Category Archives: Politics

Calling the administration to account

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During and (especially) after last year’s presidential campaign, there was much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth on the Republican side of the aisle about how the Democrats were so much more hip to social media and Web 2.0 and texting and so on, and how far behind the Republicans were and how much of a disadvantage they were at as a consequence, and how hard the party would have to work to catch up. I’m not sure anyone went quite so far as to claim that this was the only reason Barack Obama won, but there were a few folks who seemed to be thinking that (as there are always people looking to blame the unexpected on something they consider to be a gimmick).

Now, I think we can safely say that at least one prominent Republican gets it: Sarah Palin. As governor of Alaska, she used Twitter to keep Alaskans up on what she was doing and what was going on—as well as giving quick, incisive comments on broader political issues—and won a large number of followers in so doing. Now that she’s left office, she’s turned from the scalpel to the sword, using her Facebook account to go to war with the current administration in Washington, DC, primarily over their efforts to deform the American health-care system; and though she’s wielded Facebook like a rapier, her blows have fallen on the administration’s efforts like great strokes from a claymore, depriving them of momentum and putting them on the defensive. For those of us who think Obamacare is the wrong approach at the wrong time and will only make matters worse, this is a very good thing, a nice change from politics as usual, and reason for real hope.

Just because her focus of late has been on health care (which is, after all, the domestic political issue at the moment), though, doesn’t mean she has nothing else to talk about; energy is still a signature issue for her as well, and so when the Obama administration used the Export-Import Bank to commit $2 billion in loans to fund offshore drilling—in Brazil—she was quick to offer the following comment:

Today’s Wall Street Journal contains some puzzling news for all Americans who are impacted by high energy prices and who share the goal of moving us toward energy independence.

For years, states rich with an abundance of oil and natural gas have been begging Washington, DC politicians for the right to develop their own natural resources on federal lands and off shore. Such development would mean good paying jobs here in the United States (with health benefits) and the resulting royalties and taxes would provide money for federal coffers that would potentially off-set the need for higher income taxes, reduce the federal debt and deficits, or even help fund a trillion dollar health care plan if one were so inclined to support such a plan.

So why is it that during these tough times, when we have great needs at home, the Obama White House is prepared to send more than two billion of your hard-earned tax dollars to Brazil so that the nation’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, can drill off shore and create jobs developing its own resources? That’s all Americans want; but such rational energy development has been continually thwarted by rabid environmentalists, faceless bureaucrats and a seemingly endless parade of lawsuits aimed at shutting down new energy projects.

I’ll speak for the talent I have personally witnessed on the oil fields in Alaska when I say no other country in the world has a stronger workforce than America, no other country in the world has better safety standards than America, and no other country in the world has stricter environmental standards than America. Come to Alaska to witness how oil and gas can be developed simultaneously with the preservation of our eco-system. America has the resources. We deserve the opportunity to develop our resources no less than the Brazilians. Millions of Americans know it is true: “Drill, baby, drill.” Alaska is proof you can drill and develop, and preserve nature, with its magnificent caribou herds passing by the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), completely unaffected. One has to wonder if Obama is playing politics and perhaps refusing a “win” for some states just to play to the left with our money.

The new Gulf of Mexico lease sales tomorrow sound promising and perhaps will move some states in the right direction, but we all know that the extreme environmentalists who serve to block progress elsewhere, including in Alaska, continue to block opportunities. These environmentalists are putting our nation in peril and forcing us to rely on unstable and hostile foreign countries. Mr. Obama can stop the extreme tactics and exert proper government authority to encourage resource development and create jobs and health benefits in the U.S.; instead, he chooses to use American dollars in Brazil that will help to pay the salaries and benefits for Brazilians to drill for resources when the need and desire is great in America.

Buy American is a wonderful slogan, but you can’t say in one breath that you want to strengthen our economy and stimulate it, and then in another ship our much-needed dollars to a nation desperate to drill while depriving us of the same opportunity.

—Sarah Palin

Now, this is not to say that this is a bad deal; in fact, though the Ex-Im Bank doesn’t have a great record, there are some very strong reasons to be very glad the administration made this move. They probably have other reasons as well (such as the fact that it will pump a lot of money into George Soros’ pocket), but those don’t invalidate the deal by any means. It is to say, though, that this deal calls into question the administration’s stance against energy development in the US, because there is simply no coherent way to support offshore drilling in Brazil and at the same time oppose new drilling off the Gulf Coast, in the Chukchi Sea, or in ANWR.

At least, there’s no coherent economic or environmental argument for doing so; which suggests that those aren’t the arguments that really matter to the White House.

Links on Obamacare

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“Essential Reading” Department:

David Goldhill, “How American Health Care Killed My Father”
Yes, it’s 10,000 words. It’s also the most important thing you’re likely to read about the state of our health care system. I’ll be posting on this article in some detail when I have the time.

John Schwenkler, “Maybe the Best Thing I’ve Read on Health Care Reform”
Consider this the SparkNotes/CliffNotes version of Goldhill’s article.

Sally Pipes, “Top Ten Myths of American Health Care”
Good debunking of the current CW. Warning: it’s a PDF.

Megan McArdle, “Why I Oppose National Health Care”
“Once we’ve got a comprehensive national health care plan, what are the government’s incentives? I think they’re bad, for the same reason the TSA is bad. I’m afraid that instead of Security Theater, we’ll get Health Care Theater, where the government goes to elaborate lengths to convince us that we’re getting the best possible health care, without actually providing it.”

 

“Where Did You Get Your Medical Degree” Department:

Scott Gottlieb, “Obama and the Practice of Medicine”
Are bureaucrats really more qualified than doctors to make these decisions?

 

“Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game?” Department:

Caroline Baum: “Obama Goes Postal, Lands in Dead-Letter Office”
So comparing the “public option” to the Postal Service is supposed to make us like the idea?

Jay Cost: “Obama Misread His Mandate”
One of our few great political analysts says the administration doesn’t have the mandate it seems to think it has . . .

Dorothy Rabinowitz: “Obama’s Tone-Deaf Health Campaign”
. . . but the ineptitude of its salesmanship so far isn’t helping its case any, either.

 

“Sarah Palin Was Right” Department:

Mark Steyn: “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death Panels”
“Government ‘panels’ making ‘rulings’ over your body: Acceptance of that concept is what counts.”

Andy McCarthy: The right interpretive framework
“Raising these issues hit the right notes: they gave people a prism for understanding the big picture of Obamacare.”

Thomas Sowell: Whose Medical Decisions?
Daniel Terrapin summarized this one nicely: “Call it what you like, ‘death panels’ will be the end result.”

Mark Steyn: You’ve Had a Good Innings
“Ultimately, government health care represents the nationalization of your body.”

Pundette: “Sen. Diaz doesn’t like euthanasia vibes he gets from House bill”
Just a reminder that Gov. Palin didn’t make this up.

Robert D. Novak, RIP

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Robert Novak, longtime reporter, columnist, and commentator, died this morning at the age of 78 after a year-long battle with brain cancer; our country is the poorer for the loss of his voice. Like Tim Russert, Novak was one of the rare media figures who made a real difference in the politics of this country; like Russert’s fellow Buffalonian (or whatever would be the proper term for someone from Buffalo, NY) Jack Kemp, an old friend of Novak’s and one of the few politicians he liked and respected, it’s hard to imagine the Reagan Revolution happening without him. As Kenneth Tomlinson points out in his Human Events piece on Novak,

Novak was the journalistic godfather of the supply-side movement, and his columns gave political legitimacy to Kemp’s 30% tax-rate cut proposal that would, at the 11th hour, make it into Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign offerings.

And like both Russert and Kemp, Novak was a good man who remained uncorrupted by Washington, DC and its ways.

Novak was a conservative icon, but he was much more than that; as Tomlinson says,

Novak worked political sources like no other reporter. That is why so many people would be astonished when his political sources would become known. . . . Who would have imagined that Novak’s source for the Valerie Plame CIA column was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s No.2 and certainly no friend of the Bush White House. . . .

Bob Novak was first and always a reporter, and that is what made the politics of his column so appealing for conservatives and liberals alike.

The Chicago Sun-Times bears witness to this as well in the statement from its editorial board:

Bob was a relentless reporter. His political columns were marked by his determination to dig out new information, behind-the-scenes anecdotes and Washington secrets to tell us something we didn’t know. He combined that with sharp analysis, insightful commentary and passion about the issues facing the nation to emerge as a brawling contestant in the great national debates of his era. . . .

But more than that, his contributions to the great debates of the day demonstrated that Bob was someone who thought deeply about his country, its system of government and the challenges both faced. . . .

Bob most definitely was a conservative, though he never let his political inclinations blind him to what he saw as the realities of the world, even when it angered his natural allies. . . .

We at the Sun-Times will remember Bob as a generous friend and colleague, a tireless workhorse, an innovator in journalism and an example of how to practice our profession. His most enduring legacy, though, may well be his work to pass down generation to generation his love of this country, its traditions and its values that guided his life and work.

There is, as always, more that could be said, and folks like Michael Barone and Mark Tapscotthave good things to say. The most important thing, though, is that Novak (a late-in-life convert to Catholicism) was all about finding the truth, and would go wherever he believed it led. Tapscott relays this anecdote from Mal Kline that captures it all:

When the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, Novak did not become a pushover for the new GOP majority. “Bob, your problem is that you’ve been on defense so long that you don’t know what to do when your team is on offense,” a Republican congressman told Novak at the time. Novak smiled and said, “I’m not on your team.”

Given how that majority ended up, one can only wish that more conservatives had taken that attitude.

HT: Michelle Malkin

Update: I had to add this from Larry Kudlow:

Bob had a lot of opinions—conservative opinions; Reaganesque opinions. But his pursuit of journalistic detail, facts, scoops, and stories that no one else got was remarkable. He was “old school” in this respect, which is why he was so esteemed by political allies and critics alike.

Shoe leather is a term that comes to mind, and doggedness, and very hard work. Bob had a deep distrust of government. But even during the Reagan years, when I confess to being a source, Bob would write tough stories about the administration he supported. That was the thing about Bob: He was both a conservative icon in terms of his unswerving political beliefs, and a journalistic icon in terms of his unyielding tradecraft. . . .

Over the past twelve years Bob became a strong and devout traditional Catholic. He converted at the age of 66 as he came to grips with faith and embraced Jesus Christ. He did so on very personal terms, without any drama, but his belief was strong and deep. He came to believe that Christ died for us and our sins and for our salvation. As he looked back on his own life, and his several brushes with death, he came to understand that Jesus saved him and had a purpose for him.

Requiescat in pace, Robert Novak.

Health care, Whole Foods style

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John Mackey, the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods, lays out eight reforms that would significantly reduce the cost of health care without ballooning the federal debt.

  • Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).
  • Equalize the tax laws so that that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits.
  • Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines.
  • Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover.
  • Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
  • Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.
  • Enact Medicare reform.
  • Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

I think he’s spot-on with this (and of course, in the piece, he goes into each in more detail); these reforms would remove most of the things that are currently driving up the cost of health care. Mackey goes beyond these as well to offer some additional thoughts and comments; most interesting to me are these, rooted in Whole Foods’ experience.

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are currently waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment, according to a report last month in Investor’s Business Daily. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million.

At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an “intrinsic right to health care”? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.

Absolutely correct. Read the whole thing.

Dispatches from the health-care front

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As the ABC News website tells the story (HT: C4P commenter William Collins),

The news from Barbara Wagner’s doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company was crushing.

The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay.

What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50.

“It was horrible,” Wagner told ABCNews.com. “I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won’t give you the medication to live.”

Barbara Wagner is not alone in this experience.

“It’s been tough,” said her daughter, Susie May, who burst into tears while talking to ABCNews.com. “I was the first person my mom called when she got the letter,” said May, 42. “While I was telling her, ‘Mom, it will be ok,’ I was crying, but trying to stay brave for her.”

“I’ve talked to so many people who have gone through the same problems with the Oregon Health Plan,” she said.

Indeed, Randy Stroup, a 53-year-old Dexter resident with terminal prostate cancer, learned recently that his doctor’s request for the drug mitoxantrone had been rejected. The treatment, while not a cure, could ease Stroup’s pain and extend his life by six months.

“What is six months of life worth?” he asked in a report in the Eugene Register-Guard. “To me it’s worth a lot. This is my life they’re playing with.”

The thing is, though, to the state of Oregon, six months of these people’s lives isn’t worth much of anything—and it’s the state of Oregon that’s paying the bills. The inevitable result of this, asSarah Palin has been pointing out, is that a dollar value is placed on human life; if the cost of keeping someone alive is higher than that dollar value, then their life is judged “not worth living.” The logical thing to do in that case is to maximize savings and simplify the situation by encouraging the patient to accept euthanasia. This time, euthanasia advocates apologized for this in the case of Barbara Wagner—not because they believed they were wrong, but because the encouragement was offered with “insensitivity,” without “the human touch.” Next time? Who knows?

There’s a reason that in her first Facebook note on this subject, Gov. Palin’s thoughts went immediately to her son Trig: this sort of attitude is already dominant in the medical response to Down Syndrome babies. There’s a reason why over 90% of such babies are aborted, and it isn’t all about what the parents think or want, let me tell you. Or, better, let Gretchen tell you, from her post “Remembering” on the group blog Beautiful Work (HT: Jared Wilson):

It was 2 years ago this month that I was sitting in a chair looking at my unborn baby in 4D. She was precious! We had previously found out that our baby had several “markers” for down syndrome and had enlarged kidneys which may have required surgery upon birth. Thus we were monitored more carefully and had a ton more ultrasound shots at a hospital. This was the first level 3 ultrasound with this pregnancy (I had had one with my 3rd with no problems). I got to gaze upon my baby for almost a full hour—it was wonderful! I was there alone as my husband was out of town. The specialist doctor called me in after the ultrasound to go over the findings. The first words out of his mouth to me were “Well you will have to come in tomorrow for your abortion because of how far along you are.” I was utterly shocked and devastated. All I could do was mutter “What??????” He then proceeded to tell me that my baby had more “markers” for down syndrome and it didn’t look good. I was more shocked that his automatic assumption was that I would abort my baby. I almost couldn’t comprehend what he was telling me in that office. All I wanted to do was run as far away from that man as possible.

Read the whole post—it’s well worth it. Like the Palins, Gretchen and her husband opted to have the baby. The irony of their story is that their baby was born two years ago . . . without Down Syndrome, and in fact with no medical issues whatsoever. The automatic reflex of the medical system would have aborted a perfectly healthy little girl.

In all this, I think the reactions of Wagner’s ex-husband Dennis, on the one hand, and euthanasia advocate Derek Humphry, on the other (both quoted in the ABC News article), are telling. Here’s Humphry:

People cling to life and look for every sort of crazy cure to keep alive and usually they are better off not to have done it.

In other words, Humphry believes, people are better off dying than fighting to live. By contrast, here’s Dennis Wagner:

My reaction is pretty typical. I am sick and tired of the dollar being the bottom line of everything. We need to put human life above the dollar.

As it happens, I do believe his reaction is pretty typical among most folks; and in my experience, Humphry’s attitude is usually lurking in there among advocates of euthanasia, even if most of them can’t afford to be as blunt about it as the founder of the Hemlock Society, a man who has already “assisted” one wife into the grave. This really is the line between the sides here.

Now, at this point, you might be thinking that this doesn’t affect you all that much, because the concept of euthanasia doesn’t really bother you that much. What you need to understand, though, is that assigning dollar values to human lives corrupts the whole system—the extent to which that already happens with our private insurance bureaucracy is part of the problem with our health care system—and that when it’s the government doing the assigning, there’s no way to counterbalance that corruption, so it spreads unchecked. As is always the way with consequences propagating through a complex system, that produces changes beyond those which we have already thought to expect.

For instance, in that same first Facebook note, Gov. Palin pointed out a very important point made by Thomas Sowell: “Government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost.” She went on from there, as most critics have, to point out that this will inevitably result in the rationing of health care—and so it will, as it always does. But that will not be the only effect of this new reality if Obamacare goes into effect. C4P‘s Doug Brady has also pointed out that the US health care system drives most of the world’s medical innovation, including the creation of new drugs, and that government price controls will bring an end to most of that innovation. This too is true, and important; but it too is only part of the cost of price controls. It’s not merely that price controls will limit who receives medical care, or that they will depress the future potential of that care; they will also, over time, reduce the present value of that care.

To illustrate this, I want to take you inside a world which I hope is unfamiliar to most of you: that of the neo-natal intensive care unit, or NICU (pronounced “nick-you”). Specifically, I want to tell you a couple stories from the Canadian NICU experience. One, highlighted by Mark Steyn a couple months ago, comes from Hamilton, Ontario:

Hamilton’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph’s Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.

A provincewide search for an open NICU bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two-pound, four-ounce preemie to Buffalo that evening.

Steyn comments,

Well, it would be unreasonable to expect Hamilton, a city of half-a-million people just down the road from Canada’s largest city (Greater Toronto Area, 5.5 million) in the most densely populated part of Canada’s most populous province (Ontario, 13 million people) to be able to offer the same level of neonatal care as Buffalo, a post-industrial ruin in steep population decline for half a century.

Unfortunately, as Steyn goes on to point out, whenever the Canadian government starts outsourcing its health care to the US, that creates additional complications:

When a decrepit and incompetent Canadian health bureaucracy meets a boneheaded and inhuman American border “security” bureaucracy, you’ll be getting a birth experience you’ll treasure forever:

Her parents, Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson, couldn’t follow their baby because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States. They’re having to approve medical procedures over the phone and are terrified something will happen to their baby before they get there.

Once Buffalo enjoys the benefits of Hamilton-level health care, I wonder where Ontario will be shipping the preemies to. Costa Rica?

The other story I want to tell you is my own. Our oldest daughter has dual US/Canadian citizenship by virtue of having been born in Vancouver, BC; I was a student in the country at the time, so we spent five years as net beneficiaries of the Canadian health care system. I’m not going to demonize it or try to deny its virtues; combined with the medical benefits my wife received for her job, she was without question our cheapest baby despite spending the first two weeks of her life in the NICU. Yet, as I wrote last summer, there were some enormous downsides to the system as well.

We had some truly brilliant doctors, and some wonderful nurses, and the staff at BC Children’s Hospital were beyond superb; they cared deeply about their tiny patients and were past masters at making bricks without straw. The thing is, they had to be.

The equipment was junk—they finally gave up on the blood-oxygen monitor on my little baby and took it off when it reported a heart rate of 24 and a blood-oxygen level of 0 (or the other way around—it’s been a few years now); while we were there, the provincial government tried to donate some of its used medical equipment, and no one would take it. The Sun quoted one veterinarian as saying the ultrasound they wanted to give him wasn’t good enough to use on his horses. Meanwhile, the doctors kept taking “reduced activity days,” or RADs (which is to say, they took scheduled one-day strikes without calling them strikes), to protest their contract. I was actually up at St. Paul’s in Vancouver for a scan one of those days; the techs were there, obviously, but no doctors. A hospital with no doctors is a very strange place.

I could also tell you about the time we took our daughter to the ER (different hospital) at midnight; there were only a few patients there at the time, but it still took them three hours just to get us into a room, and another hour to see us. It was 5am before we walked out the front door. At that, we were the lucky ones—there were a couple folks still waiting to be seen who’d been waiting when we got there.

Nor was our experience unusual, or even extreme; we prayed for people’s friends or family members dealing with serious illness, not just that they would get better, but simply that they would get treatment before they died. Sometimes they didn’t. That’s why (as I noted in that post) there’s an increasing movement against national health care in Canada and elsewhere (though not, as far as I understand, in Britain). That’s the kind of thing that happens when the dollar, not human life, is the bottom line of the health care system. We already have too much of that in our country as it is; what Sarah Palin understands, and why she’s leading the charge against Obamacare, is that letting the government run the system will only make it worse, not better. Yes, we need change; but for that change to bring actual hope, it needs to be changefor the better. Obamacare is the wrong prescription.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

The sad irony of racism

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“This president I think has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again, who has a deep seated hatred for . . . white people? Or the white culture?” [Glenn] Beck asked. “I don’t know what it is, but you can’t sit in a pew with [former Obama pastor] Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and not hear some of that stuff, have it wash over.” . . .

“I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people,” Beck said. “I’m saying he has a problem. This guy, I believe, is a racist. Look at the things that he has been surrounded by.”

Predictably, Beck’s off hand remarks created a storm of controversy in the leftwing blogosphere, the same group that had been apologists for the Rev. Wright’s statements of hate against whites and Jews.

Color of Change, which claims to be the largest African-American political organization online with 600,000 members, has seized on Beck’s comment to mount a campaign to discourage companies from advertising on the program.

Color of Change Executive Director James Rucker spoke with Newsmax, and made clear his organization’s goal is for Beck’s voice to be silenced.

“It’s preposterous and absurd,” Rucker says of Beck’s opinion. “It’s insulting to black Americans; and it corrupts honest debate. Anyone who uses such a platform to spew such vitriol, whether Glenn Beck or anyone else, has no place on the air, and we at Color Of Change would use every resource available to us to remove corporate sponsorship from their platform.”

Newsmax, in reporting on this, is most interested in the possibility that the Obama administration is behind this attack, since a former head of Color of Change (one of its co-founders) is a member of the administration; certainly, that possibility is completely consonant with Barack Obama’s typical approach to dissent, and that of his followers. It’s worrisome, no question, especially because it fits a building pattern of behavior.

For my part, though, I’m more interested in the truly invidious double standard here. For Glenn Beck to call the president a racist is a horrible, terrible, intolerable thing; indeed, his attackers seem to be saying, to suggest that any black person is a racist is insulting to black people. For his attackers to suggest that he’s a racist, and to do so at length and in quite loaded terms, however, is perfectly acceptable. There’s no need to consider whether Beck has any justification for his assertion—whether Barack Obama’s 20 years of comfortable acceptance of high-voltage racist preaching might be meaningful, for example, or whether the president’s knee-jerk assumption that the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. must have been racist is in fact significant in understanding his mindset; they feel they can simply dismiss and denounce it as “insulting” “vitriol” without ever even having to disprove it.

Why? Because Glenn Beck is white and Barack Obama is black? I don’t see any other justification here (unless it’s the fact that Barack Obama is the President and Glenn Beck isn’t); and if that’s it, then aren’t they basing their conclusion solely on the respective colors of these men’s skins?

And isn’t that a textbook example of racism?

Taking a look around

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I wasn’t out of touch with the world during our time away, just off the ‘Net for most of that time—but reading mediocre newspapers (which most of them are) and catching the occasional cable news show (sometimes with the sound off) doesn’t exactly give one a full-orbed view of current events; and then the first part of this week, I’ve been busy and occupied with other things, so it’s only been today that I’ve started to catch up a bit with the political news.

It’s interesting to see that Gov. Palin has pretty much gone mano a mano with President Obama over health care, defining the terms of the debate with her Facebook posts—to such an extent that even non-Palinites within the GOP are acknowledging that she’s taken the leadership of the party—and judging by the poll numbers, the Obama administration’s fixation on her, the recent market gains made by health insurers, and the decision of the Senate Finance Committee to drop consultations on end-of-life care from its version of the bill, it seems clear that she’s winning. Given that her op-ed on the cap-and-tax bill was a hammer blow to its political prospects, it would seem that Gov. Palin’s leadership has had a significant effect on the Obama administration’s legislative agenda.

Perhaps the most unnerving thing to happen during the last week or two was the White House’s decision to invite people to report on friends and neighbors who are opposed to Obamacare—something which doesn’t surprise me all that much, given the pattern of behaviorshown by Barack Obama and his coterie, but which is nevertheless concerning; on the bright side, at least it inspired a vintage effort from the redoubtable Mark Steyn in response.

As a result of all this, the polls aren’t being very kind to the president or his party. New Jersey is turning on his policies (and seems likely to put a Republican in the statehouse this fall), while Rasmussen is showing voters favoring the GOP on health care (and in fact on nearly every other issue as well) and the president’s approval ratings continuing to drop (just 47% approve, only 29% strongly, while 52% disapprove, including 65% of independents; on the bright side, only 37% strongly disapprove).

On a brighter note, it looks like our government has lost some of the bank bailout money:

Although hundreds of well-trained eyes are watching over the $700 billion that Congress last year decided to spend bailing out the nation’s financial sector, it’s still difficult to answer some of the most basic questions about where the money went.

Nice job, guys. That’s definitely the sort of thing to make people think twice about giving the feds even more money to play with. And in the meantime, as the government’s left trying to clean up the mess made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, here comes their cousin Ginnie Mae to make a whole new one. Startlingly, Congress doesn’t see anything wrong with this (though if Ginnie Mae does indeed crash, they will no doubt look for some way to blame it on George W. Bush).

On the foreign policy front, the Marines have launched a major assault in Afghanistan; the incomparable Michael Yon reports (if you can get the video to work; I always have trouble with PJTV). I wish them well, but no foreign power has ever really won in Afghanistan, and I’m not confident we’ll be the first. (This, btw, was the problem with Senator Obama’s insistence that Iraq was the wrong war, that we should have been fighting in Afghanistan; fighting in Iraq drew al’Qaeda down from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts and streets of Iraq, where we could actually get at them.)

All this is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg of everything the president has to keep track of; and all we expect of our presidents is that they keep track of all of it and know what to do about all of it. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for them . . . if it weren’t for the fact that they did everything possible to put themselves in that position.

The buck stops . . . somewhere else

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A couple days ago I noted the disconcerting failure of leadership (disconcerting to Democrats, anyway) shown so far by the president on the health care bill, which is after all one of his signature initiatives; I found it puzzling. Yesterday, Michael Barone offered an explanation that makes sense, and one that dovetails with something I’ve written before: Barack Obama isn’t leading the legislative process because he doesn’t know how. And why should he? He’s never done it. He’s had the title of a legislator, but he’s never really been one.

He served as a legislator for a dozen years before becoming president, but was only rarely an active one. He spent one of his eight years as an Illinois state senator running unsuccessfully for Congress and two of them running successfully for U.S. senator. He spent two of his years in the U.S. Senate running for president. During all of his seven non-campaign years as a legislator, he was in the minority party.

In other words, he’s never done much work putting legislation together—especially legislation that channels vast flows of money and affects the workings of parts of the economy that deeply affect people’s lives. This lack of experience is starting to show. On the major legislation considered this year—the stimulus, cap and trade, health care—the Obama White House has done little or nothing to set down markers, to provide guidance, to establish boundaries and no-go areas.

The administration could have insisted that the stimulus package concentrate spending in the next year. It didn’t. It could have insisted that the cap-and-trade bill generate the revenue that was supposed to underwrite health care. It didn’t. It could have decided either to seek a bipartisan health care bill or to insist that a Democratic bill be budget-neutral. It didn’t—and it still hasn’t made this basic policy choice.

I worried, during the campaign, about electing someone with no real record of substantive accomplishment—someone who knew how to talk about ideas but not how to realize them, who had no real experience getting things done; now, I think, we’re seeing the fruit of that. When his agenda runs into trouble, all he knows how to do to push it forward is talk; that’s why, as Politico‘s Carol Lee pointed out,

He’s been in office only six months, but already there’s a strong sense of déjà vu around the way Americans are seeing and hearing from President Barack Obama.

The president keeps returning to the same communications tactics over and over, and all the pages of his PR playbook have one thing in common: a big dose of Obama.

His prime-time news conference Wednesday night, one of the standbys, brings his total to four. That’s the same number that George W. Bush did—in eight years as president.

To be fair to President Obama, he is handicapped by having to work with Nancy Pelosi, who’s proving a remarkably, perhaps historically, ineffective Speaker of the House. But every leader has to work with and rely on lieutenants who are less than they ought to be; effective leaders get the most out of those folks that they can and try to avoid putting them in a position where they can derail things. So far, anyway, that’s not Barack Obama. I’ve been saying that he’s a smart man and he’s bound to figure it out, but so far, he hasn’t; so far, all he’s managed to do is prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can’t spell “president” without “PR”—and he has the diminishing returns to prove it.

 

A good piece on Obamacare

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from a former president of the American Medical Association, Dr. Daniel Johnson Jr.: Memo to My Fellow Physicians: We Have Reached the Moment of Truth. It’s well worth your time, because he knows what he’s talking about and doesn’t hesitate to call a spade a spade; I found his thumbnail history of the debate over nationalized health care particularly interesting. Here’s an excerpt:

Now, with elderly, poor, women, and children covered, all that is left is a segment of the population outside of those groups that is reasonably self-sufficient and most of which has private insurance. Those folks will be forced into government coverage because of a “public option” plan that all intellectually honest observers, including both proponents and opponents of single payer, realize is a Trojan horse for a Canadian-style single-payer system. Once private insurance is crowded out by the unfair competitive tactics of the federal government intruding into an already flawed marketplace, it will be a simple matter to consolidate all of these different groups into one single entity.

What does this mean to physicians and their patients? “Clinical effectiveness research,” when operated by government instead of the medical profession, will become “cost effectiveness” restrictions on what care is available and to whom—determined by the federal government. It will only be a matter of a short time before Americans will enjoy the pleasures of “quality adjusted life years” wherein people my age will be denied services from which they might benefit because of their age and/or some other infirmity.

We don’t have to make this stuff up: It is already the law of the land in some other developed countries, such as the United Kingdom, and has been long advocated here in the U.S. by voices from the left, including major media outlets. The federal government will exert total control over payment for all medical services.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to imagine what will happen when the payment-control mechanisms used by Medicare are extended to the entire private sector. The occasional inability of Medicare patients to find physicians who are willing to provide for their needed care at a loss will become the standard experience when the cost shortfall can no longer be shifted to the private sector.

Practicing physicians in the U.S. have become accustomed to the continued availability of ever better diagnostic and treatment innovations created by our academic and research colleagues. In my own specialty field of diagnostic imaging, the pace and breadth of scientific innovation to help us help clinicians be more effective in the management of sick and injured individuals or in the early detection of life-threatening illness, such as breast cancer, has been amazing. Yet I remember only too well the mid 1970s when the federal government and all but two states (Nebraska and Louisiana) did everything in their power to deny the American people access to the technology of computed tomography because of cost. As sure as the night follows the day, we will see that same kind of limitation imposed, but on a much larger scale. But in contrast to the ’70s, total federal control will prevent physicians and patients from overcoming the stricture as we were able to do back then.

Read the whole thing, and remember, this man is a good doctor: take his diagnosis and prescriptions seriously.

HT: Shane Vander Hart

The disease of political hatred

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As the vitriol, invective, and dishonest attacks against Sarah Palin continue to come from the Left, demonstrating that their determination to destroy her remains high—and as she continues to refuse to fight hatred with hatred and vitriol with vitriol, which is one of the reasons I support her as strongly as I do—I can’t help thinking yet again of what a disease hatred has become in our politics in this country. It’s hard to believe, from a rational perspective, that this is really what our politics has come to, that some people in this country hate others because they don’t like their views on tax policy, or immigration, or foreign policy, or gay marriage; but sadly, it has.

I can remember, more times than I can count, hearing people denounce George W. Bush as a thief, a liar, and an abuser of presidential authority, but most of the folks who made those accusations didn’t dislike him for those reasons. Sure, there were probably some who did, but for most, it was the other way around. That’s why is why people who wrote off President Clinton’s perjury then waxed furious against President Bush for lying to the American people—which if true put him in the company of FDR and Lincoln, among others—while others who wanted President Clinton impeached turned around to defend President Bush; it’s also why many who spent 2001-08 screaming bloody murder about “the imperial Presidency” and declaiming that the president should be impeached for “destroying the Constitution” are now perfectly happy as Barack Obama continues to expand executive power. If you want defenders of congressional prerogatives (outside Congress itself, anyway), you’ll have to look on the Right. The hypocrisy here—which is not confined to one side, by any means—is enough to make you gag.

The key thing about all these charges and denunciations is that people’s views of them tend to be defined by their politics, not the other way around. That’s why criticizing Clinton’s character never worked for the Republicans, and it’s why accusing Bush of lying didn’t work for the Democrats (it was the specter of losing in Iraq, combined with the Katrina fiasco, that killed his administration): in our current political climate, for far too many people, only the politics matter.

Those on our side (whichever one that is) are the white hats who can do no wrong, and we love them; those on the other side are the black hats who do everything from evil motives, and we hate them. If the other side lies, cheats, and steals, we proclaim it from the housetops. If our side does, well, the other side reporting it just proves what rotten people they are. Not everybody takes this approach, of course—to give conservatives credit, the reaction to the Ensign and Sanford scandals has been encouragingly different in many quarters—but more often than not, this is American politics in the early 21st century.

Of course, this is nothing new; much the same could have been said about American politics across much of the 19th century, which gave us our first presidential assassination and most of the dirtiest presidential elections in our history. For that matter, it was nothing new then, either; so it has been, I expect, in pretty much every society or group that has politics, at least some of the time. I’m not accusing contemporary America of any sort of new or different sin. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to do something about it—hatred is a sickness that could eat our country hollow from the inside, if we let it.

We need to start to fight this—and by we I don’t mean somebody out there, I mean us, the common folks, the ordinary barbarians of this country. This isn’t going to be solved by politicians, or the media, or any of the rest of our country’s elite—from their perspective, that would be counterproductive; after all, as long as they can exploit the hatred so many people have been taught to feel for their own ends, they’re going to carry right on doing so (and exacerbating it in the process). The only way to begin to break down this culture of animosity is to do it at the grassroots level, following the example of (of all people) David Mamet:

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. . . .

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.

We need to do the same with those who disagree with us—not to change our minds, but to build relationships with our political opponents and listen to them respectfully, such that they know that we take their concerns seriously and with real care for what they think and feel and believe; that’s the only way we’re ever going to convince those across the political divide to do the same for us. We need to set aside the goal of changing people’s opinions—that might happen, but it shouldn’t be the purpose of conversation—and seek instead to change the way people hold their opinions, by building a spirit of disagreement in mutual understanding and respect.

The more we can do that, the worse it will be for our politicians—but the better it will be for us.