return of Lewis to Masterpiece Mystery. Kevin Whately is back with second series now running on Sunday nights. The first two episodes of the new season are as good as anything the mystery series has ever done. I hate to say it, I really do, but it's better than Morse. Lewis's character has grown. He is now fond of Wagner (an obvious bit of reverence for his former senior partner), but he still doesn't like to hear Shakespeare quoted when he hasn't had enough sleep. His sidekick James Hathaway (Laurence Fox) is the more educated and predictably less content of the pair. As always, the drama turns on class and pretension, and the insecurities of people in such a system.

Having grown to love Whately's Lewis from the original series, I am delighted with his return. Likewise the Hathaway character grew on me immediately. But the real strength of the series is the writing. It is just magnificent story telling. If you like great TV, this would be it.

What Will the President Say?

This is the point where the Administration is leaking previews of the upcoming speech to various journalists. It has become part of the vetting process, a pre-testing of ideas if you will. So what should we expect, from the pundichatter?

I have noted that this Administration has had an unusually difficult time getting its story straight on policy questions, or providing policy guidance for Congress. In the case of healthcare reform, there are two possible reasons for this. One is that the President isn't good at making up his mind on matters of national policy. Another is no one in the Administration or out of it has yet come up with a comprehensive reform package that is attractive.

What we are hearing now looks to be more of the same. We are hearing that the President intends to draw some "lines in the sand," i.e., tell us what he insists on in a reform package. That would be progress. The Washington Post reports that we should expect a lot of specifics. That would be more progress. The President doesn't have to present us with a finished bill, he just needs to show the outlines of one that has a chance of being enacted.

The Politico has this:

President Barack Obama plans to reach out to Republicans and reassure — rather than confront — his liberal supporters when he addresses an extraordinary joint session of Congress at 8 p.m. ET Wednesday.

Okay… Can he really do that? Reach out to one side without confronting the other? Some clue as to how it might be done is that Obama will say he is in favor of a public option, but understands that it might not be possible. I have heard that at least three times from my TV. But that's not exactly clarifying anything, is it? We are also hearing a lot about the possibility of a "public option trigger." Such a device would put the public option in only as something to be triggered if private health insurance companies don't meet certain goals. But would this be a "hair-trigger," designed so that failure of the private sector is almost assured, and so is a covert way of getting the public option? Or is it an unloaded gun, designed only to reassure the left without confronting it?

I see two real possibilities here. One is that President Obama will come out for a modest healthcare reform package that will close some of the existing gaps in insurance coverage without any big change in the system. That, I think, would be the President's best bet. The second is that he will say nothing at all. If the Libyans gave me a wad of Euros to bet on it, that's where I would place the cash.

Scots Rot 4

As expected, the Lockerbie release story keeps getting better. Convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was released by the government of Scotland on the grounds that he had less than three months to live. This "compassionate release" was cleared by the British Government.

It has been clear for some time that the release was in fact part of a deal worth billions in oil exploration contracts to the British. Prime Minister Gordon Brown vehemently denied that only Wednesday, but now Justice Minister Jack Straw has admitted that there was in fact such a deal.

I noted earlier that the medical opinion on which the decision was based was made by a man with not expertise in terminal prostate cancer. It now turns out that there were three doctors involved, all of them paid by the Libyans. From the London Telegraph:

Medical evidence that helped Megrahi, 57, to be released was paid for by the Libyan government, which encouraged three doctors to say he had only three months to live.

The life expectancy of Megrahi was crucial because, under Scottish rules, prisoners can be freed on compassionate grounds only if they are considered to have this amount of time, or less, to live.

This contrasted with findings of doctors in June and July who had concluded that Megrahi had up to 10 months to live, which would have prevented his release…

Professor Karol Sikora, one of the examining doctors and the medical director of CancerPartnersUK in London, told The Sunday Telegraph: "The figure of three months was suggested as being helpful [by the Libyans].

"To start with I said it was impossible to do that [give a three-month life expectancy estimate] but, when I looked at it, it looked as though it could be done – you could actually say that." He said that he and a second doctor, a Libyan, had legitimately then estimated Megrahi's life expectancy as "about three months". A third doctor would say only that he had a short time to live.

This weekend it was reported that Megrahi was moved out of an emergency care unit in Tripoli.

Don't you just love these lines:

"To start with I said it was impossible to do that [give a three-month life expectancy estimate] but, when I looked at it, it looked as though it could be done – you could actually say that."

Can't you almost hear the suitcase full of Euros flipping open, and someone scooping up wads of bills rubber banded together? How big a pile a cash did it take before the doctor could "actually say" what the Libyans wanted him to say?

What is wrong with these people? If you are going to try to pull what the Brown Government tried in this case, couldn't you at least find a bleedin' middle man between the Libyans and the medi-stooge? I mean the guy was National Health Service, right? Is the Brown Government really so broke it couldn't bribe him itself?

This has all the makings of a musical. But now a man who murdered two hundred and seventy people is out on the streets in Tripoli. The scores better be really good.

Van Jones Resigns. Now is it a story?

Bowing to pressure from South Dakota Politics, Van Jones resigned as Green Jobs Czar. Come to think of it, Green Jobs Czar would be a good title for a rock band. Naw, too much like Green Day.

Suddenly this is a story. The WaPo, which up until Friday hadn't printed a word about it, says that Jones was ousted for his "activism." In fact, he was ousted because he has been a left wing nut. Likewise the New York Times broke its silence this morning… ah, nine minutes ago according to the online screen.

So as Mickey Kaus points out, if you depended on the print edition of these two papers, or some smaller paper that recycles their stories on its Front Page, you would have had no idea this morning who Van Jones was or why he was in trouble. Nor would you have learned about this from the three major networks, all of whom ignored the story as well. If you depended on ABC Online, you would have to leave the "News" page and go to the Politics page and look very closely to see the network's first coverage of the story. Likewise NBC and CBS spiked the story until this morning.

Now here's my question: if this is big enough to result in the resignation of a "Czar," last night, wasn't it a big enough story to mention a couple of days ago? According to Byron York, neither newspaper nor the three networks had issued a word on this as late as Friday. The major news sources were trying to protect the President.

Of course you have known about the story all week if you get your news from the internet… or Fox!

Warning Signs for Democrats

I do not know what is going to happen in November of 2010. I do know that the signs for the Democrats are very ominous just right now. Analyst Charlie Cook has the best thing I have seen on this, from the National Journal:

Listening to two briefings -- one by a Democratic pollster who had just conducted a survey for a group favoring health care reform, the other by a Republican pollster more skeptical of the reform plans -- I felt as if I were hearing a pair of reports by the National Transportation Safety Board on the same plane crash…

Independent voters -- fired up by the war in Iraq and Republican scandals -- gave Democrats control of both chambers of Congress in 2006. Two years later, independents upset with President Bush and eager to give his party another kick expanded the Democratic majorities on the Hill. Late in the campaign, the economic downturn, together with an influx of young people and minorities enthusiastic about Obama, created a wave that left the GOP in ruins.

That was then; this is now. For the seven weeks from mid-April through the first week of June, Obama's weekly Gallup Poll approval rating among independents ran in the 60-to-70 percent range. But in four of the past five weeks, it has been only in the mid-to-high 40s. Meanwhile, Democrats and liberals seem lethargic even though Republicans and conservatives are spitting nails and can't wait to vote.

Cook thinks that two intertwined concerns are at the root of this shift: a concern for our economic future, and a fear of a dramatic enlargement of government. I suspect he's right on both counts, as this helps explain the wreck that the Democrats have so far made of healthcare reform. And here is the crescendo:

With 14 months to go before the 2010 midterm election, something could happen to improve the outlook for Democrats. However, wave elections, more often than not, start just like this: The president's ratings plummet; his party loses its advantage on the generic congressional ballot test; the intensity of opposition-party voters skyrockets; his own party's voters become complacent or even depressed; and independent voters move lopsidedly away. These were the early-warning signs of past wave elections. Seeing them now should terrify Democrats.

If you are a Republican, this probably puts the wind in your sails. That calls for some reserve at this point. If you are a Democrat, be afraid. Be very afraid.

One indication that the tide has shifted against the elder party is that so many signs seem to be going south at the same time. I have pointed out the apparent advantage of Republican candidates in statehouse races in Virginia and New Jersey, and the alarming poll numbers for Senator Harry Reid. But this next one came out of left field.

Mickey Kaus notes these "gruesome" poll numbers concerning approval of labor unions. From Gallup:

Gallup finds organized labor taking a significant image hit in the past year. While 66% of Americans continue to believe unions are beneficial to their own members, a slight majority now say unions hurt the nation's economy. More broadly, fewer than half of Americans -- 48%, an all-time low -- approve of labor unions, down from 59% a year ago.

Is it really good news for "organized labor's image" that 66% of Americans think that unions are beneficial to their own members, as that second sentence seems to suggest? In fact, Gallup's measure of public approval for labor unions has never dropped below fifty percent, until now. That looks to me like a shift in the plates underlying the political scene. Here is an historical graph:

The same shift among independents mentioned above occurs here as well.  Here is a second Gallup chart:

The shift among independents is tectonic. 

A little political science perspective here: both Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher (praised be her name!) cemented their political positions and turned their respective economies around by taking firm action against obstinate unions. Barack Obama, by contrast, began his term in office by bailing out the dysfunctional automobile giants. The U.S. Government spent billions to take control of a major industry. See fear of government expansion above. And the automobile worker unions? Not so much as a pay cut. Well, at least it was beneficial to union members.

If the Democrats do take a bath next year, we may look back at the car bailout, not healthcare or cap and trade, as the big mistake.

The Pledge

I said in an earlier post that if Obama simply meant to encourage kids to stay in school, then the protests of the parents who threatened to pull their kids out of class were a little overboard. I didn't know at that time that the "I Pledge" video would accompany that speech. The "I Pledge" video features a number of celebrities who pledge to do cute things like buy hybrid cars and smile at their neighbours. Mixed in with those things are some more worrying pledges. "I pledge to advance stem-cell research," "I pledge to be a servant to our president," "I pledge to be of service to Barak Obama."

Stem-cell research has nothing to do with keeping kids in school and a lot of people oppose certain forms of it. I oppose embryonic stem cell research, because I believe that unborn babies are endowed by their creator with the same rights as those of us who are already born. I know that some liberals disagree with that idea. But if George W. Bush had done something similar to try to get kids to oppose abortion, I have a feeling a lot of people on the left would have howled in protest.

What should be worrying to people on both sides of the aisle is that these celebrities are trying to convince school kids that it is cool to be a servant to the president. It is not cool. We are not Obama's servants. Elected officials, as many are pointing out, are supposed to be public servants, they are not supposed to try to make servants of us. We fought a war for our freedom. We won't give it up just because Demi Moore thinks that's cool. Now, as for the speech itself, it might still be ok. But after seeing this video, I understand the parent protesters a little better.

Here's the video:

The Not Ready for Primetime President?

No one can blame President Obama for not measuring up to the hype that he created during his campaign. It did seem to some observers, like myself, that the campaign was unusually impressionistic. We got a lot of great images and themes, but very little detail. I noticed that this didn't change once Obama moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. One official after another had to face the press or Congress and admit that, on whatever issue was up, the Administration wasn't ready to say exactly what it intended to do about it.

The progress of the President's major legislative initiatives suggested the same pattern. The stimulus package threw a gargantuan pile of money to Congress, but included no plan for how the money might be spent so as best to, well, stimulate. Little guidance came from the White House on Cap and Trade, and the same would be true of healthcare legislation.

So now here we are in September. Six months of work on healthcare reform has produced something resembling a frozen hard drive in Washington. So the President is going to address a joint session of Congress to try to reboot the system. Here is what Ezra Klein of the Washington Post reports:

This is health-care reform's endgame, or close to it. Next Wednesday, Barack Obama will give a prime-time address before both houses of Congress. But that's not all he's giving Congress. The administration is going to put a plan down on paper. The question is what it will say.

Conversations with a number of White House officials make it clear that, at this point, even they don't know. The argument was raging as recently as last night, and appears to have hardened into two main camps. Both camps agree that the cost of the bill has to come down. The question is how much, and what can be sacrificed.

Now can it really be true that the President has scheduled an address before Congress and has no idea what he is going to say? You might think that the Administration would have a plan B in reserve, ready to go with a little polishing and adjustment for circumstances. But of course that presumes that they had a plan A, which doesn't seem to be the case.

This is the point that the President should be leaking his healthcare reform plan to members of Congress, who could then leak it to the Press. His speech would be less of a surprise that way, but at least there would be less chance of a very unpleasant surprise. But if anything like that is going on it isn't getting out, which rather defeats the purpose.

Of course it may be that the President has some wonderful surprise in store for us. Maybe he can really explain how he will extend health insurance coverage to all Americans, preserve choices, and all without raising taxes on most of us or putting any additional burden on the budget. Or more likely, he will announce a much reduced legislative agenda (one that may or may not be enacted), declare victory, and go home.

I don't know what will happen, but what I expect is what we have heard from the President before. Here is this from CBS:

Yesterday's CBS News poll provided the White House with stark new evidence that despite it's best efforts, 60 percent of those surveyed say President Obama has failed to clearly explain his plans for health care reform. Asked if they understand his ideas, 67 percent said "no, they're confusing." (Read more from the poll here)

But it's not for lack of trying. Our CBS News tally shows that Mr. Obama has given 27 speeches specifically on his health care objectives. Add in other remarks, events and statements in which he mentioned health care and the number soars to 119.

The President has done nothing to advance the debate. His speeches only reflect the currents that are already well-apparent. Maybe we will get more this week. But just right now, Barack Obama is starting to look like an empty suit.

Time for Democrats to Jettison Leaky Cargo

The fact that "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones called Republicans a bunch of assholes doesn't bother me at all. I've heard worse from some of my relatives. The fact that we have a Green Jobs Czar bothers me more than a little. We might as well have a Minister of Fairies.

It turns out that we do have a Minister of Fairies. Here is a note from the Washington Times:

Mr. Jones signed a statement for 911Truth.org in 2004 demanding an investigation into what the Bush Administration may have done that "deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."

His name is listed with 99 other prominent signatories supporting such an investigation on the 911Truth.org website, including Code Pink co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodi Evans, comedienne Janeane Garofalo, Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia and others. He's identified as the executive director for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights on the statement, which he founded before going to the White House.

Conservatives have been quick to compare "truthers" with "birthers," people who think that George W. arranged the 9/11 attack with people who think Obama was born in Kenya. On one level, the two are indeed equivalent. They are both a bunch of goofballs. On another level, there is no equivalence. Truthers accuse the American government of an atrocity. Birthers accuse Barack Obama of cheating on one qualification for being President. Both are bad. The former is much, much worse.

Mr. Jones has every right to his wacky opinions. He has no business serving in an Administration. This is a very bad job of vetting, and the President should correct it immediately. He doesn't need and unpleasant distraction.

And then there's Charlie Rangel. The Democrats are suffering grievous damage right now and can't afford to have at the helm of one of the most powerful House committees (Ways and Means) an admitted tax cheat. The Washington Post is calling for his resignation.

Mr. Rangel's amended financial disclosure form, which exposes omissions from his 2002 through 2006 records, is a treasure trove of outrage. He neglected to report a checking account with the Congressional Federal Credit Union and one with Merrill Lynch, each valued between $250,000 and $500,000; the tens of thousands of dollars he's earning from dividends from a number of mutual funds and stocks; and the money made from the sale of a Harlem townhouse. As a result, Mr. Rangel's reported net worth doubled, from between $516,015 and $1,316,000 to between $1,028,024 and $2,495,000.

We called on Mr. Rangel to resign his coveted post last November while the House ethics committee probed his contact with a potential donor to a pet project who also had business before the committee. Mind you, that committee already was looking into his using official stationery to raise funds for that pet project, paying below-market rents on four Harlem apartments, failing to report income from a Florida condominium sale and failing to pay taxes on a home in the Dominican Republic. There's another subcommittee investigation into lobbyist-paid trips by Mr. Rangel and four other members of Congress.

Rangel discredits the House leadership. Speaker Pelosi should take immediate action to remove him from his post. It is a sign of dysfunction in the majority party that this hasn't been done long before. If he isn't nudged out now, I think that means that the Democrats are incapable of putting their act together.

Dallas parents push Obama speech out of kids' classrooms

Today, The Dallas Morning News reported that several Texas school districts had become “inundated with hundreds of phone calls from parents urging them to not show Obama's speech at school.” Some parents even threatened to keep their kids home if the speech was aired in their classrooms. Several schools have agreed not to air the speech, while others have decided to air in only in the library, where students can choose to watch it if they wish.

Part of the problem for Dallas parents, was that the schools handed out lesson plans to go with the speech that asked students if Obama had inspired or challenged them to do anything. This, for some, looked too much like asking students to agree with Obama’s policies. Indeed, The Morning News quotes one father, as saying the following:

 It's dangerous grounds for a president to ask students to advocate his policies for reform for education. That's exactly what he's doing.

I think that the reaction in this case was a little overboard. In my opinion, students should be able to see what goes on in government. Exposing them to current events is far more likely to make them interested in politics than shoving social studies books under their noses. But I like the fact that the schools listened to the wishes of the parents and I think that perhaps, the study guides could have been worded differently. Perhaps they could have had places for students to write out what they agreed with in the speech, as well as what they disagreed with.

I do not think it is right for schools try to make kids adopt certain political stances. My sister, who is in elementary school, was asked last year to send a letter to her superintendant urging him to implement a recycling program in her school. I don’t have anything against recycling. In fact, I rather like it, but teachers and schools have no right to make students advocate the policies they favor. So I understand why these parents are upset.

What is also interesting about this case is that it is almost certainly a grassroots protest. Nancy Pelosi would have a very hard time arguing that this was “Astroturf.” Private citizens are wary of Obama’s influence and they are showing it.

Death Panels

President Obama has scheduled an address before a joint session of Congress. The subject is health care reform. He is hoping to revive the patient. The word on the street is that he is going to give up the public option. What that will leave is anyone's guess. The Administration is promising more detail and a specific plan, but if the President really delivers that we will have to verify his identity with DNA tests.

Meanwhile bad news keeps pouring in. Sarah Palin has made a big issue out of the "death panels" that would supposedly be deciding the fate of elderly Americans if Obamacare passes. Governor Palin was being creative, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have a point. Would expanded, government paid healthcare create pressures to prematurely usher some sick patients into that good night in order to balance that good budget? To effectively answer her charge you would have to squarely face the issue of rationing, and no one in the Democratic Party has come close to doing that.

So this story from the London Telegraph is very disturbing.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a "national crisis" in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke's cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

"Forecasting death is an inexact science,"they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death "without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.

"As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients."

The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS.

Sarah Palin was right to worry. I happen to think that a rational and just way of dealing with this problem is possible. At some point in the care of some dying patients, it make sense to turn off the life saving technology and turn on the pleasant dreams. But when budgetary pressures build on a healthcare system, as they have built on England's NHS, there will be inevitable pressure to hasten the process. That has to be addressed.

If healthcare reform is failing, as I think it is, it is in part because the President had not the courage to openly address such questions.

California Leavin’

"Boy, your winters are really dreary here," my husband observed today as he looked out at the rain. "And it's only September." He is right. South Dakota has much drearier weather than a Californian is accustomed to. Here, we lack citrus trees and palms and we cannot take a day trip to the ocean side. And yet, in many ways, South Dakota is much less dreary than California.

California is now bankrupt. The state is issuing IOUs to many of its creditors and employees. But according to The Wall Street Journal many banks will no longer accept them. Foreclosures are common, but still, many cannot afford to buy suitable homes. And while many flocked to California during the great depression, hoping it was a land of opportunity, now many are emigrating from the state (NBC Bay Area).

It's not hard to see why. The cost of living is high and so is the unemployment rate. More people are leaving than are coming. And no other state lost as many residents. According to NBC Bay Area, California may lose a seat in congress for the first time in history. The state lost over 100,000 jobs last year, and this year, layoffs will continue.

One of the programs California overspent on was its Heathcare system. California has "public options" for its less wealthy citizens. The poorest residents qualify for Medi-cal, so do certain people with pre-existing conditions like pregnancy. Those who make too much money to qualify for Medical can put their children on the Healthy Families program, where parents can pay premiums of $18 a month for insurance subsidized by taxpayers. This sounds wonderful – and it is, until you realize that these programs are neither cheap nor free. Now, it's true that not all of California's economic woes were caused by its healthcare programs. The state also spent, as Bobby Darin sings in his rendition of Mac the Knife, "like a sailor". Its residents voted "yes" on nearly every bond measure. But the Obama administration also seems ready to spend liberally.

So I can't help but wonder – can the nation afford the public option? California went bankrupt as it attempted to support such an option for just its poorest groups. If we provide such an option, not only for the poor, but also for the rich, what kind of a burden will we really be bearing?

Still, right now, it looks like South Dakota's future looks sunnier (even if fall is approaching) and I am happy to be back.

Afghanistan

Allow me a moment for Kipling:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plain,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
and go to your Gawd like a solider.

I think I got that about right. It's good to recall it when you are thinking about this place where geopolitical ambitions go to die.

The moment that President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan became the good and necessary war. It's easy to forget that, up to that moment, the left in the U.S. and Europe hadn't thought it was any good at all. The fact that the U.S. had been attacked by Al Qaeda, which at that time was operating in tandem with the Taliban government in Kabul, didn't much matter to the New Statesman in Britain. I think the American left was more cautious, though I recall walking into a colleague's office during the early stages of the Afghanistan war. He was sure that George W. had made a terrible mistake, and that we were in a quagmire.

After the invasion of Iraq, all that changed. Iraq was the distraction. Afghanistan was the war we should have been fighting. That is still a plausible claim. But now that we are concentrating on Afghanistan, because George W., idiot though he was, managed to defeat the insurgency in Iraq, the left is no longer the least bit enthusiastic. From the Politico:

White House officials are increasingly worried liberal, anti-war Democrats will demand a premature end to the Afghanistan war before President Barack Obama can show signs of progress in the eight-year conflict, according to senior administration sources.

These fears, which the officials have discussed on the condition of anonymity over the past few weeks, are rising fast after U.S. casualties hit record levels in July and August.

The Left's brief approval of the Afghanistan war was entirely tactical. It allowed Democrats in particular to be in favor of defending the U.S. with military force while vehemently criticizing the war we were actually fighting. The left is congenitally incapable of any enthusiasm for making war against our enemies.

None of this tells us what we should do in Afghanistan. George Will has come out in favor of withdrawal, and he may be right. Afghanistan is a country without railroads. It hasn't even gotten to the wild, wild, West moment in development.

We are going to have to decide pretty soon what to do about this. The left has no policy but "no!" I can't wait to see what the Obama Administration does.

Headlines Worth Noting

All that and bigamy too?

Kennedy's wives stood by him in trying times

But no doubt they will stand by him in trying times:

Multiple bigamist arrested after marrying 14 women in just two-and a-half years

Maybe the Democrat's healthcare bill provide for more astropsychological therapists?

Suicidal planet seems on death spiral into star

Is it really old enough to drive?

Swine flu vaccine awaits license in UK

The vacant gaze gave her away.

Naked model arrested in museum full of nudes

Apparently, Mordor was farther from the Shire than Gandalf thought.

Hobbits 'walked out of Africa two million years ago'

Looking for a job, guys? You qualify for this one.

Police seek man for masturbating in mall parking lot

One more blow for Corn rights.

Redfield ethanol plant to manage itself

Proof that God continues to speak to man, or at least to conservative evangelicals.

Top-Selling Bible to Undergo Revision: New International Version, Preferred by Conservative Evangelicals, Will be Updated