Quick, someone alert Michael Moore. And Obama. And the rest of the Democrat/socialist party.

The man who devised Canada’s healthcare system has wised up.

Castonguay’s evolving view of Canadian health care, however, should weigh heavily on how the candidates think about the issue in this country.

Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Gasp!

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It’s as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.

Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.

Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.

The Canadian government pays for U.S. medical care in some circumstances, but it declined to do so in de Vires’ case for a bureaucratically perfect, but inhumane, reason: She hadn’t properly filled out a form. At death’s door, de Vires should have done her paperwork better.

 “I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”

So said Gen. Wesley Clark, acting as a surrogate for Barack Obama’s campaign, invoking John McCain’s military service against him in a personal attack, the very kind of politics Obama says he abhors.

But how about this: when McCain was offered early release by the North Vietnamese because his father was an admiral, he felt honor bound to refuse and spent an additional five years in prison.

Has Obama done anything close that indicates character? Toughness of will? Honor?

Please.

As for Wesley Clark, he is widely despised in the military as an arrogant showboat. In 2003 the New Yorker profiled him.

Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was Clark’s boss in 1999 when Clark was unceremoniously told that he was being removed from his position as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. “I’ve known Wes for a long time,” Shelton said.

“I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart. . . . Wes won’t get my vote.” Shelton has refused to explain how he came to his conclusion.

Boston.com has a slide show of famous nerds. They include Al Gore, who is a really a nerd wannabe.

Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics, argues they are not.

Evan Sayet ponders the hagiography of Tim Russert by the media.

The insularity and arrogance of the media is well-known and thus they think the passing of one of their own is more significant than the passing of a Pope or a President. But, even that doesn’t explain it all. After all, while coverage of Peter Jennings’ premature passing was overkill as well, it was nowhere near the hagiography we witnessed last week.

So, what is it about Russert that is engendering this kind of passion amongst the leftists in the media?

I suspect it is their recognition of the passing of the last decent man amongst them. Listening to their eulogies one is struck by how what they single out as the qualities that made Russert great are exactly the one’s the rest of them violently reject.

Russert had — and respected — his Jesuit roots and Catholic faith. This amongst people to whom faith is the greatest of all evils and whose hatred for Christianity (and specifically Catholicism) is legend.

Russert appreciated the people of small town America. Time and again the story was told this week of Russert making his first call after each program to his father, “Big Russ” of Buffalo, New York, to see if he’d lived up to his standards and values. This in opposition to the leftist news man who holds the people of Buffalo (and all other towns outside what they derisively call “fly-over country”) is utter disdain, believing, as their hero Barack Obama believes, that these losers “cling” to their values out of “antipathy for people who aren’t like them.”

Russert was optimistic and happy — exactly the opposite traits of the Modern Liberal who is constantly angry, jealous, petty and feeling “victimized.” Americans are optimistic and happy. Russert was an American.

Ralph Peters:

THE facts about your security are being torn to shreds by activist liars. And they think that you’re too stupid to know the difference.

Let’s lay out the worst current examples of media make-believe and election-year truth-trashing:

Whopper No. 1: America is less safe today than it was on Sept. 10, 2001. Oh, really? Where’s the evidence? The Clinton years saw New York City attacked and Americans slaughtered by terrorists around the globe. Nothing was done to protect us.

And the true end of the Clinton era came on 9/11.

A record to be proud of.

Countless aspects of the Bush-Cheney administration deserve merciless criticism. But fair is fair: Since 9/11, we haven’t suffered a single successful terrorist attack on our homeland. Not one.

Explain to me, please, how this shows we’re less safe. What factual measurement applies, other than the absence of attacks?

God knows, the terrorists desperately wanted to strike our homeland. And they couldn’t. Are we supposed to believe that was an accident?

Whopper No. 2: Al Qaeda is stronger than ever. Al Qaeda just suffered a strategic defeat in Iraq that may prove decisive. It can’t launch attacks beyond its regional lairs. The cowardly Osama bin Laden can’t show his face (remember his Clinton-era pep rallies?).

Yes, terrorists can still murder innocents on their home court. I personally prefer that to them killing Americans in Manhattan and Washington. Even in Iraq, al Qaeda’s been beaten down to violent-fugitive status.

By what objective measurement is al Qaeda stronger today than it was when it had an entire country for its base and its tentacles reached all the way to Florida and the Midwest?

Whopper No. 3: Success in Iraq is an illusion - the surge failed. Folks, this is something only a New York Times columnist could believe.

Every single significant indicator, from Iraqi government progress through the performance of Iraqi security forces to the plummeting level of violence, has changed for the better - remarkably so.

If current trend-lines continue, it may not be long before Baghdad is safer for Iraqi citizens than the Washington-Baltimore metroplex is for US citizens. Iraq’s government is working, its economy is booming - and its military has driven the concentrations of terrorists and militia from every one of Iraq’s major cities.

And our troops are coming home. Where’s the failure?

Bill Ayers, former Weatherman terrorist and friend of Obama, writes on his blog: 

On the death penalty, I’m an abolitionist; on education and health care, a universalist; on economic growth, a minimalist, while on economic policy, a socialist; on military power deployed in the service of occupation and conquest, a pacifist; on the possibility of progressive political change, a pessimist of the head and an optimist of the heart.

Good to know. But what’s an economist minimalist? Someone who likes poverty?

Instapundit:

JERRY POURNELLE ON SHORT-TERM THINKING:

Five years ago we were told that increased refinery and oil pumping capability in the US would do no good because it would take five years for those to affect gas pump prices. Query: if we had greatly increased supply over the past five years, would not oil be at about $75/bbl, still high, but not headed to $200? And if we do nothing to increase supply now, where will oil go? . . . We are in a time of national emergency, but it does not affect the politicians, who continue business as usual.

My response to those who say that increased drilling is pointless because it won’t yield immediate results — like Arnold Schwarzenegger –is why worry about the greenhouse effect, then? Nothing we do will cool the planet immediately. Yet we’re told immediate action there is vital. In fact, we’re told that by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the very same speech.

UPDATE: TigerHawk: “One would have thought that this point was so obvious it would not have to be made at all.”

You can never be too obvious, it seems.

Wall Street Journal: 

Justice Scalia shreds the collective interpretation as a matter of both common law and Constitutional history. He writes that the Founders, as well as nearly all Constitutional scholars over the decades, believed in the individual right. Many Supreme Court opinions invoke the Founders, but this one is refreshing in its resort to first American principles and its affirmation of a basic liberty. It’s not too much to say that Heller is every bit as important to the Second Amendment as Near v. Minnesota (prior restraint) or N.Y. Times v. Sullivan (libel) are to the First Amendment.

Which makes it all the more troubling that no less than four Justices were willing to explain this right away. These are the same four liberal Justices who routinely invoke the “right to privacy” – which is nowhere in the text of the Constitution – as a justification for asserting various social rights. Yet in his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens argues that a right to bear arms that is plainly in the text adheres to an individual only if he is sanctioned by government.

Justice Breyer, who wrote a companion dissent, takes a more devious tack. He wants to establish an “interest-balancing test” to weigh the Constitutionality of particular restrictions on gun ownership. This balancing test is best understood as a roadmap for vitiating the practical effects of Heller going forward.

Using Justice Breyer’s “test,” judges could accept the existence of an individual right to bear arms in theory, while whittling it down to nothing by weighing that right against the interests of the government in preventing gun-related violence. Having set forth this supposedly neutral standard, Justice Breyer shows his policy hand by arguing that under this standard the interests of the District of Columbia would outweigh Mr. Heller’s interest in defending himself, and the ban should thus be upheld.

But as Justice Scalia writes, no other Constitutional right is subjected to this sort of interest-balancing. “The very enumeration of the right takes [it] out of the hands of government” – even the hands of Olympian judges like Stephen Breyer. “Like the First, [the Second Amendment] is the very product of an interest-balancing by the people – which Justice Breyer would now conduct for them anew.”

In that one sentence, Justice Scalia illuminates a main fault line on this current Supreme Court. The four liberals are far more willing to empower the government and judges to restrict individual liberty, save on matters of personal lifestyle (abortion, gay rights) or perhaps crime. The four conservatives are far more willing to defend individuals against government power – for example, in owning firearms, or private property (the 2005 Kelo case on eminent domain). Justice Anthony Kennedy swings both ways, and in Heller he sided with the people.

A President Obama would give us more Breyers, which is ironic, given that Leftists are always complaining about the government intruding on their civil liberties.

…at least this time. The Canadian Human Rights Commission (kangaroo court) that heard the case against Mark Steyn/Macleans Magazine has done the right thing.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has dismissed a complaint against Maclean’s magazine over a controversial article on the future of Islam, magazine officials said yesterday.

Meanwhile, a decision from the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal over the same issue isn’t expected for several months.

The Canadian Islamic Congress launched the dual complaints over an article by Maclean’s journalist Mark Steyn. The article, The Future Belongs to Islam, came under fire by Muslim critics who claimed it spreads Islamophobia.

Earlier this month, closing arguments were made before B.C.’s Human Rights Tribunal over the article, which appeared in Maclean’s in October, 2006.

David Warren has context.

…in the strange new world of “Kafkanada” — where you can be tried for the same imaginary “hate crimes” in any or all federal and provincial jurisdictions, simultaneously or sequentially. A single complaint by any reader anywhere is enough to launch a secret inquiry. The target has no right to confront his accuser, and will not at first even be told who he or she is.

Truth is no defence, the absence of harm is no defence, there are no rules of evidence — due process is entirely subverted. The inquisitors of these kangaroo courts may ultimately reach any “judgement” they please, after months or years of playing cat-and-mouse with their selected victim.

A Protestant minister in Alberta was, for instance, recently ordered to publicly renounce his Christian beliefs, as well as pay a big lump sum to the anti-Christian activist who had prosecuted him, in a case I mentioned in a previous column, and which I am pleased to see is getting wide publicity in the United States even if not up here. “Re-education” programmes are frequently assigned, for which the victim must also pay.

All of the complainant’s expenses are paid by the taxpayer, as well as all of the overheads and expenses of the jet-setting “human rights” bureaucrats, who do all the prosecutorial work, as well as providing both judge and jury. The system is, in principle, indistinguishable from that in place during the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China. It was perpetrated by leftwing activists on the Canadian people while they were sleeping. It is a system of the activists, by the activists, and for the activists.

The people are still sleeping, but some “blowback” has finally begun to occur. Given its very eccentric inquisitorial practices, which have been documented and publicized on the Internet, the CHRC is now under an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation, and there is a Parliamentary investigation pending. (As a public relations exercise, the CHRC has also hand-picked its own “independent” investigator to do what we can only assume will be a defensive whitewash, as usual at taxpayer expense.)

43% of Iraqis say their country is on the “right track.” Only 17% of Americans say the USA is on the “right track.”

Big Baloney is in the tank for Obama. They can’t help it; they’re smitten.

Yesterday’s LA Times big story was Obama shifting to the center – basically talking centrist after talking leftist (and more to the point, acting leftist his whole career). For most people, this is a sign of gross insincerity — y’know, politics as usual. Not to Big Baloney.

But nothing beats Time magazine for its cover in March, which posed the rhetorical question, “How much does experience matter?”

No need to read what’s inside — it wasn’t really a question, it was political cover.

We created our own Time covers to answer their non-question.

Robert Samuelson:

Tired of high gasoline prices and rising food costs? Well, here’s a solution. Let’s shoot the “speculators.” A chorus of politicians, including John McCain, Barack Obama and Sen. Joe Lieberman, blames these financial slimeballs for piling into commodities markets and pushing prices to artificial and unconscionable levels. Gosh, if only it were that simple. Speculator-bashing is another exercise in scapegoating and grandstanding. Leading politicians either don’t understand what’s happening or don’t want to acknowledge their complicity.

Granted, raw-material prices have exploded across the board. Look at the table below. It shows price increases for eight major commodities from 2002 to 2007. Oil rose 177 percent, corn 70 percent and copper 360 percent. But that’s just the point. Did “speculators” really cause all these increases? If so, why did some prices go up more than others? And what about steel? It rose 117 percent—and continued increasing in 2008—even though it’s not traded on commodities futures markets.

A better explanation is basic supply and demand. Despite the U.S. slowdown, the world economy has boomed. Since 2002, annual growth has averaged 4.6 percent, the highest sustained rate since the 1960s, says economist Michael Mussa of the Peterson Institute. By their nature, raw materials (food, energy, minerals) sustain the broader economy. They’re not just frills. When unexpectedly high demand strains existing production capacity, prices rise sharply as buyers scramble for scarce supplies. That’s what happened.

We’ve had a demand shock,” says analyst Joel Crane of Deutsche Bank. “No one foresaw that China would grow at a 10 percent annual rate for over a decade. Commodity producers just didn’t invest enough.” In industry after industry, global buying has bumped up against production limits. In 1999, surplus world oil capacity totaled 5 million barrels a day (mbd) on global consumption of 76mbd, reckons the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Now the surplus is about 2mbd—and much of that in high-sulfur oil not wanted by refiners—on consumption of 86mbd.

Or take nonferrous metals, such as copper and aluminum. “You had a long period of underinvestment in these industries,” says economist John Mothersole of Global Insight. For some metals, the collapse of the Soviet Union threw added production—previously destined for tanks, planes and ships—onto world markets. Prices plunged as surpluses grew. But “the accelerating growth in India and China eliminated the overhang,” Mothersole says. By some estimates, China now accounts for 60 percent to 80 percent of the annual increases in world demand for many metals.

Commodity-price increases vary, because markets vary. Rice isn’t zinc. No surprise. But “speculators” played little role in the price run-ups. Who are these offensive souls? Well, they often don’t fit the stereotype of sleazy high rollers: many manage pension funds or university and foundation endowments. Their modest investments in commodities aim to improve returns.

Click for more. Even more here.

by Burt Prelutsky 

I must confess I got a chuckle out of Barack Obama’s warning us all to lay off his wife. Sorry, pal, but it’s too late in the game for that. If you didn’t want her to be a legitimate target, you should have told her to stay home with the kids and to keep her yap shut.

The days when the little women remained at home while the menfolk went off to run for president ended a long time ago, back in the days of Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower. Ever since, we voters have been encouraged to take an interest in the wives, trying to determine whether we wanted them to represent America as the First Lady. Frankly, I’ve always suspected that Teresa Heinz-Kerry had more to do with costing her hubby the election than the good folks of Ohio, for which, I, for one, will be forever grateful.

Many years ago, another prominent Democrat came to the defense of a family member. Some Republicans had accused FDR of wasting millions of tax dollars by sending a U.S. destroyer to the Aleutian Islands to retrieve his little Scotch terrier, Fala. But at least Roosevelt had the good grace to say that he, his wife and his children, all expected to come under attack from his political opponents, but that his dog, being a thrifty Scot, would have been the first to object if the accusation had been true.

I agree that there are times when the honorable thing is to keep women out of harm’s way. That’s the way the Mafia conducts its business. You don’t go after the other guy’s wife, mother and children, because you don’t want his goombahs coming after yours. But the difference is that the dons don’t arm their women with Uzis and tell them to go out and earn their keep. Of course nobody in his right mind ever suggested that politicians were as honor-bound as Mafiosos. 

Politicians tend to turn campaigns into family endeavors. Hillary sends Chelsea out on the hustings, but being the candidate’s daughter, she’s supposed to be spared not only critical comment, but even hard questions.

Barack sends Michelle out to make speeches and give interviews, but when her words suggest a certain note of bitterness, racism and disaffection for America, Mr. Obama tells us we’re not supposed to take her to task. 

Well, Senator, if I recall correctly, you also think your spiritual advisor and your good friends, a corrupt lobbyist and an unrepentant terrorist, should be left out of the equation. So, on exactly what basis would you have us consider your qualifications to be our president? I’m sure you wouldn’t think it cricket if we judged you by your books, filled, as they are, with smoldering hostility towards white people and the capitalist system. Or perhaps you’d have us consider your record as the great conciliator, the man who’ll unite us all, when you have the most partisan, most socialistic, voting record in the U.S. Senate. Or perhaps you’d prefer to be judged on the basis of your vast experience in foreign affairs? No, I didn’t think so.

The fact is, these political spouses serve a very real, very positive, purpose. Not only do Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton serve as lightning rods for their respective spouses, taking hits that would otherwise be directed at the candidates, but they serve to remind the rest of us that maybe our own husbands and wives aren’t so bad, after all.

An interesting collection of photographs.

Powerline:

Today the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held yet another hearing on the subject of terrorist interrogations. It is not clear to me why the Democrats are obsessed with this subject. The ranking Republican on the subcommittee, Trent Franks of Arizona, noted that “detainee treatment has been the subject of over 60 hearings, markups and briefings during the last Congress in the House Armed Services Committee alone, of which I am a member.” And that is only a drop in the bucket, since any number of Democrat-controlled committees and subcommittees are eager to declare their solidarity with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda terrorists who have been interrogated over the last six years.

Franks lent an air of sanity to the proceedings. His opening statement is worth reading in its entirety, but we’ll have to settle for a brief extract:

[F]inally, I’d like to note that the dangers of moving back toward the failed model of treating terrorists like ordinary criminals was made perfectly clear in a recently written article on the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.The article appeared last Sunday in the “New York Times” and it makes clear how we can expect terrorists to react when they are granted the rights of criminal defendants.

According to the “New York Times,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed met his captors at first with a cocky defiance, telling one veteran CIA officer, a former Pakistan station chief, that he would talk only when he got to New York and was assigned a lawyer.

Of course, this was the experience of his nephew and partner in terrorism, Ramzi Yousef, after Yousef’s arrest in 1995.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court of the United States has taken steps to grant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s wish, and I hope the Congress does not make the same mistake.

The subcommittee summoned three witnesses to serve as its foils: David Addington, Chief of Staff and former Counsel to Vice-President Cheney, John Yoo–no introduction necessary–and Chris Schroeder, a former official of the Department of Justice who was there to parrot the Dems’ line. The hearing, like dozens of others on the same theme, was a bad joke.

The Democrats sought to advance the view that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a crime on a par with the Holocaust, whereas I, for one, think that waterboarding is exactly the right technique for interrogating terrorists: it takes only two or three minutes, is almost always effective, and does no harm to the terrorist.

It is clear, however, that some, at least, of the Democrats who engage in these witch-hunts now identify with members of al Qaeda and unapologetically represent their interests. One such member of Congress is Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts. In this exchange with David Addington, Delahunt expresses his pleasure at siding with al Qaeda members who are watching the proceedings on CSpan against a member of the Bush administration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j2uvxsCU_M

In a sane world, this would be a scandal that would call into question whether any member of Delahunt’s party should be elected to Congress in November.

IBD:

The U.S. has just persuaded the most isolated tyranny on Earth to disable a plutonium plant and turn over nearly 19,000 pages of nuclear documents. Would Obama do better?

Barack Obama has done a lot of talking in his campaign about the merits of “tough diplomacy,” as he likes to put it, “the kind that the Bush administration has been unable and unwilling to use.”

In that vein, Obama has belittled Asia’s U.S.-led six-party talks between North Korea, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea, calling them an “ad hoc arrangement.”

As an alternative, “Obama is willing to meet with the leaders of all nations, friend and foe,” according to the foreign policy section of his campaign Web site. As Obama’s thinking goes, “if America is willing to come to the table, the world will be more willing to rally behind American leadership to deal with challenges like terrorism, and Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs.”

Similarly, Obama’s immediate predecessor as Democratic presidential standard bearer, Sen. John Kerry, this week remarked that “engaging our enemies can pay dividends.”

Kerry was referring to the Bush administration’s modest but significant diplomatic victory in persuading the communist government of North Korea to deliver records of its nuclear activities to China on Thursday. The development is a key move toward Pyongyang’s atomic disarmament.

Much is being made of the Kerry “compliment” by those outraged that the president will now reward North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il by easing some sanctions, and in 45 days remove the regime from America’s list of terrorist client states.

The president’s own former U.N. ambassador, the clear-minded, no-nonsense John Bolton, called it ” shameful” and said it signaled “the final collapse of Bush’s foreign policy.”

And House Intelligence Committee ranking Republican Pete Hoekstra of Michigan said the president’s move rewards a “brutal dictator for shallow gestures.” He suggested that the Bush Administration may have been fooled by Kim, not unlike the way he fooled Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

But the “concessions” granted to Pyongyang are largely symbolic in nature. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stresses that we have provided precious little aid or help in the economic sphere and that considerable sanctions remain in place.

And the president pointed out that “the two actions America is taking will have little impact on North Korea’s financial and diplomatic isolation. North Korea will remain one of the most heavily sanctioned nations in the world.”

As Bush put it, this is “a moment of opportunity for North Korea.”

by J.C. Phillips 

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has promised Americans a new kind of politics – “change we can believe in.” Who could’ve suspected that the change he was referring to was a reversion to the failed policies of 30 years ago? 

In response to the rising price of gasoline, the senator responded, “I’ll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we’ll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills.”

For my middle class money, the senator gave the wrong answer to the first economic question. Go to the back of the line; no gold star for you.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed into law a windfall tax on big oil profits also hoping to use the money to subsidize the cost of rising energy prices.

The policy was a failure. The Congressional Research Service found that “the tax reduced domestic oil production by 3% to 6% and increased oil imports from OPEC by 8% to 16%.” And what of all that revenue that was to pour into government coffers in order to give relief to American consumers, (who oddly enough were now burdened by higher gas prices and shortages)? It turns out that the tax was expensive to impose and equally as expensive to collect. Tax revenue dripped in rather than raining down. When the tax was finally and mercifully repealed, the New York Times summed up the policy thusly: “…when Americans waited two hours in gasoline lines and Saudi princes summered in Monaco, it seems almost quaint now.”

It is remarkable how new liberals have convinced themselves that because their hearts are in the right place, the laws of economics (to say nothing of history) simply do not apply to them. 

The senator’s answer does, however, reveal something about the basic tenets of new liberalism to whit: wealth is bad and always ill gotten – that is all wealth that is not their wealth. Further, they are committed to the redistribution of wealth over and above the stated goals of providing relief for the common man.

Obama, for instance, sniffs that lifting the ban on off shore drilling “is not something that’s going to give consumers short-term relief, and it is not a long-term solution to our problems.” If we can’t drill for oil and we can’t build nuclear energy plants, how can we achieve the independence from foreign oil that every president since Jimmy Carter has promised and failed to deliver? Of course, none of those other men promised to calm the seas and heal the world so perhaps Obama is up to a job the others were not.

In what can only be described as a truly cynical gesture the junior senator from Illinois recently voted for a farm bill that rewards corn based ethanol, which as it happens also drives up the price of everything from beef to beer. 

Corn growers are reaping record profits. They have experienced a windfall if you will. The rising price of corn has also led to correspondingly high prices for wheat and barley and has sent the price of groceries soaring. Yet, there is no call for a windfall profits tax on corn growers who despite the increasing demand for corn are planting fewer acres this year than last. In fact, the senator wants to replace tax subsidies for the oil industry with tax subsidies for the ethanol producers. Most of these subsidies do not go to small family farms, but “big agriculture.” 

Where is the relief for the common man? Most of us could stand to walk more and drive less, but none of us can stop eating. Of course, none of that matters so long as we punish big oil companies for making profits.

What remains unclear is what is new about demonizing “big oil” in order to earn populist points while at the same time supporting policies that hurt consumers? The answer is nothing. The new politics of Barack Obama smell an awful lot like the politics of old. And if it smells like bull, well…

Thomas Sowell:

If anyone suggested that Tiger Woods should try to be more like other golfers, people would question the sanity of whoever made that suggestion.

Why should Tiger Woods try to be more like Phil Mickelson? If Tiger turned around and tried to golf left-handed, like Mickelson, he probably wouldn’t be as good as Mickelson, much less as good as he is golfing the way he does right-handed.

Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe, often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some Americans, it is considered chic to be like Europeans.

If Europeans have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, then we should have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, according to such people. If Europeans restrict pharmaceutical companies’ patents and profits, then we should do the same.

Some Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court even seem to think that they should incorporate ideas from European laws in interpreting American laws.

Before we start imitating someone, we should first find out whether the results that they get are better than the results that we get. Across a very wide spectrum, the United States has been doing better than Europe for a very long time.

By comparison with most of the rest of the world, Europe is doing fine. But they are like Phil Mickelson, not Tiger Woods.

Minimum wage laws have the same effects in Europe as they have had in other places around the world. They price many low-skilled and inexperienced workers out of a job.

Because minimum wage laws are more generous in Europe than in the United States, they lead to chronically higher rates of unemployment in general and longer periods of unemployment than in the United States– but especially among younger, less experienced and less skilled workers.

Unemployment rates of 20 percent or more for young workers are common in a number of European countries. Among workers who are both younger and minority workers, such as young Muslims in France, unemployment rates are estimated at about 40 percent.

A documentary currently airing on HBO concerns the case of Roman Polanski, who had sex with a 13-year old girl and fled the country. The documentary details Polanski’s tragic life — losing his parents to the Nazis, his wife to Charles Manson — and the milieu in which the story played out.

The judge was a bit star struck and overly concerned about the press — at one point, he asked a reporter  in private what sentence he ought to give. To the extent that he broke his word with Polanski and his attorney, Polanski can be regarded as aggrieved.

But the documentary glosses over the essential villainy of what Polanski did. He now lives in Paris and is highly respected, even winning an Oscar a few years back. Hollywood people refer to him as living “in exile.”

Again, we bring you the sordid details. Stop reading if blunt language offends you. Here is the story, right from the transcript:

At age 43, Polanski invited a 13-year old girl to pose for a photo spread in French Vogue magazine. He shot her one day, then invited her back for a second round. He fed her champagne and a Quaalude, got her to remove her top, then photographed her in the jacuzzi (this happened at Jack Nicholson’s home when no one else was there).

Polanski got naked and joined her in the jacuzzi. She got uncomfortable and lied that she had asthma and needed to go home to get her medicine. Instead of heeding her request, Polanski got her into a bedroom and went down on her. In the transcript, she called this performing “cuddliness” (she meant cunnilingus) and she describes herself as “ready to cry.”

Then he penetrated her vagina. After a while, he inquired about her last period, and apparently deciding there was a risk of pregnancy, he decided to “go in through her back.”

If anything, the documentary demonstrates how times have changed. No 43-year-old would be able to plea bargain his way out of that. He’d be a pedophile doing time and then put on a list of sexual predators.

The Supreme Court ruled against the death penalty for child rape. Choice quotes: 

“The opinion reads more like an out-of-control legislative debate than a constitutional analysis,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican. “One thing is clear: The five members of the court who issued the opinion do not share the same ’standards of decency’ as the people of Louisiana.”

———————

“The harm that is caused to the victims and to society at large by the worst child rapists is grave,” Alito wrote. “It is the judgment of the Louisiana lawmakers and those in an increasing number of other states that these harms justify the death penalty.”

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But Justice Kennedy said the absence of any recent executions for rape and the small number of states that allow it demonstrate “there is a national consensus against capital punishment for the crime of child rape.”

Justices are not supposed to divine “national consensus” but to interpret the law. To wit: is it unconstitutional for Louisiana to enact laws that meet its voters’ will. How many said executions have been carried out recently is irrelevant.

I know that much and I never went to law school.

Tuesday marked the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Berlin Airlift. I first wrote the following post in 2006. My father is now 87, which means he was 27 years old at the time - younger than my oldest son today.

_______________________________ 

My liberal friends openly fret about anti-American attitudes in Europe. To them, this is George W. Bush’s fault for being so unilateralist and America’s fault for electing him. What I see in Germany is historical ignorance (theirs) and resentment common to spoiled adolescents who’ve been given much and asked for little.

At the end of WWII, the United States took the long view and instead of lording our victory over the vanquished Germans, we helped rebuild their country. First, billions of American dollars in the Marshall Plan went to get Europe back on its feet. When the Soviets got nasty, we launched the Berlin Airlift and kept West Berlin alive.

My dad was a pilot in that effort: an amazing 278,228 flights in 15 months brought vital supplies into the city that had been blockaded by the Soviets. The planes would touch down, unload, take off and do it again. And again. Day after day. On one day there were 13,000 sorties — one every minute.

What makes my father’s story more astonishing is how quickly the enemy had changed. Some four years earlier, he had been delivering P-39 fighters to the Soviet Union, flying them from California to Alaska to better arm our Soviet allies. Those P-39s were put to use fighting Germany.

Even then he sensed something suspicious about Soviet attitudes. For example, the American and Soviet pilots in Alaska were forbidden from mingling or socializing in any way. When the war ended, he had a hunch more trouble was ahead. Passing up a cushy airline job, he remained in the Air Force.

So there he was in 1948 flying cargo planes into Berlin to help the Germans. And our enemy was now the Soviet Union. To harass the airlift pilots, the Soviets set up a fighter firing range adjacent to the runway and fired across their approach. My father said he’d look at the Soviet P-39s firing away and wonder whether that was a plane he’d delivered.

The United States could make such a sudden switch because we didn’t make war on the German people, but on the Nazi government. Rather than punish our vanquished enemies, we helped rebuild their nations and establish sovereign governments. Our interests were both noble and selfish.

The German people then were quite grateful. But today? Let this German blogger tell it:

I watched a television documentary on Berlin earlier this summer that included a segment on the Berlin airlift. It showed clips of the Berlin Airlift but not once did it mention who flew the planes. There is no doubt that history is being re-written in Germany today.

Some family history: when my father returned from his long German deployment, my older brother, then three years old, did not remember him. In the middle of the night he crawled out of his bed, shook my mother awake and whispered, “Tell that man to go home.” My dad, now 85 years old and still going strong, has never forgotten that moment.

Eleven years later he was back in Germany, with the whole family in tow this time, to do his part in the Cold War. Without the US to defend it from Soviet aggression, the photo I took of East Berlin in 1961 would be a picture of Europe today: shabby, forlorn and impoverished.

And how does Germany remember our sacrifice for them?

At the base of the walkway that leads to the top there is a photographic exhibit on the history of the building, beginning with its construction as the Reichstag and ending with its reconstruction as the Bundestag. Naturally much of the exhibit is devoted to the post-war period, the division of Berlin, and reunification.

To my amazement, there was not one mention in either the photographs or the accompanying narrative of the United States and the role it played in bringing down the wall and reunifying the city. Without the United States the Bundestag would still be meeting in Bonn but here were busloads of German and international school children reading a history that would have made the East German Communist Party proud. The experience reminded me of those photos of the Politburo where the faces of party members who had fallen out of favor had been cropped out.

This is largely the doing of the German left wing, I believe. In this regard, they are soul mates of America’s Chomsky-ite lefties who see everything the United States does as part of some nasty imperialist scheme.

Granted, the USA has many blemishes in its history. There are no perfect nations. But at a critical moment in world history, we stepped up and did the heavy lifting. We did a lot of good for a lot of people. Ignoring that history, or worse, rewriting it, is wrong on principle.

As it happens, commercial television in Germany probably did more to keep the airlift history alive. Joerg Wolf brought to may attention a made-for-TV movie about the airlift. My German is rusty, but I could tell from the website for the show that it would probably reach more minds than any museum. I guess we can take comfort in knowing that Oliver Stone didn’t direct the show.

Well, Obama’s against it.

Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed he would break America’s addiction to “dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive” oil if he is elected U.S. president — and one of his first targets might well be Canada’s oil sands.

A senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign told reporters it’s an “open question” whether oil produced from northern Alberta’s oilsands fits with the Democratic candidate’s plan to shift the U.S. sharply away from consumption of carbon-intensive fossil fuels.

“If it turns out that those technologies don’t advance . . . and the only way to produce those resources would be at a significant penalty to climate change, then we don’t believe that those resources are going to be part of the long-term, are going to play a growing role in the long-term future,” said Jason Grumet, Mr. Obama’s senior energy adviser.

The remarks amount to a shot across the bow of Alberta’s oil sands industry, which is planning to boost production from 1.3 million barrels a day to 3.5 million barrels over the next decade.

The industry has come under sustained attack from U.S. environmentalists over the past year because the production of its heavy oil emits an estimated three times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil.

Mr. Obama has cast himself as a champion of green energy during his White House campaign, proposing a national low-carbon fuel standard that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 180 million metric tons by 2020. He has also promised to invest $150-billion in developing alternative energy, and to reduce American dependence on foreign oil by 35% by 2030.

“The possibilities of renewable energy are limitless,” Mr. Obama said in an energy policy speech Tuesday in Las Vegas. “We’ve heard promises about it in every State of the Union [speech] for the last three decades. But each and every year, we become more, not less, addicted to oil — a 19th-century fossil fuel that is dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive.”

“…possibilities of renewable energy are limitless” is vapid. Possibilities of anything are limitless, but they won’t fuel your car.

Arthur Herman 

According to an April 2008 poll in U.S. News & World Report, fully 61 percent of American historians agree that George W. Bush is the worst President in our history. Some of these scholars cite the President’s position on the environment, or on taxes, or on the economy. For most, though, the chief qualification for obloquy lies in Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq.

In this, of course, the historians are hardly alone: five years after the launching of Operation Iraqi Freedom, both the mainstream media and America’s political elites treat the Iraq war as a disaster virtually without precedent in our national experience. But while politicians and journalists are not necessarily expected to be adepts of the long view, for professional historians the long view is a defining necessity. As the English historian F.W. Maitland wrote more than a century ago, “It is very hard to remember that events that are long in the past were once in the future.” Hard it may be, but the job of historians is not only to remember it but to judge events accordingly.

In this light—that is, in light of what was actually known at the time about Saddam Hussein’s actions and intentions, and in light of what was added to our knowledge through his post-capture interrogations by the FBI—the decision to go to war takes on a very different character. The story that emerges is of a choice not only carefully weighed and deliberately arrived at but, in the circumstances, the one moral choice that any American President could make.

Had, moreover, Bush failed to act when he did, the consequences could have been truly disastrous. The next American President would surely have faced the need, in decidedly less favorable circumstances, to pick up the challenge Bush had neglected. And since Bush’s unwillingness to do the necessary thing might rightly have cost him his second term, that next President would probably have been one of the many Democrats who, until March 2003, actually saw the same threat George Bush did.

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It is too often forgotten, not least by historians, that George W. Bush did not invent the idea of deposing the Iraqi tyrant. For years before he came on the scene, removing Saddam Hussein had been a priority embraced by the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and by Clinton’s most vocal supporters in the Senate:

Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons. . . . Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: he has used them. Not once, but repeatedly. . . . I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.

These were the words of President Clinton on the night of December 16, 1998 as he announced a four-day bombing campaign over Iraq. Only six weeks earlier, Clinton had signed the Iraq Liberation Act authorizing Saddam’s overthrow—an initiative supported unanimously in the Senate and by a margin of 360 to 38 in the House. “Iraqis deserve and desire freedom,” Clinton had declared. On the evening the bombs began to drop, Vice President Al Gore told CNN’s Larry King:

You allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons. How many people is he going to kill with such weapons? . . . We are not going to allow him to succeed. [emphasis added]

What these and other such statements remind us is that, by the time George Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the United States was already at war with Iraq, and in fact had been at war for a decade, ever since the first Gulf war in the early 1990’s. (This was literally the case, the end of hostilities in 1991 being merely a cease-fire and not a formal surrender followed by a peace treaty.) Not only that, but the diplomatic and military framework Bush inherited for neutralizing the Middle East’s most fearsome dictator had been approved by the United Nations. It consisted of (a) regular UN inspections to track and dispose of weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) remaining in Saddam’s arsenal since the first Gulf war; (b) UN-monitored sanctions to prevent Saddam from acquiring the means to make more WMD’s; and (c) the creation of so-called “no-fly zones” over large sections of southern and northern Iraq to deter Saddam from sending the remnants of his air force against resisting Kurds and Shiite Muslims.

Small minds + excess time =

A council has banned the term “brainstorming” - and replaced it with “thought showers”.

Officials Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent feared the phrase might offend epileptics or the mentally ill.

Staff have been sent memos about the change and even sent on training courses, reports The Sun. But Margaret Thomas, of the National Society for Epilepsy, said: “Brainstorming is a clear and descriptive phrase.

“Alternatives such as “thought shower” or “blue-sky thinking” are ambiguous to say the least.

“Any implication that the word “brainstorming” is offensive to epileptics takes political correctness too far.”

And Richard Colwill, of mental health charity SANE, agreed: “This ban goes too far. Few would be genuinely offended by the word “brainstorming” in the context of council meetings.”

A council spokesman said: “We take diversity awareness very seriously. The majority of staff have taken part in training and been asked to use the term “thought showers”.”

So liberals have “solved” another problem that didn’t exist, thus creating new rules and training courses, all so they can feel good about themselves.