When things get too hot in the Nation’s Capitol and the scandals mount, leaders are apt to get out of town. Redirect the news. Give the media something else to focus on. Distraction. Never mind the sequester, never mind Americans out of work,. The President and his family are heading for Africa. The trip will not be cheap. It is expected to cost American taxpayers $60 to $100 million, according to the Washington Post. Presidential travel does not come cheap.
When President Obama goes on an extended trip to sub-Saharan Africa, the federal agencies charged with protecting the president won’t take any chances. Hundreds of U.S. Secret Service agents will be dispatched to secure facilities in Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania. A Navy aircraft carrier or amphibious ship with a fully staffed medical trauma center will be stationed offshore in case of a presidential emergency.
Military cargo planes, lots of them, will airlift 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bullet-proof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. Fighter jets will fly in shifts giving 24-hour coverage over the president’s airspace so they can intervene quickly if an errant plane gets too close.
“The extraordinary security provisions — costing the government tens of millions of dollars are outlined in a confidential internal planning document obtained by The Washington Post. While the preparations appear to be in line with similar travels in the past, the document offers an unusual glimpse into the colossal efforts to protect the U.S. commander-in-chief on trips abroad.”
After the paper questioned the costs of a planned family safari, the White House canceled that excursion. “The president and the first lady had also planned to take a Tanzanian safari as part of the trip, which would have required the president’s special counter-assault team to carry sniper rifles with high-caliber rounds that could neutralize cheetahs, lions or other animals if they became a threat, according to the planning document. Nut the White House canceled the safari on Wednesday following inquiries from The Washington Post about the trip’s purpose and expense, according to a person familiar with the decision.” We need more inquiry about the trip’s purpose and expense.
The paper adds, “Obama’s trip could cost the federal government $60 million to 100 million based on the costs of similar African trips in recent years.The Secret Service planning document, which was provided to the Post by a person who is concerned about the amount of resources necessary for the trip, does not specify costs.” And the purpose of the trip is…?
White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes says the president will get “great bang for the buck” for US foreign policy as a result of President Obama’s trip to Africa at month’s end. Despite high costs, NSC Rhodes defends President Obama’s upcoming trip to Africa. He says the US would cede leadership there if Obama didn’t go.”Cede leadership there?” What an utterly embarrassing thing to say. Did any other leader in the history of the world travel in such grotesque opulence?
And schoolchildren are not allowed tours of their White House, which are conducted by volunteers, because Obama wants the public to feel the pain of the sequester and blame Republicans for their intransigence. What is wrong with this picture?
Since the exposure last week of the vast scope of the United States’ government’s domestic surveillance operations, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. which was published sixty-four years ago has enjoyed a massive spike in sales. Amazon sales of the book shot up 7,000% just this week. Is Obama Big Brother?
Are we being organized into a world that is no longer free in the name of what? Something more perfect, more communal, more equal and more just. So how come everything seems to be tilted in the direction of the government? So how come when we are going to have more equal health care, all the members of the government get to keep their remarkably good plans? How come all these green start ups that are supposed to offer so many new green jobs go bankrupt but enrich Obama’s supporters who ran the companies or owned them?
If we are to be more equal, then how come those who disagree with the administration are treated so differently? How come what Obama claims today seems to have no relation to what he said last week? Is this the Ministry of Truth which published public falsehoods? Or is this the imagined world that Edward Snowden lives in?
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned today that failure to win the battle against youth unemployment could tear Europe apart, while abandoning the continent’s welfare model in favor or tougher U.S. standards would cause “revolution.”
A generation of young Europeans fear that they will not find jobs, with youth unemployment in the EU standing at nearly one in every four, more than twice the rate of adult unemployment. Yet, he said, if US welfare standards were introduced in Europe “we would have revolution, not tomorrow, but on the very same day.” Schaeuble told a conference in Paris. U.S. “tougher” standards would create revolution. Tougher?
However dismal the job prospects are for European youth, they are worse for disaffected immigrant Muslim youth, and that’s a very bad sign. So they can’t afford the welfare, and they can’t afford to be tougher about it, so….
In Britain police stand by helplessly and watch a young soldier brutally killed because there is nothing they can do against Islamic terrorists armed with knives and meat cleavers, because they are not allowed to carry weapons. It takes armed police with weapons 20 minutes to get there. A serious crackdown on those who might criticize Muslim terrorists on social media is in progress.
In Sweden riots by ‘youths’ throwing rocks, burning buildings and firing cars continues, moving from one suburb to another. It isn’t poverty, for Sweden is a famously egalitarian society with exceptional welfare provisions, built by 40 years of social democratic government.
“So maybe I am lucky to be in Europe,” says Baraar Mohamed, a 15 year old with Somali parents who maintains he hasn’t been throwing rocks or starting fires. “Compared to people in Somalia, maybe I am lucky. But I have hardly ever even met them, and this is where I live, and I have to live with police brutality, and I don’t have the same chance as the Swedish kids. I am Swedish. I am Swedish.”
The police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. “our ambition is really to do as little as possible. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.” Swedish parking laws continue to be rigidly enforced. Parking enforcement officers have been noted writing parking tickets for burned-out cars.
The Washington Post reported that a French soldier [was] stabbed in the neck by a robed attacker” in Paris. “The lone attacker was described as a young man wearing a Muslim prayer cap and a North African-style robe called a djellaba. According to a police account he was monitored on security cameras and seen shedding his robe and fleeing in European clothes before disappearing into the crowd in a subway and suburban train entrance.”
The press is unable to identify the ‘youths’ concerned as Muslim, though they still can identify the family’s country of origin. Europe reacted to their declining population, the birth dearth, by encouraging immigration, and many from the war-torn countries of the Middle East and Africa have been grateful to take advantage of the opportunity. But real assimilation is not happening.
Back in Britain, a “22-year old man has been charged on suspicion of making malicious comments on Facebook following the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby.” The comments were “allegedly of a racist or anti-religious nature.”
If everyone just politely fails to use words such as ‘Islamist’ or ‘terrorism’ or ‘radical’, then it will be alright, won’t it? The data keeps coming out, in spite of all the soothing words. Greek joblessness topped 27% in January, the last month for which data are available, Spanish unemployment is close to the same. But it is the figures for ‘youth’ unemployment that are so startling. 59.1% of those under 25 are unemployed in Greece, 55.9% in Spain, 38.4% in Italy, 38.3% in Portugal, 26.5% in France. A lost generation? Why it’s because of the remaining vestiges of capitalism — socialism just hasn’t gone far enough. Entrepreneurs are now villains. May Day rallies across Europe had a single resounding message: end “the excesses of reckless capitalism.” Good luck with that.
There’s a lot of pretense going on. If you just pretend hard enough, it will all be alright. We have a lot of that going on here as well.
Many economists based their policy prescriptions on the implicit assumption that government was full of wise platonic guardians who automatically recognized the failures of the market and instinctively knew the remedies for all such problems. …………………………………………………………..[James Bovard] ………………………………. …………...
The society that promises no risks, and whose leaders use the word “risk” only as a pejorative, may be able to protect life, but there will be no liberty, and very little pursuit of happiness. You will look in vain in the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution for promises of a safe, easy, risk-free life. Indeed when Woodrow Wilson called for a world safe for democracy, it was left to Gilbert Chesterton to put that sentiment in perspective. “Impossible” he said. “Democracy is a dangerous trade.” …………………………………………………………[Walter Wriston]
Once upon a time there was a street fair. It had striped awnings and bright colors and from far and near, farmers came with wagons full of produce to sell at the street fair. The produce was plentiful and cheap and the crowds it drew were huge which created all sorts of concerns for the government.So the government created a Ministry of Street Fairs which it funded by taxing the produce sold at the fair. At first the Ministry brought some some order to the street fair, but it would periodically launch new “street fair initiatives” to justify another expansion and pay for them by raising taxes on the produce.At first the taxes were small, but as the ministry grew, so did the Produce Tax. The Ministry of Street Fairs built itself a towering stone headquarters overlooking the street fair. In its shadow, the street fair dwindled as its produce was now more expensive than anywhere else in the city.The empty fair would once have been a relief to the government, but was now a source of concern because it had grown dependent on the Produce Tax and plenty of its nephews and nieces had picked up lucrative positions in the great stone building.So after some consultation the Ministry of Street Fairs launched an “Emergency Street Fair Stimulus Plan” to promote shopping at the street fair. The stimulus plan offered people credit for shopping at the street fair, but the credit was paid for by borrowing against the expected returns from an enlarged produce tax. The stimulus plan also piled on new regulations to be enforced by new branches of the Ministry of Street Fairs detailing exactly how many pears can be placed in a basket and the exact shade of green that a Granny Smith apple should be.A short term burst of shoppers excited by the credit arrives and then fades away. The new taxes and regulations force the fruit sellers to raise prices again. The credit goes away, but the high prices remain.
Worried, senior members of the Ministry of Street Fairs do the unthinkable and consult with some of the vendors at the fair. They learn that their old customers are choosing to shop for their fruit at supermarkets where all the taxes and regulations don’t apply because there is, as of yet, no Ministry of Supermarkets.
Tackling the problem head on, the Ministry of Street Fairs demands that supermarkets be classified as indoor street fairs and put under its jurisdiction. The “Supermarkets are now Indoor Street Fairs” bill is introduced and not only puts the supermarkets under the Ministry’s authority, but taxes them at twice the rate of street fairs. Supporters of the bill denounce the evil “Supermarket Lobby” for its indoor unregulated street fairs which use a legal loophole to profit at the expense of starving children who need fresh fruit.
The bill passes. The Ministry is congratulated for its commitment to fighting for the right of everyone to buy fruit at vastly inflated prices.
Produce sales fall drastically as fruit becomes a luxury. Most fruit now spoils on the stands with no one to buy it because no one will buy it at the minimum price necessary to turn even the most minimal profit. Fruit sellers and merchants raise their prices again to compensate for decreased sales volume. Many supermarkets and sellers go out of business, so that even fewer people can afford fruit. In a ripple effect, fruit growers and importers also go out of business further destroying the market.
The Ministry of Street Fairs responds to public protests by creating a “Fruit Dole” which entitles every child to one apple a week. This dole comes at the expense of the fruit sellers, which again raises the price of fruit for everyone. Charismatic young politicians demand “Fruit for the People” and denounce the corrupt interests who keep the people from having access to fruit. A radical “Fruit People’s Party” is created with a call for nationalizing the orchards to ensure equal fruit for everyone.
Back in 1997 class-action lawsuit Pigford v. Glickman was filed by Timothy Pigford and 400 southern black farmers who apparently had legitimate claims of discrimination against the U.S.Department of Agriculture (USDA) in its allocation of farm loans between 1983 and 1987. For farmers, the cost of planting is high — seed, fertilizer, equipment — and they may need loans to tide them over till harvest.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Department of Agriculture found no evidence of ongoing discrimination but that black farmers had been treated unfairly in the past. This injustice became the reasoning for an officially sanctioned fraud amounting to reparations for non-white, non-male farmers.
The Clinton administration decided on a $1 billion settlement that , as one lawyer told the Times “was more a political decision than a litigation decision.”The presiding judge expanded the definition of claimants to include anyone who had “attempted to farm” and no written complaint or proof of discrimination was necessary. The judge set up a mechanism to provide “those class members with little or no documentary evidence with a virtually automatic cash payment of $50,000.” Enter the money tree. Mass meetings of potential claimants were held and staff from lawyers’ offices filled out forms for claimants. Entire families filled out claims; people filled out claims for their kids. Planting tomatoes in the back yard would qualify you as a farmer. Most applicants had never received any loans, making it impossible to check the record to verify their claims.
The Times examined 16 ZIP codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and North Carolina, and found that “the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997, the year the lawsuit was filed. Those applicants received nearly $100 million.” In Little Rock, ten members of one extended family reaped a cool half a million dollars.
Thousands of applicants missed the 1999 deadline for the original lawsuit. Senator Barack Obama supported paying the late applicants, and as president he successfully sought another $1.15 billion for the purpose. “Political appointees at Justice and Agriculture committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the original 91 plaintiffs, but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.” The government settled for another $760 million with Native Americans, but even with the lure of the cash, they could only give away $300 million. So $400 million will go to Native American nonprofits if they can find any. The plaintiffs’ lawyers get $60 million for their assistance in squandering taxpayer money.
The deal, according to the Times, was fashioned in White House meetings in spite of vehement objections of career lawyers and agency officials who argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination, and the basic plan —proved to be a magnet for fraud.
The deal resulted from a desire to redress what the government and the judge agreed was a painful legacy of bias against African-Americans by the Agriculture Department. The Times showed that it became a runaway train driven by racial politics and pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stood to gain more than $130 million in fees. More than 90,000 people have filed claims, more claimants than farms.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, whose only connection to agriculture is that he was a former governor of Iowa, a farm state, said the compensation effort ushers in “a new chapter of civil rights at U.S.D.A.” where “we celebrate diversity instead of discriminate against it.” Gaack.
At the time of his premature death, the great Andrew Breitbart had been delving into the Pigford settlement for more than a year, trying to bring attention to this open-ended government redistribution scheme that showed no signs of ending. A handful of conservative outlets devoted small amounts of effort to mentioning it, but in Breitbart’s lifetime it never broke through to widespread attention. Perhaps that will change with the publication of the New York Times well reported 5,000 word piece on Pigford. The case represented everything Andrew Breitbart hated. — cronyism, identity politics, hypocrisy and complete indifference from the mainstream media.
The epic New York TimesPigford exposé is here. If you ever wondered about government corruption, cronyism, hypocrisy and redistribution of assets, here is your evidence. Over at Breitbart’s Big Government, Joel Pollak has a note on how widely disseminated it is.
The watershed year was 1979, and the battlefield was Britain. After an unprecedented series of strikes, especially in the public sector, dubbed by the media ‘the winter of discontent,’ Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to become leader of a British political party became Britain’s first woman Prime Minister on 4 May 1979, having led the Conservatives to a 43-seat electoral victory. Mrs. Thatcher, soon dubbed by the Brezhnev regime “the Iron Lady’ (a title she relished), called herself a ‘conviction’ politician, as opposed to a consensus one. She implicitly repudiated much of Conservative post-war policy, and especially its tacit agreement with the Labour Party that whole areas of British public life, including the welfare state and the nationalized sector, were sacrosanct. Her first task was to curb the legal power of the trade unions which, as we have seen, had been growing steadily since 1945. A previous attempt at reform by the Conservative government in 1971, the comprehensive and ultra-complex Industrial Relations Act, had proved unworkable and had been promptly scrapped by the incoming Labour Cabinet in 1974. Mrs. Thatcher’s government, having learned the lesson, set about the problem on a step-by-step basis, enacting in all five separate acts, over the space of three parliaments, which progressively ended a whole series of special union legal privileges, made many strikes and forms of picketing unlawful, and subjected unions that broke the law to severe financial penalties. Mrs. Thatcher also made it clear that the police, in dealing with ‘mass’, ‘flying’ and ‘secondary’ pickets, which had made it virtually impossible in the 1970s for employers to resist strike demands and so inflicted grievous damage on both the private and public sector would be fully backed by her government. …
The decline of union restrictive practices and of overmanning in many sectors produced a rise in productivity in Britain, which in several years during the decade, was the highest in Europe; and for much of 198os the British economy expanded rapidly: in 1988, for instance, it was still growing at 4 per cent after seven years of continuous expansion, a record unique in the post-war years of continuous expansion, a record unique in the post-war period. But what particularly struck foreigners about the performance of the Thatcher government was its success in reducing the state sector, by the process known as ‘privatization’. This had two aspects. The first was the transfer of nationalized industries, such as Cable & Wireless, British Steel, British Airways, British Telecommunications, British Gas, and the water and the electricity supply and distribution industry into private ownership and management. …Privatization rapidly transformed the loss-makers into profitable companies.British Steel, for instance, had incurred the largest loss in corporate history, some £500 million, the year before it was privatized; by the end of the 1980s it had the highest productivity rates in the European steel industry and was the most profitable steel company in the world. The turnaround at British Airways was scarcely less spectacular.
The foregoing comes from Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, an essential book.
Then there was the Cold War, and the unlikely triumvirate of the Polish Pope, Britain’s Iron Lady, and the American actor turned President, Ronald Reagan. If you didn’t watch these excerpts from Herb Meyer’s speech, do take the time. If you’re short on time, just watch the middle excerpt.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were essentially soul mates, which doesn’t mean they didn’t have their disagreements, but they were world significant figures in history and will be long remembered. Courage, iron will, and keeping their eyes on the prize. Paul Johnson again:
Thus the year 1989, which the Left throughout the world had planned as a celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution — the beginning of modern radical politics, as it was argued — turned into something quite different: a Year of Revolutions indeed, but of revolutions against the established order of Marxism-Leninism. Not all of them succeeded.
Prime Ministers and Presidents come and go, and some of them are significant and put the world on a different path, and some aren’t and don’t. Lady Margaret Thatcher was one of the significant ones. Rest in Peace.
ADDENDUM: I quoted historian Paul Johnson regarding Margaret Thatcher. The Wall Street Journal opinion page has featured today, an article from Paul Johnson on “The World-Changing Margaret Thatcher: Not since Catherine the Great has there been a woman of such consequence.” It may be behind a pay wall, but here is a link to the piece, and here is the Journal’s own piece.
Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) favors not just background checks, but repeal of the Second Amendment. Keep in mind that she identifies herself as a Progressive, but is a far left radical, firmly in support of all things on the far left end of the spectrum. All is politics and politics is all.
Obama’s Sequester strategy is slowly crumbling. The White House dreamed up the sequester idea to force Republicans to fall in line. They thought that big cuts to Defense would force Republicans to cave. Progressives are not in politics to tinker with the existing system; they are in politics to achieve “social justice” and transform the way Americans live. Through government programs they will make everyone equal and take care of everyone in need. They can’t be having Republicans cut back on the funding they need to achieve their goals.
Republicans did not cave, so Obama had to enumerate all the layoffs and furloughs and children who wouldn’t get their vaccinations, park restrooms locked, and White House tours cancelled. Schoolchildren whose visit was spoiled, left Obama talking about bake sales and how he didn’t know anything about it, it was all the Secret Service’s fault. The ongoing list of horrors produced mostly a sharp decline in Obama’s believability, so now he is embarked on a “charm offensive” which even aides say is just for show. There is a budget battle coming up.
President Obama has clearly stated that he does not believe that spending is a problem. No one knows how he arrives at that delusional idea. He believes that the problem is the rising costs of health care, which ObamaCare will arrest.
It’s hard to understand why Democrats don’t see that the glorious future they hope to achieve has been tried over and over and always failed. Europe is the only the most recent example. Creating a massive government program that would absorb one-sixth of the economy and make every American dependent on government for health care, they saw as a major stepping stone to the ‘fundamental transformation’ of America. They are completely oblivious to the crumbling breakdown of their vision, sure that they can fix anything with a few new rules or regulations.
ObamaCare is a dreadful mess, and a law that will break down of its own weight. It is going to cost more than anyone dreamed, the law is stifling medical innovation, there are far from enough doctors, so the intent is to palm patients off on nurses, and import doctors from other countries. Now we learn that wives will be dropped from husband’s employer-provided health insurance. Insuring ‘children” until they are 26 will put an enormous burden on Insurance policies, and employers will have a strong incentive to drop spouses. ObamaCare requires a “per life” fee from companies that insure their workers, now $1 or $2 will be $65 in 2014. Some companies will simply require their employees to pay a spousal surcharge rather than drop them from the insurance rolls.
Democrats were astonished to learn that Paul Ryan’s budget plan includes the repeal of ObamaCare. The depth of the delusion is apparent when you recall that when ObamaCare passed, it’s supporters insisted the law would “bend the cost curve down,” and reduce the deficit.
The Senate’s budget plan (after 4 years of delay) not only does not halt the massive spending in ObamaCare, it adds an estimated $1.2 trillion for subsidies to individuals for purchasing coverage through the exchanges., and $638 billion in matching funds for states to expand their Medicaid coverage. (possibly useless since few doctors will accept Medicaid patients).
Today, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates ObamaCare will add almost $1.6 trillion in new spending over the next ten years. It obligates an estimated $1 trillion for subsidies to individuals for purchasing coverage through government exchanges and $644 billion for states agreeing to expand their Medicaid programs. To pay for the new entitlements, it takes over $700 billion out of Medicare, a program headed for insolvency without reform. They assume they can just pay doctors and hospitals less, and the medical professionals will still see those patients.
Supporters are desperate to hide ObamaCare’s failures and shortcomings, so the next phase has ideas such as strengthening the individual mandate penalty, expanding the powers of the Independent Payment Advisory Board. (IPAB) (Death Panels) Their only ideas are more force (mandates, fines and penalties), cutting the pay of providers, and denying service. You will participate, you can spend your days trying to find a doctor or go to the emergency room for any little thing raising costs dramatically, and if you are in such pain you need surgery, we’ll supply you with pain pills instead.
Every one of the major think tanks has brilliant ideas for replacing ObamaCare. Hospitals are reorganizing to save money and for greater efficiency. But individual doctors are coming up with different ways to practice. We have a number of “concierge’ doctors here— you pay an annual fee, and they become your doctor. I know a physician who bought a big motor home, outfitted it as a doctor’s office, and arranged to park it at a local mall. I wrote recently about an Oklahoma Surgery Center that has reduced costs remarkably. Doctors are many of our best and brightest, and quite capable of finding innovative solutions. Pity that Democrats didn’t think to get their help. Of course they didn’t consult the American people either. Just Dump it
Venezuelan dictatorial socialist president Hugo Chavez has died, and his impoverished country has slight chance for recovery. He has held power and repressed his people to create his vision of a “Bolivarian state, “looking backwards to the glory days of the liberator Simon Bolivar. A new election will be held soon, Vice President Nicolas Maduro (Chavez’s appointed heir) is set to run against chief opposition leader Henrique Capriles.
This will be an interesting choice to see whether state propaganda of how much Chavez loved the poor of Venezuela whom he oppressed, deprived of food, opportunity and electricity, and essentially eliminated the middle class, will trump the $2 billion dollars of graft and oil money that he managed to squirrel away as his personal fortune. He mismanaged Venezuela’s oil resources, and mismanaged the country. They say they are going to embalm him and put his body in a glass case in imitation of other communist dictators. Why do they do that?
Former President Jimmy Carter “commitment to improving the lives of his fellow countrymen” and said he would be remembered for his bold assertion of autonomy and independence for Latin American governments and for his formidable communication skills and personal connection with supporters in his country and abroad to whom he gave hope and empowerment.” Well, what did you expect, it’s Jimmy Carter.
The Atlantic wrote, presumably while weeping openly, Passionate and charismatic, Chavez slipped comfortably into the role of romantic Latin American revolutionary, championing the poor against an unfeeling local oligarchy and its imperial paymasters…Today millions of Venezuelans will weep tears of genuine anguish at his passing.”
Bloomberg TV said “He rode a wave of revolution into power, and over 14 years would transform his country’s place on the world stage…It was oil revenues that allowed Chavez to pour money into food and education programs in Venezuela.” —and apparently his pockets. Those revolutionary socialist ideas never work. The poor remain poor, and the rest of society is made poor as well, but they do manage to thoroughly enrich themselves. Casts a pall on their ‘legacy.’
Paul Krugman is a man of the Left, an economist of the Keynesian persuasion, and a partisan hack who writes for the New York Times. He has found that writing partisan pieces is way more fun than doing serious economics. Well, I should talk, as I write partisan blog posts, and certainly politics are more divided and more partisan than I have ever seen in my lifetime.
The Holy Grail for the Left has always been single-payer, government-run health care. When government controls your life and death, they probably have your vote as well. And what matters to the Left is not you, or your health, or your well-being, but their power. If you assume that they care about you — you’re wrong.
They are sure that there is a better world out there without all the annoyances of ordinary life and without annoying people who disagree with them; and if they just have the power, they will bring about that perfect government and perfect society. They just won’t accept the untidy real world and the flawed nature of ordinary human beings. And they do not recognize that those who have had the very same dreams and the very same aims have invariably created the most repressive, murderous societies the world has ever known. This time it will be different. They just didn’t do it right. Right. Uh huh.
When the Left embarked on what we now call ObamaCare, the amusingly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), they claimed to be modeling it on Massachusetts Care. Obama’s team of advisers, however, were all enamored (seriously) of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), where physicians are salaried employees, hospitals are run by the “National Trust” and health care is “free” to the patient (except for high taxes), and except in unusual circumstances Labour is consistently reelected to power. I expect that the last part of that last sentence is the important one.
What has transpired with the NHS is that the priority of the medical establishment has become getting paid and following the rules. And the priority of the government is saving money. That sets up a conundrum where the loser is the patient. All is well, when it’s a minor annoyance, but when you are really in need of major medical care, you’re in trouble. If you search the British papers for news about the NHS, over time, it’s frightening. The most recent concerns are with “The Liverpool Pathway” which is designed to cut the losses from expensive care for old folks, by gently easing them out of this world by cutting off their nutrition and hydration, and probably neglecting to tell either the patient or his family that is what they are doing.
So, back to Paul Krugman. He was recently addressing a leftist group, and didn’t realize that he was being videotaped:
Eventually we do have a problem. That the population is getting older, health care costs are rising… there is this question of how we’re going to pay for the programs. The year 2025, the year 2030, something is going to have to give…
We’re going to need more revenue… Surely it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well… We won’t be able to pay for the kind of government the society will want without some increase in taxes… on the middle class, maybe a value added tax…
And we’re also going to have to make decisions about health care, doc pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits.
So the snarky version… which I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.
So Sarah Palin was right about death panels. The Obama health care advisers pointed out from the beginning that the major expenses for health care came in the final years of a person’s life. They talked about “life years” and “cost-benefits”, and how it was more important to treat young people who had many life years ahead of them, and old folks should just not have expensive treatments that would only extend their worthless lives unnecessarily. They didn’t use those words, or it would all have been over, but that was the idea.
The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is the 15 member board of bureaucrats that gets to decide what gets paid for and what doesn’t. The Death Panel. They are trying to fill the positions now, but they aren’t getting any candidates.
Everything about ObamaCare is and was a lie. High costs in health care had climbed, but were on the mend as new diagnostic techniques took hold and new medicines saved lives. In Britain, 60,000 patients have been put on the death pathway without being told, but minister still says the controversial end-of life-plan is “fantastic.” Medical specialty groups in this country back repeal of the IPAB. Nothing is “bending down” the cost curve of ObamaCare, instead cost of insurance is expected to triple. But enough. My ObamaCare folder is brimming, My thanks to Paul Krugman for verifying what we all suspected.
Few bad ideas are more devastating, and conversely more celebrated than “diversity.” There are few, if any, places where “diversity” is more important and more needed than in America’s colleges and universities. Every picture taken for the college catalogue will be a careful array of skin colors and ethnic heritages. If they could get some Indian (excuse me Native American) headdresses and Sikh turbans in the pictures they would be in seventh heaven. Yet conservative thought, conservative speakers and heaven forbid, conservative faculty members are simply not allowed. Diversity of thought is unwelcome.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto has some wonderful examples today:
“A construction crew working on the campus of Ohio’s Sinclair Community College was forced to halt work until it removed a ‘Men Working’ sign that was deemed ‘sexist’ by a college administrator,” reports National Review’s Eliana Johnson:
A spokesman for the college told National Review Online that the incident, which occurred on November 21, stemmed from the school’s “deep commitment to diversity,” and that it takes that commitment “very seriously.”
One laughs, but then one reads stuff like this, from a Lafayette College (Easton, Pa.) press release:
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $100,000 grant to Mary Armstrong, associate professor of English and chair of women’s and gender studies, and Jasna Jovanovic, professor of psychology and child development at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, for their study of how colleges and universities can more effectively support the success of underrepresented minority women faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) academic fields. . . .
“Our approach is based on the idea that institutions tend to structure supportive initiatives that address only one aspect of a potentially marginalized group, such as gender, or race, or sexual orientation,” explains Armstrong. “But an underrepresented minority woman will, by definition, have several such identities; hence, lesbians or women of color experience being a woman in STEM with complex, compound disadvantages.”
Armstrong and Jovanovic are conducting the first comprehensive study of how initiatives funded through the NSF ADVANCE program are enhancing the success of underrepresented women in STEM. The research team believes that successful institutional programs have to be creatively reshaped to accommodate the complications experienced by women who identify within multiple underrepresented identities.
One wonders how much money and talent are being poured into this sort of thing instead of producing scientists and engineers. It reminds us of that scene in “Star Trek” when Captain Kirk asks (we quote from memory), “Scotty, can you get us warp drive?” and Scotty replies: “I’m doin’ my best, Cap’n, but I’m strugglin’ with multiple underrepresented identities!”
We really have to do better than just holding up examples to laugh at. Ridicule, disparage, mock, sneer and taunt. They deserve every bit of it. I think it’s a kind of mind rot.
So the government created a Ministry of Street Fairs which it funded by taxing the produce sold at the fair. At first the Ministry brought some some order to the street fair, but it would periodically launch new “street fair initiatives” to justify another expansion and pay for them by raising taxes on the produce.At first the taxes were small, but as the ministry grew, so did the Produce Tax. The Ministry of Street Fairs built itself a towering stone headquarters overlooking the street fair. In its shadow, the street fair dwindled as its produce was now more expensive than anywhere else in the city.The empty fair would once have been a relief to the government, but was now a source of concern because it had grown dependent on the Produce Tax and plenty of its nephews and nieces had picked up lucrative positions in the great stone building.So after some consultation the Ministry of Street Fairs launched an “Emergency Street Fair Stimulus Plan” to promote shopping at the street fair. The stimulus plan offered people credit for shopping at the street fair, but the credit was paid for by borrowing against the expected returns from an enlarged produce tax. The stimulus plan also piled on new regulations to be enforced by new branches of the Ministry of Street Fairs detailing exactly how many pears can be placed in a basket and the exact shade of green that a Granny Smith apple should be.A short term burst of shoppers excited by the credit arrives and then fades away. The new taxes and regulations force the fruit sellers to raise prices again. The credit goes away, but the high prices remain.
