Category Archives: Barack Obama

Thomas Sowell asks a very important question

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one that I’ve been asking as well, in his latest column:

One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation’s medical care before the August recess—for a program that would not take effect until 2013!

Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years—more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?

If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election? . . .

If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it.

Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.

Hard to argue with Dr. Sowell’s conclusion.

Considering the intelligence of Barack Obama

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What I want to know, if I have reason to try to figure out how smart people are, would be things like this: Are they able to comprehend, internalize, and then begin to properly use complicated concepts? If so, how quickly—are they fast learners? How about their problem-solving ability? Can they innovate, finding new ways around problems, or do they just keep going back to a few approaches that have worked for them before? Are they creative? Do they have a nose for good ideas, whether their own or someone else’s? Can they recognize when someone’s critique of their own ideas is valid, and if so, are they able to make use of that critique to improve their ideas?

As it happens, my idea of what an intelligent person looks like meshes well with that of Elaine Lafferty, former editor of Ms. magazine:

Now by “smart,” I don’t refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don’t really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a “quick study”; I’d heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. . . .

For all those old enough to remember Senator Sam Ervin, the brilliant strict constitutional constructionist and chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee whose patois included “I’m just a country lawyer” . . . Yup, Palin is that smart.

The question is, does this description match the reality of our president? One of the big arguments for Barack Obama from his supporters has been that he’s extremely intelligent; at this point, that’s pretty much the received wisdom. I’m increasingly skeptical about that, though. Sure, there’s no question he’s a smart man; but the idea that he’s extremely smart essentially rests on five things:

  • He went to Columbia
  • He went to Harvard Law
  • He’s written books
  • He’s good one-on-one with people
  • He’s liberal

And that’s basically it. The last comes into play because of the natural human tendency to overrate the intelligence of people who argue for positions we ourselves support—we tend to overvalue arguments that lead to conclusions we agree with, and undervalue arguments that challenge our conclusions. Thus, from the perspective of our liberal media, Barack Obama must be smarter, because he believes and argues for things which are true, than (let’s say) George W. Bush, who believes and argues for things which are not true. The fallacy, of course, is that whether we like the conclusions of an argument or not doesn’t actually say anything about the quality of that argument, and thus people aren’t actually smarter because they agree with us; but we tend to perceive them so.

As for the others? Well, yes, he went to Columbia; but if he showed any evidence of extraordinary intelligence or aptitude while there, we haven’t seen it, because the president and his supporters have been quite careful not to let us see it. This tends to suggest, of course, that his academic record there doesn’t in fact show any such evidence.

Harvard Law? Well, he clearly showed evidence of significant political skills there, getting the student body to elect him president of the law review; but beyond that? Carole Platt Liebau, who the next year would be the first female managing editor of the Harvard Law Review, paints an unflattering picture of his tenure there:

[W]hen he was at the HLR you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.

A lot of the time he quote/unquote “worked from home”, which was sort of a shorthand—and people would say it sort of wryly—shorthand for not really doing much. He just wasn’t around. Most of the day to day work was carried out by the managing editor of the Review, my predecessor, a great guy called Tom Pirelli who’s actually going to be one of the assistant attorney generals now.

He’s the one who did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he’d leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done.

His inaction extended beyond his indifference to running the Harvard Law Review; during his time at the law school, he wrote almost nothing for it—just a brief case comment—and nothing during his tenure as its president. That he would be allowed to run the HLR with such a thin résumé suggests that it wasn’t his abilities that kept him in the position. By way of comparison, here’s Beldar’s account of his time as an editor of the Texas Law Review:

Second-year members were required, upon penalty of being kicked off the Review, to produce, on deadline, a publishable quality “student note.” At Texas and most other top 20 law journals, such student notes tend to be not much different, either in scope or length or even quality, from the articles submitted by aspiring young law professors hoping to publish to promote their tenure prospects. We’d moved away from the earlier practice of having students write shorter, more limited “case-notes” that typically focused on a single new judicial decision, and instead encouraged more ambitious writing that would genuinely add something creative and new to the legal literature.

It was quite typical at Texas (and, I think, at most other major law reviews) that each new editor-in-chief, in fact, would be the student who, as a second-year member, had produced and published the very best student note. In the class ahead of me, my own class, and the class behind me at Texas, there was a wide-spread consensus on whose notes were the best. It is inconceivable to me that any of the three of them would have been selected to be editor-in-chief if they hadn’t written a publishable note at all. And indeed, the quality of their respective notes became the source of the each new editor-in-chief’s credibility as first among equals, final decision-maker, and the only editor permitted to use a blue pencil for his copy-editing (which no other editor would dare erase or alter without close consultation). . . .

At Texas and, I believe, most other major law reviews, the rule for members was (and I think still is): “Publish or perish, up or out.” If you didn’t produce a publishable-quality note on deadline, your name was stricken from the membership list on the masthead, you had no opportunity to become an editor, and—worst of all—you became ethically obliged to call back all those employers who’d extended you job offers in part based on a résumé credential that you were no longer entitled to claim.

Taken in conjunction with the fact that Obama didn’t do much as a young lawyer, there’s simply not a lot here to support any great claims for his intelligence.

But what about the book? Even if he didn’t write anything of significance at Harvard, he has written a couple books, and particularly Dreams from my Father. Except that there are good reasons to doubt that he did in fact write that book, for one; and for another, even if we grant him that credential, writing an engaging memoir isn’t really evidence of high intelligence. Kirby Higbe did the same thing, though with acknowledged help, and he only had a seventh-grade education.

The thing that really convinces people that the president is super-smart, though, is that he’s good at making that impression. That is, of course, no small thing; but it’s not necessarily the proof people think it is. The thing that really strikes me about the oohing and aahing over President Obama’s intelligence is how content-free it is. What I mean by that is, I see a lot of people coming away from encounters with him talking about how smart he is, but I don’t see any of them talking about any new ideas he expressed, or any startling insights. I don’t see any evidence of the products of intelligence, just of his ability to convince people he’s highly intelligent. In my experience, that’s usually a sign that the person in question is really just smart enough to fake it.

This fits: I don’t see any new ideas or insights expressed in the work of his administration, either. I don’t see any great leadership coming from his administration—rather, I see an administration that has left many of its leadership responsibilities to Congress. I see the same old ideas recycled—and when they’re met with opposition, I see the same old tired tacticsrecycled to deal with that opposition. This administration doesn’t seem able to out-argue its critics; when its initiatives flounder, it doesn’t seem to have any better ideas than to accuse its opponents of racism and call them Nazis and brown-shirts, on the one hand, and to have yet another stacked town meeting full of puffball “questions” on the other, preferably on prime-time TV.

All of which is to say, while I don’t have any doubt that President Obama is a smart man and a gifted campaigner, I don’t see any significant evidence of his intelligence beyond the fact of his election. On the basis of his record, what I see is a smart man, but far from a brilliant one, whose intelligence has been largely focused on impressing people, and who’s very good at doing that, both one-on-one and on the large scale of a political campaign. I don’t see much evidence of wisdom in any aspect of his life, and I don’t see any real evidence of an active broad-gauge intelligence.

(Adapted from a post on Conservatives4Palin)

 

The leaven of the Pharisees and the loaf of politics

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I posted yesterday on this passage from Ray Ortlund’s blog:

Moral fervor is our deepest evil. When we intend to serve God, but forget to crucify Self moment by moment, we are capable of acting cruelly while feeling virtuous about it.

Let’s always beware that delicious feeling that we are the defenders of the holy. Christ is the only Defender of the holy. He defends us from persecutors. He defends us from becoming persecutors. We can take refuge in him. But that esteem of him also means we regard ourselves with suspicion, especially when judging another.

As I was writing, I remembered a somewhat similar passage from C. S. Lewis:

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

We may rightly call Lewis’ observation the political application of Dr. Ortlund’s point. I didn’t want to go that direction with my post, so I didn’t reference Lewis at that time. Denver Postcolumnist David Harsanyi did, though, in a recent piece (HT: Shane Vander Hart), applying Lewis’ point squarely to our president and his administration:

This week, President Barack Obama claimed his version of health care reform is “a core ethical and moral obligation,” beseeching religious leaders to promote his government-run scheme. Questioning the patriotism of opponents, apparently, wasn’t gaining the type of traction advocates of “reform” had hoped. . . .

On Team Righteous, we have those who meet their moral obligations; on the other squad, we must have the minions of Beelzebub—by which, of course, we mean profit-driven, child-killing, mob-inciting insurance companies.

Why wasn’t this multidenominational group of pastors, rabbis and other religious leaders offended that a mere earthly servant was summoning the good Lord in an effort to pass legislation? Certainly, one of the most grating habits of the Bush administration was how it framed policy positions in moral absolutes.

As CBS News recently reported, Obama has thrown around the name of God even more often than George W. Bush. Then again, no group couches policy as a moral obligation more than the left. On nearly every question of legislation, there is a pious straw man tugging at the sleeves of the wicked.

The problem with this, as both Lewis and Dr. Ortlund point out, is that it’s the ultimate version of “the end justifies the means”—if “we” are on God’s side and “they” are enemies of the right, the good and the just, then “we” don’t need to worry about any moral constraints, because the rightness of our cause automatically justifies anything we do in its service. This is the kind of thing that makes, at the extremes, a Torquemada, a Lenin, a Dzerzhinsky, a bin Laden—the people who will “torment us without end,” and do so “with the approval of their own conscience” because they know it’s for the best—indeed, because they’re really only doing it for our own good.

This kind of thing doesn’t make for good religion; it doesn’t make for good politics, either. As I said yesterday, the only real antidote to this is humility, and for all the degrees and other qualifications on display in the current White House, humility appears to be one thing that’s in short supply there. Fortunately, one good thing about democratic politics is that it’s usually pretty good about humbling those politicians as need it.

May it come soon.

Further links on Obamacare

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For those who doubt that the purpose of the Democratic health care “reform” is a government takeover of our health-care system—and that the only unsettled issue in their minds is the best way to get there as quickly as possible—watch this:

Those opposed to the expansion of the abortion industry should consider this comment from Ed Morrissey:

On the campaign trail, Obama told Planned Parenthood that the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate state restrictions on abortion and repeal the Hyde Amendment ban on federal funding for it, would be his first legislative priority. ObamaCare allows him to pass FOCA without the head-on fight. If the public option remains in the bill and it covers abortion, that will have the de facto effect of repealing the Hyde Amendment. The interstate nature of ObamaCare and the public plan may also allow the Department of Justice to fight state abortion restrictions, such as parental notification, on the grounds that the regulations interfere with interstate commerce. It’s FOCA by other means.

For those still dubious about Sarah Palin’s invocation of “death panels,” ponder this from Nat Hentoff (no fundamentalist Republican):

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model)—as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill—decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It’s already in the stimulus bill signed into law. . . .

No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama’s eventual master health care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview (quoted in Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake, he says, a “very difficult democratic conversation” about how “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care” costs.

And if anyone is wondering why all the fuss—is this really that big a deal?—let Andy McCarthy explain:

These last seven months ought to tell us that the usual political rules don’t apply when predicting this president’s behavior. His purpose is revolutionary change in an American society he grew up understanding to be fundamentally unjust, racist, materialist, imperialist, and the agent of global misery. He is in Washington to transform the nation from the top down. Nationalized health care is key for him. If he gets it, sovereignty shifts from the citizen to the state. By law, government will be empowered to manage minute details of our lives. Over time—when, as the American Thinker’s Joseph Ashby observes, a “1,000-page health-care law explodes into many thousands of pages of regulatory codes”—that is precisely what government will do.

Obama is not a normal politician. He’s a visionary, and using health care to radically expand the scope of government happens to be central to his vision. For my money (if I have any left), achieving it is more important to him than is getting reelected. His poll numbers and those of congressional Democrats may keep plunging (for the latter, there must come a point where that is statistically impossible), but they have the votes to Rahm this thing through.

And if it comes to that, they will most certainly try, unless enough Democrats in Congress get cold feet. Sure, that wouldn’t be what the president promised to get elected, but so far, that hasn’t stopped him yet:

Initial returns on Obamanomics

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Mark Steyn has a good piece up on “Why the Stimulus Flopped” which dissects the president’s economic approach with his usual panache (Steyn’s, that is; the president’s not bad on panache himself, but he’s no match for Mark Steyn):

The other day, wending my way from Woodsville, N.H., 40 miles south to Plymouth, I came across several “stimulus” projects—every few miles, and heralded by a two-tone sign, a hitherto rare sight on Granite State highways. The orange strip at the top said “PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK” with a silhouette of a man with a shovel, and the green part underneath informed you that what you were about to see was a “PROJECT FUNDED BY THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT.” There then followed a few yards of desolate, abandoned, scarified pavement, followed by an “END OF ROAD WORKS” sign, until the next “stimulus” project a couple of bends down a quiet rural blacktop. . . .

Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan, and much of continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain, and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Actually, when I say “to less effect,” that’s not strictly true: Thanks to Obama, one of the least indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted—and getting ever more so. We’ve become the third most debt-ridden country after Japan and Italy. According to last month’s IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.

As Steyn sums it up,

The “stimulus” . . . didn’t just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats’ political priorities overrode everything else. If you’re a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap’n’trade is promising increased regulatory costs and health “reform” wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama’s leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he’s spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust’s settled and you get a better sense of just how broke he’s going to make you. For this level of “community organization,” there aren’t enough of “the rich” to pay for it. That leaves you.

For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democratic terms. It’s no surprise that the president can’t make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare, because that’s not what it’s about—and for all his cool, he can’t quite disguise that.

Read the whole thing—it’s vintage Steyn. The only point he doesn’t make is that we shouldn’t have expected the “stimulus” to work, because we had immediate prior evidence that it wouldn’t: namely, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out a while back, the effect of similar political and economic approaches in New York, New Jersey, and California.

A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

If “high tax rates on the rich, lots of government ‘investments,’ heavy unionization and a large government role in health care” haven’t worked for these states, why would we expect them to work for the country as a whole?

A dissenting view on health-care spending

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There is general agreement that our country spends too much on health care. I’m not so sure that’s actually true.

Why? The key here is recognizing the truth of David Goldhill’s distinction: “Health insurance isn’t health care.” This points us to another distinction, that of spending on care vs. spending on insurance. We tend to run them together, and I would certainly agree that we spend too much on these two things in combination; but we need to understand that in fact they’re two very different things—and I would argue that we should view spending money on them very, very differently.

Money spent on health care proper is money that goes to local businesses, perhaps a local non-profit organization (that would be, perhaps, your local hospital), and to other businesses that employ people to make things and to design new things to make. Money spent on healthinsurance is spent on bureaucrats who generate paper; indirectly, it also goes to subsidize trial lawyers and their campaign contributions to Democratic politicians. A good chunk of what you pay for health care also goes to this purpose, of course, in the percentage of your bill that is used to defray insurance costs for your doctor, your hospital, and so on.

Do we spend too much money on health care? No, what we spend too much money on—far too much money—is bureaucrats and trial lawyers. This is what needs to change most of all if we’re going to bring down the combined cost of health care and health insurance; and if we focus instead on reducing the cost of health care, we’re going to reduce the quality of our care without ever addressing the real problem and the real inefficiency of the current system.

This is, I think, what has happened to health care in Britain under the National Health Service. British cyberfriend David Riddick defends the NHS, in part, on the grounds that the UK spends less on health care than the US, and certainly the share of GDP spent on the combination of health care and health insurance is lower there; but given that they spend a higher percentage of that on bureaucrats, I don’t think that’s actually a good thing. That doesn’t drive good care, because the money isn’t being spent on care, and it doesn’t help the British economy any, either. Bureaucrats aren’t productive for the economy—they don’t create wealth, they don’t create jobs, they don’t create innovation; they just create red tape and paperwork.

The same is not true of much of the rest of the health care sector in modern economies. To take one example, the community where I live is the home of a cluster of orthopedics-products companies that make artificial joints, spinal hardware, and the like—products that relieve people (mainly, but not only, older people) of a great deal of pain and greatly improve their quality of life. These companies employ a lot of people, offering good manufacturing jobs as well as a lot of design and engineering work, and they drive research, as they’re always working on developing new and better products. So far, they’ve weathered the financial storm quite well; people will put off luxuries and elective purchases in tough economic times, but if you’re in pain and you can’t walk right, you’re not going to put off getting a new knee or a new hip if that will solve the problem.

Right now, though, they’re deeply worried about the push to nationalize our health care system, because it’s going to devastate their business. That artificial hip that the president keeps talking about, the one that he thinks might have been a waste to put in his grandmother, didn’t come from nowhere; it probably came from Warsaw, and it employed a number of people. His idea of how to cut health-care costs isn’t going to reduce the amount of money that goes to bureaucrats—it’s going to increase that spending, because we’ll need a lot more bureaucrats to run his program and decide which people are allowed to get new hips and knees. Instead, it’s going to reduce the amount of money that goes to companies like Zimmer and Biomet, which means it’s going to reduce the number of people they employ to design and build their products.

Health care “reform” as envisioned by the Democrats will take money out of their pockets to pay even more bureaucrats; it will shift money from a profitable sector of our economy, one that creates jobs that pay good wages and new products that improve people’s lives, to an unprofitable sector (the government)—and all in the name of spending less money. The contrast with the “stimulus” package is ironic. There we were told, “Spending money is good—increasing spending is good for the economy.” When it comes to health care, though, the government is telling us that spending money is bad, and so we need to hire lots and lots more bureaucrats so that we can cut down on the money we spend on actual health care. In the spirit of the “stimulus” package, wouldn’t it make more sense to increase the amount of money going to companies like Biomet and Zimmer so that they can hire more people and help the economy?

We tend to talk about the cost of health care as if cost were the only side of the coin, and it just isn’t; the money we spend doesn’t just vanish into thin air. Instead, that money goes to actual people, and much of it drives good things in our economy. Health care spending creates economic growth; it’s good for our country. We don’t need to spend less money on care; we need to spend less on bureaucrats and trial lawyers. Unfortunately, the president’s plan gets this backwards; we need to put it right way ’round.

 

Mr. Obama goes to Montana

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and a number of folks in Montana aren’t all that happy about it, or at least about the way it was handled. This letter was written by a resident of Bozeman, Montana; I don’t know them, but I’m confident in the source, especially I’ve had someone else vouch for it as an accurate account as well, so I’m posting it.

Hello All,

By now you have probably heard that President Obama came to Montana last Friday, Aug. 14. However, there are many things that the major news has not covered. I feel that since Bill and I live here and we were at the airport on Friday I should share some facts with you. Whatever you decide to do with the information is up to you. If you chose to share this email with others I do ask that you DELETE my email address before you forward this on.

On Wednesday, August 5th it was announced locally that the President would be coming here. There are many groups here that are against his healthcare and huge spending so those groups began talking and deciding on what they were going to do. The White House would not release ANY details other than the date.

On about Tuesday Bill found out that they would be holding the “Town Hall” at the airport. (This is only because Bill knows EVERYONE at the airport). Our airport is actually located outside of Belgrade (tiny town) in a very remote location. Nothing is around there. They chose to use a hangar that is the most remotely located hangar. You could not pick a more remote location, and you can not get to it easily. It is totally secluded from the public. FYI: We have many areas in Belgrade and Bozeman which could have held a large amount of folks with sufficient parking (gymnasiums/auditoriums). All of which have chairs and tables, and would not have to be SHIPPED IN!! $$$$$. During the week, cargo by the TONS was being shipped in constantly. Airport employees could not believe how it just kept coming. Though it was our President coming several expressed how excessive it was, especially during a recession. $$$$$.

Late Tuesday/early Wednesday Aug. 12th, they said that tickets would be handed out on Thursday 9am at two locations and the president would be arriving around 12:30 Friday. Thursday morning about 600 tickets were passed out. However, 1500 were printed at a Local printing shop per White House request. Hmmmm . . . 900 tickets just DISAPPEARED. This same morning someone called into the radio from the local UPS branch and said that THOUSANDS of Dollars of Lobster were shipped in for Obama. Montana has some of the best beef in the nation!!! And it would have been really wonderful to help out the local economy. Anyone heard of the Recession?? Just think . . . with all of the traveling the White House is doing. $$$$$. One can only imagine what else we are paying for.

On Friday Bill and I got out to the airport about 10:45am. The groups that wanted to protest Obama’s spending and healthcare had gotten a permit to protest and that area was roped off. But that was not to be. A large bus carrying SEIU (Service Employees International Union) members drove up onto the area (illegal) and unloaded right there. It was quite a commotion and there were specifically 2 SEIU men trying to make trouble and start a fight. Police did get involved and arrested the one man but they said they did not have the manpower to remove the SEIU crowd. The SEIU crowd was very organized and young. About 99% were under the age of 30 and they were not locals! They had bullhorns and PROFESSIONALLY made signs. Some even wore preprinted T-shirts. Oh, and Planned Parenthood folks were with them . . . professing abortion rights with their T-shirts and preprinted signs. (BTW, all these folks did have a permit to protest in ANOTHER area)! Those against healthcare/spending moved away from the SEIU crowd to avoid confrontation. They were orderly and respectful. Even though SEIU kept coming over and walking through, continuing to be very intimidating and aggressive at the direction of the one SEIU man.

So we had Montana folks from ALL OVER the state with their homemade signs and their DOGS with homemade signs. We had cowboys, nurses, doctors you name it. There was even a guy from Texas who had been driving through. He found out about the occasion, went to the store, made a sign, and came to protest. If you are wondering about the press . . . Well, all of the major networks were over by that remote hangar I mentioned. They were conveniently parked on the other side of the buildings FAR away. None of these crowds were even visible to them. I have my doubts that they knew anything about the crowds. We did have some local news media around us from this state and Idaho. Speaking of the local media . . . they were invited. However, all questions were to be turned in to the White House in advance of the event. Wouldn’t want anyone to have to think off the top of their head! It was very obvious that it was meant to be totally controlled by the White House. Everything was orchestrated down to the last detail to make it appear that Montana is just crazy for Obama and government healthcare. Even those people that talked about their insurance woes . . . the White House called our local HRDC (Human Resource and Development Committee) and asked for names. Then the White House asked those folks to come. Smoke and mirrors . . . EVERYTHING was staged!!!!!!!!!!!

I am very dismayed about what I learned about our current White House. The amount of control and manipulation was unbelievable. I felt I was not living in the United States of America, more like the USSR !! I was physically nauseous. Bill and I have been around when Presidents or Heads of State visit. It has NEVER been like this. I am truly very frightened for our country. America needs your prayers and your voices. If you care about our country please get involved. Know the issues. And let Congress hear your voices again and again!! If they are willing to put forth so much effort to BULLY a small town one can only imagine what is going on in Washington DC. Scary!!

The death book for veterans

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I’d meant to repost this from Conservatives4Palin yesterday, but I got distracted; I still wanted to mention it here as well, though, because it’s important. The Wall Street Journal‘s Jim Towey has done our country a service (in a piece linked yesterday by Sarah Palin on her Facebook page) by calling attention to a document recently re-promulgated by the Obama administration’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs called “Your Life, Your Choices.” This is a 52-page document for end-of-life planning which was first drafted by the Clinton administration—by an advocate of physician-assisted suicide and health-care rationing, Dr. Robert Pearlman. When the Bush 43 administration got a look at it, they ordered the VA to stop using it; as Towey describes it,

“Your Life, Your Choices” presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political “push poll.” For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be “not worth living.”

The circumstances listed include ones common among the elderly and disabled: living in a nursing home, being in a wheelchair and not being able to “shake the blues.” There is a section which provocatively asks, “Have you ever heard anyone say, ‘If I’m a vegetable, pull the plug’?” There also are guilt-inducing scenarios such as “I can no longer contribute to my family’s well being,” “I am a severe financial burden on my family” and that the vet’s situation “causes severe emotional burden for my family.”

When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?

One can only imagine a soldier surviving the war in Iraq and returning without all of his limbs only to encounter a veteran’s health-care system that seems intent on his surrender. . . .

This hurry-up-and-die message is clear and unconscionable.

In my book, George W. Bush did the only decent and honorable thing in pulling this invidious document; for the Obama administration to start using this again with VA patients—all patients, mind you, not even just those who are clearly dying—is nothing short of despicable. Thank you, Mr. Towey, for writing about this; and thank you, Gov. Palin, for using your platform to call it to our attention.

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.

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?