Jonah Goldberg from The Goldberg File

C. S. Lewis said:

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

Which brings me to Michael Bloomberg, who seems to be very far down the wrong road.

One of the things Edmund Burke loved about the early Americans was their really interesting underwear. But that’s a subject for a different “news”letter. Another thing he dug about those hipcats across the pond was the way they worried about the infringement of their liberties before The Man actually got up in their grill.

In other countries [than the American colonies], the people . . . judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance, [but in America] they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

In other words, in the immortal words of Will Smith in the original Men In Black, the Founding generation of this country worked from the principle: If the government “Don’t start nuthin, won’t be nuthin.”

I bring this up because for much of the last few years, to speak of potential death panels coming down the pike was to prove you were a paranoid idiot. More recently, to wonder aloud whether the government could, under the theories supporting Obamacare, force the American people to eat broccoli or join weight watchers, was to reveal your mulishness.

By the way, the funny thing about the broccoli question is that most liberals never answer it when asked. They say it’s not a relevant question right now.

And that’s sort of the point, right?

The tendency in the American character to anticipate encroachments of liberty before they happen that Burke admired so much has been so ground down, to even offer such concerns is now seen as a kind of ideological derangement.

Meanwhile, the Bloombergian belief that the war on smoking demonstrated that there’s no outer boundary, no limiting principle, to progressive do-goodery is riding tall in the saddle. “It worked for cigarettes, it can work for anything I don’t like” is the only meaningful metric for his ilk.

Already the shock troops of the nanny state are hoping to parlay Bloomberg’s anti-soda ban into an all-out prohibition on junk food.

“We’re not taking away anybody’s right to do things,” Bloomberg explained, “we’re simply forcing you to understand that you have to make the conscious decision to go from one cup to another cup” [emphasis mine -- which just happens to be the title of my proposed sequel to the under-appreciated sci-fi movie Enemy Mine].

Is it really such a long trip from here to the insistence that the government can “force you to understand” that you should eat your broccoli?

If Obama had more self-awareness (the opposite of narcissism), he’d realize how small he becomes when he points fingers and takes undue credit.

Once again:

“I believe that If we’re successful in this election, when we’re successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”

Fact: Obama had two years with total control of the government.

“I believe that If we’re successful in this election, when we’re successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”

When Obama is gone, it won’t be a fever breaking, it will a laxative taking effect.

LA Times

Milky Way, Andromeda galaxies set to crash — in 4 billion years

The Milky Way is set to collide with its closest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope said Thursday. Galactic residents need not brace for impact just yet, however: The predicted collision would take place in 4 billion years.

Andromeda, officially known as Messier 31, or M31, is located about 2.5 million light-years away from the Milky Way — which would make it our closest fellow spiral galaxy. Spiral galaxies have flat, rotating, disc-shaped bodies with spiral arms anchored by a supermassive black hole at the center…

Could be painful.

Victor Davis Hanson:

As the campaign heats up, one problem is that we continue to meet lots of different Barack Obamas — to such a degree that we don’t know which, if any, is really president.

I think the president believes that private-equity firms harm the economy and that their CEOs are at best indifferent and sometimes unsympathetic to the struggle of average Americans. I say “I think” because Obama has himself collected millions of dollars from such profit-driven firms, and uses their grandees to raise cash for his reelection. Cynical, hypocritical, or unaware? You decide.

I think the president is in favor of publicly funded campaign financing but against super PACs; but again I say “I think” because Obama renounced the former and embraced the latter. Are Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, and preventive detention constitutional necessities or threats to our security? Some of Obama’s personalities have said they are bad; others apparently believe them to be good.

One Barack Obama crisscrosses the country warning us that a sinister elite has robbed from the common good and must atone for destroying the economy. Another Barry Obama hits the golf links in unapologetically aristocratic fashion and prefers Martha’s Vineyard for his vacation. So I am confused about the evil 1 percent. Obama 1 feels they have shorted the country and must now pay their fair share, while Obama 2 feels they are vital allies in helping the poor by attending his $40,000-a-plate campaign dinners.

Barry Obama respects those who make billions from Berkshire Hathaway, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook, but Barack Obama does not respect those who make billions from oil, farming, and construction. Is Wall Street the source of our national problems or the source of the president’s political salvation? There is an Obama who runs against a prep-schooled mansion-living member of the elite; there is another Obama who was a prep-schooled mansion-living member of the elite.

I thought one Obama swore to us that borrowing $5 trillion was vital — Keynesian pump priming, stimulus, averting 8 percent–plus unemployment, and all that. But now another (more…)

David Axelrod yesterday told a group of GOP hecklers that they “couldn’t handle the truth.”

When it comes to Medicare, Obama won’t even try to speak the truth to the American public because it is grim. Fairy tales with GOP villains sell much better.

Bryan Lawrence in the Washington Post

Medicare may be the most sacred government program in the United States — even 76 percent of tea-party supporters oppose cuts to it, a McClatchy-Marist poll found in November. Given its central role in our fiscal challenges, it makes sense to examine why this program is so popular.

There are two key factors. First, retired Americans receive high-quality care but have virtually no idea what their Medicare benefits cost. The George W. Bush administration required Medicare to begin providing such information, but it is presented in a way that makes it hard to understand and is read only by people who request it. (The Medicare Web site even cautions that the “files are large so printing them is not recommended.”) While not every retiree takes the time to study the cost, almost all rely on the benefits.

Second, every working American has Medicare taxes deducted from each paycheck and has been told that the money is paid into a trust fund for his or her future benefits. It’s not surprising that Americans feel proprietary about Medicare — they believe that they have spent their working lives paying for their future benefits.

But those Medicare taxes, and interest on the program’s small trust fund, cover just 38 percent of the annual cost of the program’s benefits. Premiums paid by beneficiaries cover an additional 12 percent, but fully half of the program’s $549 billion cost last year was funded by federal income taxes on working Americans.

Put another way, Medicare is a transfer of wealth from younger to older Americans.

As long as the baby boomers were working and paying taxes, their large numbers made this transfer to their parents and grandparents affordable. But the boomers began to retire last year (more…)

Drugmakers led by Pfizer (PFE) Inc. agreed to run a “very significant public campaign” bankrolling political support for the 2010 health-care law, including TV ads, while the Obama administration promised to block provisions opposed by drugmakers, documents released by Republicans show.

The internal memos and e-mails for the first time unveil the industry’s plan to finance positive TV ads and supportive groups, along with providing $80 billion in discounts and taxes that were included in the law. The administration has previously denied the existence of a deal involving political support.

The documents were released today by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. They identify price controls under Medicare and drug importation as the key industry concerns, and show that former Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Kindler and his top aides were involved in drawing it up and getting support from other company executives.

Obama, anticipating that ObamaCare will be struck down, is working behind the scenes to organize media events.

As a former community organizer, this is Obama’s sweet spot: assembling a gaggle to make a loud noise.

…The best way to demonstrate public outrage or public celebration about the decision is to stage an event that shows average people actually responding to the news,” according to the memo, e-mailed on May 16 by an official at the Herndon Alliance, a coalition of groups that backs the health-care overhaul.

The Tea Party exists because of public outrage over ObamaCare’s passage. It demonstrated by electing people to office (aka, the shellacking).

“The White House is obviously very involved in this stuff,” said Bob Crittenden, executive director of the Herndon Alliance. “Some of the groups we work with have very close connections with the White House.”

Nick Papas, a White House spokesman, and Anton Gunn, director of external affairs at Health and Human Services, make regular appearances at the Protect Your Care meetings, which are held every other week.

They want to help Americans know what to think.

“The odds are that it’s slightly more likely to overturn the individual mandate,” said Richard Kirsch, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the former campaign manager for Health Care for America Now, a group that fought for the overhaul. After the court makes its ruling, “one of the battles will be to define what’s happened.”

They’re already doing that, trying to depict the Roberts court as extremists.

Even if the mandate is removed, supporters of the law should organize media events to have “people who continue to benefit from the law to tell their stories,” said Kirsch, author of “Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States.”

There’s the nub: government promises freebie (of course, there is no such thing) then citizens regard them as a right. And thus government grows and grows and….