Filed under: American Elephant, Foreign Policy, News, Politics, United Kingdom | Tags: Gordon Brown, Lockerbie, Obama
Obama knew about the Lockerbie bomber release all along:
‘The US was kept fully in touch about everything that was going on with regard to Britain’s discussions with Libya in recent years and about Megrahi,’ said the Whitehall aide.
‘We would never do anything about Lockerbie without discussing it with the US. It is disingenuous of them to act as though Megrahi’s return was out of the blue.
‘They knew about our prisoner transfer agreement with Libya and they knew that the Scots were considering Megrahi’s case.’ [read more]
Filed under: Economy, News of the Weird, Taxes, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: Doncaster, Efficiency, The Mayor
Here’s an unusual story from the town of Doncaster in England. The newly-elected Mayor, Peter Davies, has some curious ideas. Davies is one of only eleven directly-elected Mayors in England. Most mayors are selected by the local council. Not only that, but he is a member of the English Democrats, not Conservative, Liberal or Labor. But, as you will see, of no relation whatsoever to our Democrats.
His first act was to reduce his own salary from £73.000 to £30,000 (from about $110,000 to about $48,000 per year) and to get rid of the mayoral limousine. Then he ended the “sister city” arrangement with five other cities around the world, saying that it was just an excuse for “people to fly off and have a binge at the council’s expense.” He abolished the town’s diversity policies, and ended funding for the Gay Pride Parade, on the grounds that whatever one’s sexual preferences, there was no reason why they should be paraded at taxpayer expense.
He has driven the green lobby into a panic by building parking places encouraging people to shop downtown. He is trying to reduce the council from 63 members to just 21. He said “If Pittsburgh can manage with nine councilors, why do we need 63?” And to top it all off he is abolishing all council “non-jobs” like the “community cohesion officers.”
He is doing just what he was elected to do: reducing the size and reach of government, and with the savings, reducing taxes. Not everyone will approve — 42 city councilors for example, and an unknown number of community cohesion officers, and the green lobby as well. But if he has accomplished so much, so far, the man has a great deal of courage.
He seems to believe that the job of a Mayor is to administer the public’s business efficiently and effectively. Isn’t that refreshing! We hope he receives loads of publicity and serves as a sterling example to all, even our Democrats.
(h/t The Heritage Foundation)
Filed under: Economy, Freedom, Health Care, Politics, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: Comparative Effeciveness Research, Ezekiel Emanuel MD, Who Decides?
Today’s headline reads: “Sentenced to death on the NHS: Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under an NHS scheme to help end their lives, leading doctors warn today.”
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.
This is Britain’s National Health Service. Somebody said something about “Death Panels,” and I hasten to add that the words “Death Panel” do not appear in the U.S. House Bill 3200.
They don’t need to appear in the bill. Bureaucratic control of what treatment you may have already appears in H.R. 1, The Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the Stimulus Bill which contains $1.1 billion to fund the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. This was the brain child of former Health and Human Services Nominee Tom Daschle.
Well, of course Tom Daschle had tax problems and lobbyist problems and did not become Secretary of HHS; but he did venture that health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.
President Obama’s chief medical adviser is now Ezekiel Emanuel M.D., the brother of the President’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Both Tom Daschle and Dr. Emanuel are very interested in the fact that costs at the end of life are especially high (perhaps because people are often near the end of life because they are ill). Young, healthy people don’t make such demands on a health care system. Which is the kind of observation that people who are more interested in statistics than in human beings are apt to make.
In the British National Health Service (NHS), a government agency approves only those expensive treatments that add at least one Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) per £30,000 (about $49,685) of additional health-care spending. If a treatment costs more per QALY, the health service will not pay for it.
Dr. Emanuel is a bioethicist. He has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is also a communitarian. He belongs to a school of thought that redefines a physicians’ duty, believing that it means working for the greater good of society rather than focusing on an individual patient’s needs. Many physicians find this view dangerous.
According the Betsy McCaughey, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says Dr. Emanuel said:
Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality of care are merely “lipstick” cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change.
True reform, he argues, must include redefining doctors’ ethical obligations. In the June 18, 2008, issue of JAMA, Dr. Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the “overuse” of medical care. … In numerous writings, Dr. Emanuel chastises physicians for thinking only about their own patient’s needs.
This may be why Dr. Emanuel doesn’t do doctoring, he does thinking about doctoring.
Strict Youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects… — Lancet, Vol 373, Jan. 31, 2009. p. 425
Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments…. It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does. — Lancet, Vol 373, Jan. 31, 2009, p.428
Comparative Effectiveness Research is designed to have a panel of bureaucrats in Washington decide what treatments are most “effective” by looking at statistics from across the country and send that information to physicians, which doctors will be required to follow. This ignores the fact that people are not building blocks, all alike, to be moved this way or that.
These may not be “death panels” as such, but they are deciding who gets what treatment, and it is not you and your doctor who would make that decision. At the very least, it is cold. Very, very cold, and I want no part of it.
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Terrorism, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: al-Megrahi, Gordon Brown, Lockerbie Bombing, Moammar Gadhafi
The release of the mastermind of the Lockerbie bombing, Abel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, after serving just eight years of a 27-year minimum sentence, on “compassionate grounds” has shocked friends and families of the 259 passengers and 11 villagers killed by the wreckage.
Whether or not al-Megrahi is actually dying of cancer remains to be seen. Moammar Gadhafi arranged for a large audience to greet him when he arrived in Libya on one of Gadhafi’s jets. The crowd was delirious, cheering and singing patriotic songs.
Canadian journalist David Warren addressed the situation:
The use of the very term “compassionate” in the Scottish decision is two-edged. while it does, indeed, spit on the graves of the bomber’s victims, and in the faces of their survivors, it simultaneously infers that by refusing “compassion” opponents of the decision are unjust. Here we enter into the insanity of “moral relativism” and “moral equivalence” — recently on exhibit in tears shed ignominiously for the inmates of Guantanamo.
We reveal, almost everywhere that compassion is invoked, the fact that we no longer have a viable conception of justice. For in the conception we once had,”compassion” had no part.
The operative word was “mercy,” and the idea behind it was radically different from the idea behind compassion. … Mercy has tempered justice, in our western tradition. Note that construction: mercy is not a part of justice, it is “another thing.”(…)
But today it is “justice,” which, in our civilization, was known to be something sharp and hard. Justice is necessary to rectify injustice. The man who intentionally kills many unknown to him, in order to make a political statement, has committed a grave act of injustice, for which an equal and opposite act of justice is required. Justice, not retribution; for a desire for revenge should no more come into a just judgment, than a desire for compassion.
And as it has become clear that the release of this man had little to do with “compassion” and everything to do with millions in British business opportunities in the oil fields of Libya, David Warren added:
It is insulting to be told an obvious lie; more insulting when the lie is insisted upon, in the face of undeniable facts. Unfortunately, few of our contemporary politicians seem to grasp this, yet they do not always pay for it in the polls. It appears from this distance that at least Gordon Brown, the current U.K. prime minister, will not be returned to office when the British have their next chance to vote, and that his Labour Party will be annihilated. But I wish I could be sure.
Filed under: Capitalism, Health Care, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: Britain, Medical Care, National Health Service, Rights
British author and physician Theodore Dalrymple had a brief and excellent essay in the Wall Street Journal asking “Is There a ‘Right’ to Health Care?” It is an interesting question at this particular time.
There are constant arguments for newly invented rights coming from the left. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his State of the Union Message to Congress on January 11, 1944, said that the rights guaranteed to us by the Declaration and the Constitution were no longer enough. He went on to propose a “Second Bill of Rights” based on “Security and Prosperity.”
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation; to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; of every family to a decent home; to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; to a good education.
Mark Levin, from whose splendid Liberty and Tyranny I extracted this excerpt, says “This is Tyranny’s disguise. These are not rights. They are the Statist’s false promises of utopianism, which the Statist uses to justify all trespasses on the individual’s private property. Liberty and private property go hand in hand. By dominating one the Statist dominates both, for if the individual cannot keep or dispose of the value he creates by his own intellectual and/or physical labor, he exists to serve the state. The ‘Second Bill of Rights’ and its legal and policy progeny require the individual to surrender control of his fate to the government.”
Hollywood dreams up its fantasies of world’s end with wrecked and vacant cities and perhaps inures us to the very real things that happen in this world of ours. If we do not understand history we neither appreciate what we have, nor grasp the possibilities of what could be.
If you do not look at the stories and pictures coming out of Iran and understand what it is like to live under tyranny, you are missing the point that is so clearly made. Venezuela, under Caesar Chavez, is eliminating the right to free speech. Cuba, we are told, has splendid health care, but it is only for cash-paying tourists. Ordinary Cubans get dirty rooms and abysmal care. Tyranny doesn’t come lumbering in loudly announcing itself, it creeps in gradually offering goodies if you will just allow those who are wiser and more important to control your life.
In Britain, Mr. Dalrymple says, the recognition of a “right” to health care has led to substandard care.
If there is a right to health care, someone has the duty to provide it. Inevitably, that “someone” is the government. Concrete benefits in pursuance of abstract rights, however, can be provided by the government only by constant coercion.
People sometimes argue in favor of a universal human right to health care by saying that health care is different from all other human goods or products. It is supposedly an important precondition of life itself. This is wrong: There are several other, much more important preconditions of human existence, such as food, shelter, and clothing.
Everyone agrees that hunger is a bad thing (as is overeating),. but few suppose there is a right to a healthy, balanced diet, or that if there was, the federal government would be the best at providing and distributing it to each and every American.
Where does the right to health care come from? Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, how was it that our ancestors, who were no less intelligent than we, failed completely to notice it?
If, on the other hand, the right to health care did not exist in those benighted days, how did it come into existence, and how did we come to recognize it once it did?
When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”
When I then ask my interlocutor whether he can think of any reason why people should not be left to die in the street, other than that they have a right to health care, he is generally reduced to silence. He cannot think of one.
The rest of the essay is to be found here. As a physician, Mr Dalrymple has long practiced in Britain, and his reflections on the British Health Care system (NHS) are worth a great deal of thought.
From Argghhh!!!, a message that Combined Joint Task Force Division Headquarters in Afghanistan received this morning:
“To Combined Joint Task Force 82,
65 years ago, at 2h30 (French Local time), you jumped from hundreds of DAKOTAS in the dark skies over Normandie in order to liberate France and Europe.
That D-Day, you wrote the most glorious page of your history and the name of your Division is forever famous in France.
That D-Day, you and the allied forces met their rendezvous with destiny.
6 June 2009, Afghanistan; we are still brothers in arms.
We will never forget what you did on D-Day.
In the name of all the French soldiers embedded with CJTF-82, thank you for what you have done.
Today, in celebration of those events 65 years ago, we are “All Americans.”
Airborne!
Ltc Pierre V.
French LNO
Filed under: Foreign Policy, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: Economy, Obama, Politics
If you need a good weekend chuckle, John Crace of The Guardian has a comment on the Obama visit to Britain, when the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson asked the One a question.
