Monday, January 31, 2011
Kasich Issues Brochure To Administration Employees Further Clarifying His Diversity Policies & Procedures
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Kasich Clarifies His Position On Diversity
Governor John Kasich has taken some heat recently for his solid-vanilla Cabinet appointments. Ohio's Black Congressional Caucus is particularly upset with the Honky In Chief.
Kasich sensed the political pickle and explained his position as follows: "I'm sensitive to the issue. I'm all for diversity, as long as diversity and I can work together and diversity has the same philosophy as I do. So what I'm saying is, diversity better be a heartless white male Republican with experience in business or lobbying. That's what I call diversity! Yee-haaa!!!!"
ObamaCare: UNCONSTITUTIONAL !
Read Judge Vinson's opinion here. it is brilliant, and plainly enough written so that a layman (like me!)can comprehend the judge's points well enough without necessarily being familiar with the judicial precedents being referenced.
I just love this part, where the judge throws Obama's words (and the Democrats in both houses) right back in his face - Page 68:
Moreover, the defendants have conceded that the Act’s health insurance reforms cannot survive without the individual mandate, which is extremely significant because the various insurance provisions, in turn, are the very heart of the Act itself. The health insurance reform provisions were cited repeatedly during the health care debate, and they were instrumental in passing the Act. In speech after speech President Obama emphasized that the legislative goal was “health insurance reform” and stressed how important it was that Congress fundamentally reform how health insurance companies do business, and “protect every American from the worst practices of the insurance industry.” See, for example, Remarks of President Obama, The State of the Union, delivered Jan. 27, 2009.28
(See also, e.g., The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, OfficialTranscript of President Obama’s News Conference, July 22, 2009, available at:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/news-conference-president-july-22-20
09; The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Official Transcript of President
Obama’s Remarks at Health Care Reform Town Hall, July 23, 2009, available at:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Health-)
Meanwhile,the Act’s supporters in the Senate and House similarly spoke repeatedly and often of the legislative efforts as being the means to comprehensively reform the health insurance industry.
To be sure, the words “protection” and “affordable” in the title of the Act
itself are inextricably tied to the health insurance reform provisions (and the
individual mandate in particular), as the defendants have emphasized throughout the course of this litigation.
Love this analogy as well:
In the final analysis, this Act has been analogized to a finely crafted watch,and that seems to fit. It has approximately 450 separate pieces, but one essential piece (the individual mandate) is defective and must be removed. It cannot function as originally designed. There are simply too many moving parts in the Act and too many provisions dependent (directly and indirectly) on the individual mandate and other health insurance provisions --- which, as noted, were the chief engines that drove the entire legislative effort --- for me to try and dissect out the proper from the improper, and the able-to-stand-alone from the unable-to-stand-alone. Such a quasi-legislative undertaking would be particularly inappropriate in light of the fact that any statute that might conceivably be left over after this analysis is complete would plainly not serve Congress’ main purpose and primary objective in passing the Act. The statute is, after all, called “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” not “The Abstinence Education and Bone Marrow Density Testing Act.” The Act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker.
Amen, your Honor. Amen.
I just love this part, where the judge throws Obama's words (and the Democrats in both houses) right back in his face - Page 68:
Moreover, the defendants have conceded that the Act’s health insurance reforms cannot survive without the individual mandate, which is extremely significant because the various insurance provisions, in turn, are the very heart of the Act itself. The health insurance reform provisions were cited repeatedly during the health care debate, and they were instrumental in passing the Act. In speech after speech President Obama emphasized that the legislative goal was “health insurance reform” and stressed how important it was that Congress fundamentally reform how health insurance companies do business, and “protect every American from the worst practices of the insurance industry.” See, for example, Remarks of President Obama, The State of the Union, delivered Jan. 27, 2009.28
(See also, e.g., The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, OfficialTranscript of President Obama’s News Conference, July 22, 2009, available at:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/news-conference-president-july-22-20
09; The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Official Transcript of President
Obama’s Remarks at Health Care Reform Town Hall, July 23, 2009, available at:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Health-)
Meanwhile,the Act’s supporters in the Senate and House similarly spoke repeatedly and often of the legislative efforts as being the means to comprehensively reform the health insurance industry.
To be sure, the words “protection” and “affordable” in the title of the Act
itself are inextricably tied to the health insurance reform provisions (and the
individual mandate in particular), as the defendants have emphasized throughout the course of this litigation.
Love this analogy as well:
In the final analysis, this Act has been analogized to a finely crafted watch,and that seems to fit. It has approximately 450 separate pieces, but one essential piece (the individual mandate) is defective and must be removed. It cannot function as originally designed. There are simply too many moving parts in the Act and too many provisions dependent (directly and indirectly) on the individual mandate and other health insurance provisions --- which, as noted, were the chief engines that drove the entire legislative effort --- for me to try and dissect out the proper from the improper, and the able-to-stand-alone from the unable-to-stand-alone. Such a quasi-legislative undertaking would be particularly inappropriate in light of the fact that any statute that might conceivably be left over after this analysis is complete would plainly not serve Congress’ main purpose and primary objective in passing the Act. The statute is, after all, called “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” not “The Abstinence Education and Bone Marrow Density Testing Act.” The Act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker.
Amen, your Honor. Amen.
If we can ban offshore drilling post-BP, why not close the abortion clinics after Gosnell?
Little Miss Atilla begs the question:
Is there an analogy to be made between the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill last year and the Gosnell abortion clinic scandal in Philly a few weeks ago? Because most of my friends on the left felt pretty strongly last summer that a dramatic failure to enforce regulations meant any given industry should be largely shut down until new guidelines could be drafted.
The New York Times, which supports the moritorium on drilling that is starving the Gulf Coast, raising gasoline prices through the roof, and damaging our national security, provided an immediate answer, on the same day Miss Atilla makes her innocent inquiry:
Away from Washington, another ominous anti-abortion battle is accelerating in the states. Anti-abortion forces have been trying to take advantage of the 2007 ruling in which the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on a particular method of abortion.
November’s elections made the outlook even bleaker.
...This math greatly increases the prospect of extreme efforts to undermine abortion access with Big Brother measures that require physicians to read scripts about fetal development and provide ultrasound images, and that impose mandatory waiting periods or create other unnecessary regulations.
Such restrictions, combined with a persistent atmosphere of intimidation and violence....
Americans who support women’s reproductive rights and oppose this kind of outrageous government intrusion need to respond with rising force and clarity to this real and immediate danger.
One can not blamed for wanting to burst out in laughter after hearing the Times complain about "Big Brother measures", after all, isn't that the sum total of their precious ObamaCare? As for the persistent atmosphere of intimidation and violence, well...maybe if the Times would obey the laws of the "new civility" and stop inciting such hatred with words like "ominous", "extreme", and "danger", maybe their cadres on the Left would cease their violent outbursts.
But that's not the point, really. Let's just change a few words in the NYT editorial and see how easy it is to clarify the dark heart of the Left:
"Within Washington, another ominous anti-energy battle is accelerating in the states. Radical Green forces have been trying to take advantage of the 2010 "temporary" moratorium on oil drilling...
...This math greatly increases the prospect of extreme efforts to undermine energy exploration and access with Big Brother measures....
Such restrictions, combined with a persistent atmosphere of intimidation and violence....(no change needed here!)
Americans who support oil independence, job creation, low energy prices, and national security and oppose this kind of outrageous government intrusion need to respond with rising force and clarity to this real and immediate danger."
So looking through the prism of the Times' filthy mirror, we learn that -
Cheap oil that spurs the national economy and lifts everyone's standard of living: EVIL
Putting even the slightest restrictions on abortions, to prevent recurrences of the Gosnell clininc scandal: EVIL
Killing unborn babies wantonly and in massive numbers: GOOD
Miss Atilla, does this answer your question? At the very least, it clearly spells out the moral divide between even simple economic conservatism and the human carnage that is liberal philosophy.
And that is why we have a culture war well underway. And that is why it won't remain "civil" - because we won't shut up, and we will continue to point out their hypocrisy and lies, and demand they explain their morality to us - if they even can....
Is there an analogy to be made between the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill last year and the Gosnell abortion clinic scandal in Philly a few weeks ago? Because most of my friends on the left felt pretty strongly last summer that a dramatic failure to enforce regulations meant any given industry should be largely shut down until new guidelines could be drafted.
The New York Times, which supports the moritorium on drilling that is starving the Gulf Coast, raising gasoline prices through the roof, and damaging our national security, provided an immediate answer, on the same day Miss Atilla makes her innocent inquiry:
Away from Washington, another ominous anti-abortion battle is accelerating in the states. Anti-abortion forces have been trying to take advantage of the 2007 ruling in which the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on a particular method of abortion.
November’s elections made the outlook even bleaker.
...This math greatly increases the prospect of extreme efforts to undermine abortion access with Big Brother measures that require physicians to read scripts about fetal development and provide ultrasound images, and that impose mandatory waiting periods or create other unnecessary regulations.
Such restrictions, combined with a persistent atmosphere of intimidation and violence....
Americans who support women’s reproductive rights and oppose this kind of outrageous government intrusion need to respond with rising force and clarity to this real and immediate danger.
One can not blamed for wanting to burst out in laughter after hearing the Times complain about "Big Brother measures", after all, isn't that the sum total of their precious ObamaCare? As for the persistent atmosphere of intimidation and violence, well...maybe if the Times would obey the laws of the "new civility" and stop inciting such hatred with words like "ominous", "extreme", and "danger", maybe their cadres on the Left would cease their violent outbursts.
But that's not the point, really. Let's just change a few words in the NYT editorial and see how easy it is to clarify the dark heart of the Left:
"Within Washington, another ominous anti-energy battle is accelerating in the states. Radical Green forces have been trying to take advantage of the 2010 "temporary" moratorium on oil drilling...
...This math greatly increases the prospect of extreme efforts to undermine energy exploration and access with Big Brother measures....
Such restrictions, combined with a persistent atmosphere of intimidation and violence....(no change needed here!)
Americans who support oil independence, job creation, low energy prices, and national security and oppose this kind of outrageous government intrusion need to respond with rising force and clarity to this real and immediate danger."
So looking through the prism of the Times' filthy mirror, we learn that -
Cheap oil that spurs the national economy and lifts everyone's standard of living: EVIL
Putting even the slightest restrictions on abortions, to prevent recurrences of the Gosnell clininc scandal: EVIL
Killing unborn babies wantonly and in massive numbers: GOOD
Miss Atilla, does this answer your question? At the very least, it clearly spells out the moral divide between even simple economic conservatism and the human carnage that is liberal philosophy.
And that is why we have a culture war well underway. And that is why it won't remain "civil" - because we won't shut up, and we will continue to point out their hypocrisy and lies, and demand they explain their morality to us - if they even can....
Is it time for us to follow the Egyptians?
All Egyptians are being liberated from the burden of history.
My birth at the end of July 1967 makes me a child of the naksa, or setback, as the Arab defeat during the June 1967 war with Israel is euphemistically known in Arabic. My parents' generation grew up high on the Arab nationalism that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser brandished in the 1950s. But we ''Children of the Naksa'', hemmed in by humiliation, have spent so much of our lives uncomfortably stepping into pride's large, empty shoes.
But here now finally are our children - Generation Facebook - kicking aside the burden of history, determined to show us just how easy it is to tell the dictator it's time to go.
To understand the importance of what's going in Egypt, take the barricades of 1968, throw them into a mixer with 1989 and blend to produce the potent brew that the popular uprising in Egypt is preparing to offer the entire region. It's the most exciting time of my life.
I struggle with the magnitude of my feelings as my country revolts and I cry when I hear my father's accent in the English of Egyptian men screaming at TV cameras through tear gas: ''I'm doing this for my children. What life is this?''
And Arabs from the Mashreq to the Maghreb are watching, egging on those protesters to topple Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for 30 years, because they know if he goes, all the other old men will follow, those who have smothered their countries with one hand and robbed them blind with the other. Mubarak is the Berlin Wall. ''Down, down with Hosni Mubarak,'' resonates through the whole region.
My Twitter feed explodes with messages of support and congratulations from Saudis, Palestinians, Moroccans and Sudanese. The real Arab League; not those men who have ruled and claimed to speak in our names and who now claim to feel our pain but only because they know the rage that emerged in Tunisia will soon be felt across the region.
Brave little Tunisia, resuscitator of the Arab imagination. Tunisia, homeland of the father of Arab revolution: Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old who set himself on fire to protest at a desperation at unemployment and repression that covers the region. He set into motion Tunisian protests that in just 29 days toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's 23-year dictatorship. We watched, we said wow and we thought: that's it? It's that easy?
It took Mubarak just four days into Egypt's revolt to call the army. He unleashed the brutality of his security forces and their riot police, but they couldn't stem the determination of the thousands who continued to demand his ousting. He put Egypt under information lock-down by shutting down the internet but still they came.
Ben Ali's fall killed the fear in Egypt. So imagine what Mubarak's fall could do to liberate the region. Too many have rushed in to explain the Arab world to itself. ''You like your strongman leader,'' we're told. ''You're passive, and apathetic.''
But a group of young online dissidents dissolved those myths. For at least five years now, their blogs and Facebook updates and notes and, more recently, tweets offered a self-expression that may have at times been narcissistic but for many Arab youths signalled the triumph of ''I''. I count, they said again and again.
Most people in the Arab world are aged 25 or are younger. They have known no leaders but those dictators who grew older and richer as the young saw their opportunities - political and economic - dwindle. The internet didn't invent courage; activists in Egypt have exposed Mubarak's police state of torture and jailings for years. But we've seen that even when the dictator shuts the internet down protesters can still organise, can connect with ordinary people and form the kind of alliances that we're seeing on the streets of Egypt where protesters come from every age and background. Youth kickstarted the revolt, but they've been joined by old and young.
I know that each Arab watching this revolution does so with the hope that Egypt will mean something again. Thirty years of Mubarak rule have shrivelled the country that once led the Arab world. But those youthful protesters, leapfrogging our dead-in-the-water opposition figures to confront the dictator, are liberating all Egyptians from the burden of history. Or reclaiming the good bits.
In cracking down on protesters, Mubarak immediately inspired resistance reminiscent of the Arab collective response to the tripartite aggression of the 1956 Suez crisis.
Meanwhile, the uprisings are curing the Arab world of its obsession with Israel. Successive Arab dictators have tried to keep discontent at bay by distracting people with the Israeli-Arab conflict. Israel's bombardment of Gaza in 2009 increased global sympathy for Palestinians. Enough with dictators hijacking sympathy for Palestinians and enough with putting our lives on hold for that conflict.
Arabs are watching as tens of thousands of Egyptians turn Tahrir (or Liberation) Square into the symbol of their revolt. This is the square Egypt uses to remember the ending of the monarchy in 1952, as well as of British occupation. The group of young army officers who staged that coup claimed it as a revolution, heralding an era of rule by military men who turned Egypt into a police state.
Today, the army is out in Tahrir Square again, this time facing down a mass of youthful protesters determined to pull off Egypt's first genuine post-colonial revolution.
Mona Eltahawy is a writer and lecturer on Arab issues.
*************************************************************************************
2011 is the start of what will eventually lead to a full explosion in December 2012 as predicted by many wise men.
So then will the takeover of Selangor by UMNO before April 2011 be the time all Malaysians will rise against such barbaric action or remain docile and uncaring like what happened in Perak.
The Egyptian Uprising: Germany Blames The Jews?
You know, after all these years of hearing about how Israel was the obstacle to peace in the Middle East, and if only a "final solution" was arrived at to solve the Israeli-Palestinian "crisis", this turgid region would become calm, lukewarm water - easy for the intellectual superiors of the West to manipulate, and lead.
Well, we have rolling waves, all right - but none of them seem to be emanating from Israel. As a a matter of fact, as Egypt boils over into revolution, not a single ordinary Egyptian citizen has been seen screaming about Israel malfeasance or Jewish chicanery, nor has one tourist had a hair harmed on their heads.
What do we make of this? Could there be -gasp - other factors at play in the Middle East?
Unemployment is unofficially estimated at over 25 percent, even higher among the youth, food price inflation has been at about 17 percent per year and the rampant poverty and inequity in income distribution have all served as a catalyst for the popular uprising....
For 30 years Mubarak has been channelling hsi people's rage at Israel. The Egyptians seems to have had enough of blaming a beaten-up people on a tiny strip of land for all of their woes, and have instead turned on the leadership that has kept them poor, illiterate, hopeless, and oppressed.
Is there anyone who still thinks that if, say, Benjamin Netanyahu had succumbed to Obama's demand to halt settlement building in Jerusalem, that the Egyptian revolution would not have come to pass? Is there anyone that stupid, or that anti-Semitic, to still point a finger at the Jews?
Would you believe...the Germans?
German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday called to stop the building in the settlements, saying that in light of the events in Egypt, it is important to further the diplomatic process.
Merkel, who arrived Monday afternoon at the head of a delegation of eight ministers for a joint Israeli-German government meeting, shared her assessments with Netanyahu about the situation in Egypt and in the region.
Note that Merkel doesn't even try to make a logical connection between the settlements and the Egyptian uprising; she is just too intellectually lazy to realize the paradigm she's comfortably sat on for her entire life has been pulled out from beneath her. Hey Angie, you ain't relaxing comfortably on the Barcalounger anymore; your fat ass just landed on the floor with a thud...
Go with what you know, I suppose. Outdated concepts and Jew-baiting. Beats re-thinking a puzzle that you & all the other smart guys were so sure you had figured out years ago....
In other words...expect similar sentiments to come from Barack Obama, to try to show he is doing something - anything - in the face of crisis that is way above his intellectual capacity to comprehend.
Obama blames Jewish settlements for renewed violence in Egypt, demands an immediate halt
Bet on it...
Well, we have rolling waves, all right - but none of them seem to be emanating from Israel. As a a matter of fact, as Egypt boils over into revolution, not a single ordinary Egyptian citizen has been seen screaming about Israel malfeasance or Jewish chicanery, nor has one tourist had a hair harmed on their heads.
What do we make of this? Could there be -gasp - other factors at play in the Middle East?
Unemployment is unofficially estimated at over 25 percent, even higher among the youth, food price inflation has been at about 17 percent per year and the rampant poverty and inequity in income distribution have all served as a catalyst for the popular uprising....
For 30 years Mubarak has been channelling hsi people's rage at Israel. The Egyptians seems to have had enough of blaming a beaten-up people on a tiny strip of land for all of their woes, and have instead turned on the leadership that has kept them poor, illiterate, hopeless, and oppressed.
Is there anyone who still thinks that if, say, Benjamin Netanyahu had succumbed to Obama's demand to halt settlement building in Jerusalem, that the Egyptian revolution would not have come to pass? Is there anyone that stupid, or that anti-Semitic, to still point a finger at the Jews?
Would you believe...the Germans?
German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday called to stop the building in the settlements, saying that in light of the events in Egypt, it is important to further the diplomatic process.
Merkel, who arrived Monday afternoon at the head of a delegation of eight ministers for a joint Israeli-German government meeting, shared her assessments with Netanyahu about the situation in Egypt and in the region.
Note that Merkel doesn't even try to make a logical connection between the settlements and the Egyptian uprising; she is just too intellectually lazy to realize the paradigm she's comfortably sat on for her entire life has been pulled out from beneath her. Hey Angie, you ain't relaxing comfortably on the Barcalounger anymore; your fat ass just landed on the floor with a thud...
Go with what you know, I suppose. Outdated concepts and Jew-baiting. Beats re-thinking a puzzle that you & all the other smart guys were so sure you had figured out years ago....
In other words...expect similar sentiments to come from Barack Obama, to try to show he is doing something - anything - in the face of crisis that is way above his intellectual capacity to comprehend.
Obama blames Jewish settlements for renewed violence in Egypt, demands an immediate halt
Bet on it...
Americans reject Obama's SOTU, and everything in it...
...and embrace the Tea Party. The LA Times is even more perplexed than Gallup is, but they at least report the story straight:
An earlier post-speech Gallup Poll found the president's assertion that the troubled economy is "poised for progress" was rejected by a majority of Americans, who say the economy is actually still worsening....
Although historically relatively little of State of the Union speeches actually come to fruition, Gallup found widespread doubts about some other assertions by the Democrat:
Contrary to the Obama administration's offshore drilling moratoriums, two-thirds of Americans favor a new energy bill to expand domestic exploration and drilling.
The president outlined a vast new program to rebuild what he called a "crumbling" infrastructure. Americans oppose more stimulus spending and think reducing the deficit is much more important.
Americans oppose giving existing illegal immigrants "a path to legal status" and prefer halting the flow of illegal immigrants before addressing the problems of those already here.
And on Obama's proudest achievement, his signature healthcare legislation, only 13% like the idea of keeping it as is. Everyone else favors minor changes, major changes or tossing out the entire thing.
Other than that though, the president's 62-minute speech seems to have gone over really well.
And even 50% of Democrats agree - It's time for Tea:
A new Gallup Poll out this morning finds that 71% of Americans, even many who do not think highly of the "tea party," say it's important that Republicans should take the its positions into account.
Gallup appears puzzled by its findings: While only 6% of Democrats call themselves "tea party" supporters and only 11% hold a favorable view of it, more than half of Democrats still....
... think it's important the GOP work the movement's views into Republican programs. Perhaps some hope the tea party will help weaken the GOP, despite increasing support for the tea party's fiscal conservatism as deficit fears mount.
Yeah. The Tea Party hurt the Republicans so much in November that they were limited to a takeover of only 63 seats in the House and a half-dozen in the Senate, a historic landslide. Not to mention the tremendous flip of statehouses from Left to Right...
The LA Times does offer a propohecy of sorts:
Developing support for tea party positions as well as listening could augur large trouble for Obama's reelect next year.
Not to mention blinking helplessness in the face of a revolution in Egypt that can change the face of the Middle East for generations, and not necessarily in a positive way.
But as far as listening goes, Barack Obama doesn't seem to be doing much of that - either to the American people, the new Republican majority, or the few fiscal hawks in his own party:
President Barack Obama will send a multitrillion budget to Congress on Feb. 14, administration spokesman Kenneth Baer said, setting up a conflict over spending that may dominate a divided Congress for the rest of the year.
The budget for fiscal 2012 is a political document that will put into precise language the administration’s priorities for increasing economic growth and creating jobs...
Just what the American people want. Looks like Obama's first serving of Tea will be piping hot...
An earlier post-speech Gallup Poll found the president's assertion that the troubled economy is "poised for progress" was rejected by a majority of Americans, who say the economy is actually still worsening....
Although historically relatively little of State of the Union speeches actually come to fruition, Gallup found widespread doubts about some other assertions by the Democrat:
Contrary to the Obama administration's offshore drilling moratoriums, two-thirds of Americans favor a new energy bill to expand domestic exploration and drilling.
The president outlined a vast new program to rebuild what he called a "crumbling" infrastructure. Americans oppose more stimulus spending and think reducing the deficit is much more important.
Americans oppose giving existing illegal immigrants "a path to legal status" and prefer halting the flow of illegal immigrants before addressing the problems of those already here.
And on Obama's proudest achievement, his signature healthcare legislation, only 13% like the idea of keeping it as is. Everyone else favors minor changes, major changes or tossing out the entire thing.
Other than that though, the president's 62-minute speech seems to have gone over really well.
And even 50% of Democrats agree - It's time for Tea:
A new Gallup Poll out this morning finds that 71% of Americans, even many who do not think highly of the "tea party," say it's important that Republicans should take the its positions into account.
Gallup appears puzzled by its findings: While only 6% of Democrats call themselves "tea party" supporters and only 11% hold a favorable view of it, more than half of Democrats still....
... think it's important the GOP work the movement's views into Republican programs. Perhaps some hope the tea party will help weaken the GOP, despite increasing support for the tea party's fiscal conservatism as deficit fears mount.
Yeah. The Tea Party hurt the Republicans so much in November that they were limited to a takeover of only 63 seats in the House and a half-dozen in the Senate, a historic landslide. Not to mention the tremendous flip of statehouses from Left to Right...
The LA Times does offer a propohecy of sorts:
Developing support for tea party positions as well as listening could augur large trouble for Obama's reelect next year.
Not to mention blinking helplessness in the face of a revolution in Egypt that can change the face of the Middle East for generations, and not necessarily in a positive way.
But as far as listening goes, Barack Obama doesn't seem to be doing much of that - either to the American people, the new Republican majority, or the few fiscal hawks in his own party:
President Barack Obama will send a multitrillion budget to Congress on Feb. 14, administration spokesman Kenneth Baer said, setting up a conflict over spending that may dominate a divided Congress for the rest of the year.
The budget for fiscal 2012 is a political document that will put into precise language the administration’s priorities for increasing economic growth and creating jobs...
Just what the American people want. Looks like Obama's first serving of Tea will be piping hot...
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Will The Egyptian Revolt Lead To An Islamic Empire?
An overmatched Democratic president watches a revolution unfold, and draws all the wrong conclusions, and makes all the wrong decisions. From a brilliant yet dark piece by Abraham Miller, we go to Jimmy Carter, circa 1979:
The scene is all too reminiscent of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Then, President Jimmy Carter not only demanded restraint but also had his administration work behind the scenes to bring down the shah. Carter believed he was watching a democratic revolution unfold, one led by Mehdi Bazargan, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh and Abulhassan Banisadr. Neither Carter nor his advisers understood that this democratic-centrist revolution, like those in Europe, would be short-lived. Bazargan resigned from the government over its authoritarian turn; Ghotbzadeh was shot by a firing squad; and Banisadr fled to France...
The Egyptian people want democracy, but there are no elements or institutions in place (or even national historical precedents) to help guide them. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so here comes the Muslim Brotherhood - Islamists all, friends of Iran, blood brothers of Hamas and tied tightly to Hezbollah - to fill the empty space with "leadership":
The choice in the streets of Egypt is not Mubarak or democracy. It is Mubarak or the Muslim Brotherhood. It is the Muslim Brotherhood, like the ayatollahs of Tehran, who are the best situated to benefit from and direct the revolution, unless of course the Egyptian military holds firm.
If the Brotherhood comes to power, it will behave as did its proxy in Gaza: one man, one vote, one time, with the opposition shot in the legs and thrown off rooftops.
What must Obama do? Something that really has never been done before:
Our first order of business in Egypt is to produce stability and then to do something we have not done before: Assist the Egyptians in finding a mechanism for a transition to reform through an evolutionary rather than revolutionary path.
But this is Barack Obama we are talking about, a man who speaks of "boilers" and "Sputnik" and of welfare plans hatched in the 70's; what hope have we really for forward thinking from this man?
While one can sympathize and support the Egyptian people, a completely hands-off approach (the one Obama seems to be favoring here, as he is spending most of this crisis partying with David Axelrod) rather than guided involvement can bring the Egyptian people and perhaps the entire Middle East to ruin. As Miller writes:
Did those who ran through the streets of Paris in July 1789 think they were revolting for the ensuing “Terror”? Did the workers who charged the Winter Palace in 1917 think they were fighting for the Gulag? Did Banisadr and Ghotbzadeh think they were replacing the shah of Iran with a theocracy?
We must be involved, actively, in urging Mubarak to transition to democracy, to set up new institutions, to cede some power immediately, and to move his nation forward. A laissez-faire approach to revolution brought us the Sandinistas and the ayatollahs (Carter's watch). More thoughtful intervention has brought us a thriving democracy in South Korea and in the Philippines (Reagan's watch). Alas, Obama, as has been is way, is following the Carter model - just witness his abandonment of the Iranian people if their "Green Revolution", so that he could continue with a scenario he felt comfort in - crawling before the mad mullahs.
What is at stake in Egypt? How about...everything?
For decades we have been dumping billions of dollars worth of advanced weapons into Egypt. A revolution means that those weapons could fall into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. This will tilt the balance of power in the Middle East. Emboldened by success in Egypt, radical Islam will next show its power in the Gulf and threaten the world’s oil supply. Already there are riots in Yemen.
The world as we knew it might just spin out of control....
A heavily armed Islamic axis, from Iran to Egypt to Gaza to southern Lebanon, poised to destroy Israel as their first victory, and then threaten Western Civilization from their perch atop the minarets.
Can Obama rise to this challenge?
Or are we asking a child to stop a bulldozer?
The scene is all too reminiscent of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Then, President Jimmy Carter not only demanded restraint but also had his administration work behind the scenes to bring down the shah. Carter believed he was watching a democratic revolution unfold, one led by Mehdi Bazargan, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh and Abulhassan Banisadr. Neither Carter nor his advisers understood that this democratic-centrist revolution, like those in Europe, would be short-lived. Bazargan resigned from the government over its authoritarian turn; Ghotbzadeh was shot by a firing squad; and Banisadr fled to France...
The Egyptian people want democracy, but there are no elements or institutions in place (or even national historical precedents) to help guide them. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so here comes the Muslim Brotherhood - Islamists all, friends of Iran, blood brothers of Hamas and tied tightly to Hezbollah - to fill the empty space with "leadership":
The choice in the streets of Egypt is not Mubarak or democracy. It is Mubarak or the Muslim Brotherhood. It is the Muslim Brotherhood, like the ayatollahs of Tehran, who are the best situated to benefit from and direct the revolution, unless of course the Egyptian military holds firm.If the Brotherhood comes to power, it will behave as did its proxy in Gaza: one man, one vote, one time, with the opposition shot in the legs and thrown off rooftops.
What must Obama do? Something that really has never been done before:
Our first order of business in Egypt is to produce stability and then to do something we have not done before: Assist the Egyptians in finding a mechanism for a transition to reform through an evolutionary rather than revolutionary path.
But this is Barack Obama we are talking about, a man who speaks of "boilers" and "Sputnik" and of welfare plans hatched in the 70's; what hope have we really for forward thinking from this man?
While one can sympathize and support the Egyptian people, a completely hands-off approach (the one Obama seems to be favoring here, as he is spending most of this crisis partying with David Axelrod) rather than guided involvement can bring the Egyptian people and perhaps the entire Middle East to ruin. As Miller writes:
Did those who ran through the streets of Paris in July 1789 think they were revolting for the ensuing “Terror”? Did the workers who charged the Winter Palace in 1917 think they were fighting for the Gulag? Did Banisadr and Ghotbzadeh think they were replacing the shah of Iran with a theocracy?
We must be involved, actively, in urging Mubarak to transition to democracy, to set up new institutions, to cede some power immediately, and to move his nation forward. A laissez-faire approach to revolution brought us the Sandinistas and the ayatollahs (Carter's watch). More thoughtful intervention has brought us a thriving democracy in South Korea and in the Philippines (Reagan's watch). Alas, Obama, as has been is way, is following the Carter model - just witness his abandonment of the Iranian people if their "Green Revolution", so that he could continue with a scenario he felt comfort in - crawling before the mad mullahs.
What is at stake in Egypt? How about...everything?
For decades we have been dumping billions of dollars worth of advanced weapons into Egypt. A revolution means that those weapons could fall into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. This will tilt the balance of power in the Middle East. Emboldened by success in Egypt, radical Islam will next show its power in the Gulf and threaten the world’s oil supply. Already there are riots in Yemen.
The world as we knew it might just spin out of control....
A heavily armed Islamic axis, from Iran to Egypt to Gaza to southern Lebanon, poised to destroy Israel as their first victory, and then threaten Western Civilization from their perch atop the minarets.
Can Obama rise to this challenge?
Or are we asking a child to stop a bulldozer?
The Egyptian Revolution: George Bush's Defining Moment?
Over the past two years, we've seen an interesting inverse ratio - Barack Obama's star, once deemed brightest in the firmament, dimming more rapidly than a government-approved fluorescent bulb, while George W. Bush's returns to a glory he may not have seen since the early days of the post-9/11 era, all without saying a word.
Perhaps it is because actions speak louder than them. Maybe it is because it turns out that the smartest guys don't always need rooms full of synchophants telling them just how brilliantly they shine. And it turns out that "book smart" may just not be smart enough to run a super-power:
Turns out that Bush knew a thing or two. He may not have been all that sophisticated by some standards, but like Ronald Reagan, he grasped basic truths that eluded the intellectuals. Reagan, recall, earned endless scorn for suggesting that the “evil empire” might soon be consigned to the “ash heap of history.” But he understood that basic human desires for freedom could not be repressed forever. Bush understood precisely the same thing, and like Reagan he also realized that the U.S. had to get on the right side of history by championing freedom rather than by cutting disreputable deals with dictators.
Or perhaps Bush's regained stature has to do with the fact that even the hard core left is conceding Bush's points, the sames ones they rejected as not quite being "smart diplomacy". Speaking of...here's Fareed Zakaria:
This sort of striving for democracy is what Arab intellectuals have yearned for, speaking of the freedom deficit in their lands, which is quite true. And, of course, George W. Bush set forth to fix the problem with what he called a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East...
...give President George W. Bush his due. He saw the problem and he believed that Arabs were not genetically incapable of democracy, and he put America's moral might behind the great cause of Arab reform.
Erstwhile Bush opponent John Kerry finally - six years after the fact - comes around to the fact that Bush was right, and takes a tougher stand - more "rightward?" - than Hillary Clinton
Kerry echoed Clinton's message...But he went one step further than the administration in calling on Mubarak to actually hold free elections.
"In the case of Egypt, President Mubarak has the opportunity to quell the unrest by guaranteeing that a free and open democratic process will be in place when the time comes to choose the country's next leader later this year," the statement read.
Even Chris Matthews attributed the Egyptian uprising to George Bush, although it seems as if the very fact of Bush's apparent prophetic powers simultaneously drove him off the deep end (video at the link) as well:
Good evening. I`m Chris Matthews in Washington.
Leading off tonight: Unrest in Egypt. Proving the Iraq war wasn`t needed, these protests in Egypt, as well as in Yemen and Tunisia, are all aimed at dictators supported by the U.S. The demonstrations have not yet turned anti-American, but they could. These are the events the Bush administration hoped to encourage by lying about weapons of mass destruction and invading Iraq.
On the New York Times opinion pages, we see...nothing at all about the unfolding Egyptian Revolution, and insteadwe are provided with Obama love stories from Maureen Dowd and Tea-Party bashing from Frank Rich. Sigh. If you can't speak ill of George W. Bush, the Times seems to feel, don't speak of him at all.
That's fine. Don't speak of him. Your filthy mouths are not fit to utter his great name. You, who mocked, sneered, and defiled a great president and a great man for speaking thusly:
"Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a choice in the matter?"
The Times said yes, as did the Democratic party. Turns out that history doesn't follow the will - or theories - of the Times editorial board, or the Hard Left. Seems like some are awakening to that fact. Will be interesting to see who remains a denier, though, besides the New York Times and possibly Barack Obama.
Hey - every century has had it's "flat-earthers". So we have ours. Unfortunately they currently hold positions of power and communication, but that too is not forever...
Perhaps it is because actions speak louder than them. Maybe it is because it turns out that the smartest guys don't always need rooms full of synchophants telling them just how brilliantly they shine. And it turns out that "book smart" may just not be smart enough to run a super-power:
Turns out that Bush knew a thing or two. He may not have been all that sophisticated by some standards, but like Ronald Reagan, he grasped basic truths that eluded the intellectuals. Reagan, recall, earned endless scorn for suggesting that the “evil empire” might soon be consigned to the “ash heap of history.” But he understood that basic human desires for freedom could not be repressed forever. Bush understood precisely the same thing, and like Reagan he also realized that the U.S. had to get on the right side of history by championing freedom rather than by cutting disreputable deals with dictators.
Or perhaps Bush's regained stature has to do with the fact that even the hard core left is conceding Bush's points, the sames ones they rejected as not quite being "smart diplomacy". Speaking of...here's Fareed Zakaria:
This sort of striving for democracy is what Arab intellectuals have yearned for, speaking of the freedom deficit in their lands, which is quite true. And, of course, George W. Bush set forth to fix the problem with what he called a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East...
...give President George W. Bush his due. He saw the problem and he believed that Arabs were not genetically incapable of democracy, and he put America's moral might behind the great cause of Arab reform.
Erstwhile Bush opponent John Kerry finally - six years after the fact - comes around to the fact that Bush was right, and takes a tougher stand - more "rightward?" - than Hillary Clinton
Kerry echoed Clinton's message...But he went one step further than the administration in calling on Mubarak to actually hold free elections.
"In the case of Egypt, President Mubarak has the opportunity to quell the unrest by guaranteeing that a free and open democratic process will be in place when the time comes to choose the country's next leader later this year," the statement read.
Even Chris Matthews attributed the Egyptian uprising to George Bush, although it seems as if the very fact of Bush's apparent prophetic powers simultaneously drove him off the deep end (video at the link) as well:
Good evening. I`m Chris Matthews in Washington.
Leading off tonight: Unrest in Egypt. Proving the Iraq war wasn`t needed, these protests in Egypt, as well as in Yemen and Tunisia, are all aimed at dictators supported by the U.S. The demonstrations have not yet turned anti-American, but they could. These are the events the Bush administration hoped to encourage by lying about weapons of mass destruction and invading Iraq.
On the New York Times opinion pages, we see...nothing at all about the unfolding Egyptian Revolution, and insteadwe are provided with Obama love stories from Maureen Dowd and Tea-Party bashing from Frank Rich. Sigh. If you can't speak ill of George W. Bush, the Times seems to feel, don't speak of him at all.
That's fine. Don't speak of him. Your filthy mouths are not fit to utter his great name. You, who mocked, sneered, and defiled a great president and a great man for speaking thusly:
"Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a choice in the matter?"
The Times said yes, as did the Democratic party. Turns out that history doesn't follow the will - or theories - of the Times editorial board, or the Hard Left. Seems like some are awakening to that fact. Will be interesting to see who remains a denier, though, besides the New York Times and possibly Barack Obama.
Hey - every century has had it's "flat-earthers". So we have ours. Unfortunately they currently hold positions of power and communication, but that too is not forever...
Obama on Malpractice Reform: No Change That We Can Believe In
Gullible media coverage aside, there’s no real evidence that the President has given an inch on the basic issues of medical lawyering and liability. Nevertheless, those are the issues that are not only making healthcare more expensive, but are also stifling the Serious Medicine innovation that would make healthcare cheaper, as well as better. After all, it’s not what lawyers do to doctors that matters most, it’s what lawyers do to us--to our health and to our life-prospects.
Yet many Americans might have the impression that something big is happening in medical malpractice, that the political ice is breaking on “med mal.” In the course of defending his Obamacare legislation in his January 25 SOTU Obama declared, “I’m willing to look at other ideas to bring down costs, including one that Republicans suggested last year--medical malpractice reform to rein in frivolous lawsuits.”
Those 26 words set off a wave of media interpretation--and over-interpretation. A headline at a Foxnews.com affiliate read, “Obama pushes limits to medical malpractice suits.” Mark McKinnon, well-known Republican media consultant, wrote the next morning in The Daily Beast, “I was pleased to see President Obama talk about tort reform.” And the headline atop a post in The Frum Forum by Dr. Stanley Goldfarb of the University of Pennsylvania medical school proclaimed, “Obama Takes the Lead on Malpractice Reform.”
Yet maybe we need to look at the situation more closely. Dr. Goldfarb, for instance, asserts that malpractice reform is “a key part of the required approach to avoid financial calamity.” Dr. Goldfarb is absolutely right, but there’s no evidence that Obama agrees with him. An occupational hazard of punditry, to be sure, is to assume that the other person agrees with you, even to the point that you, the pundit, find yourself filling in the blank spaces between the other person’s words. Indeed, so long as a powerful person, such as a president, says he is willing to “look at” an idea, some proponents will wishful-think equivocal words into unequivocal support.
In fact, Obama’s 26 words in the SOTU need to be weighed against the two years of his presidency, where no serious action against “frivolous” lawsuits has been taken, to say nothing of the multiple lawsuits that are merely costly and harmful. Once again, we can observe that an overall cost to the country is a direct gain for the tort bar. Inside every one of those million- and billion-dollar settlements is a 40-percent contingency fee to a trial lawyer. And trial lawyers as a group, of course, are smart enough to share their wealth with politicians who protect their ongoing system of litigation plunder. Weighed against the deep structure of pro-trial-lawyer interests inside the Democratic Party, the brief words of a president in the middle of a re-election campaign seem fleeting indeed.
Of course, some might say that the White House has been busy, what with Egypt and all. But on Sunday morning, January 30, even as events in Egypt dominated the news, the White House was still prominently featuring its boilerplate State of the Union promotion package. And that’s right and proper, because, after all, we have a large federal government that does many things at once.
So perhaps elsewhere in the executive branch, we might hope, top aides and advisers are diligently crafting a new look at malpractice. That’s a possibility--but let’s take a look.
Accompanying the President’s SOTU was a White House fact sheet, boldly titled, “President Obama's Plan to Win the Future." And in that document we find this single sentence: “The President is urging reforms to further reduce the rate of health care cost growth, including medical malpractice liability.” That’s it--just 19 words. Hard to call that much of a foundation for med mal progress.
Meanwhile, as another part of the White House communications effort, on January 28, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the administration’s point person on health issues,
sat down for a Q & A session with reporters/bloggers; only one “Q”, out of the 13, concerned malpractice. And to that Sebelius answered, “The President has said pretty consistently that he does not support caps,” referring to the idea of limiting liability damages--a central plank of malpractice reformers. Instead, Sebelius cited new government efforts at “gathering data” on lawsuits and their effect on the cost of healthcare. She was referring to a plan that she herself launched in September 2009, when HHS began doling out $25 million in grants to encourage states to experiment with ways to deter malpractice lawsuits. These “demonstration projects,” as they are called, are based on existing programs in which doctors who make a mistake--or are accused of making a mistake--apologize early and seek to negotiate a settlement with the victim. Other projects include screening systems in which states have formed medical-expert panels which must rule that patients’ complaints have merit before they may sue.
It might seem obvious that ambulance-chasing comes at a cost to the healthcare system--reasonable estimates vary from $55 billion to $200 billion a year--but for her part, Sebelius doesn’t seem to agree; as she told her questioner, “malpractice insurance rates are a tiny fraction of healthcare costs.” As an aside, we might note that it’s little wonder that Richard Foster, chief actuary of the Medicare program, is skeptical that any savings will be achieved through Obamacare.
Moreover, in an opinion piece for AOL News, signed by Sebelius, the word “malpractice” did not appear once. In other words, without the prompt of a question, Sebelius and her HHS ghostwriters make no effort to highlight malpractice. In fact, a look at the HHS website finds nothing new on med mal. Yet this absence should be no real surprise, in view of Sebelius’ background; she spent a decade as the executive director of the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association. (We might also note that one can hear only the sound of med mal silence, too, at the Department of Justice.)
Yet the idea of malpractice reform is popular with many key constituencies and much of the public, and so the President has talked up the idea of med mal from time to time. On June 15, 2009, for example, he addressed the American Medical Association in Chicago, saying that he understood that “doctors feel like they are constantly looking over their shoulder for fear of lawsuits.” He added, in words suggesting that he felt the medical profession’s pain: “Some doctors may feel the need to order more tests and treatments to avoid being legally vulnerable. That's a real issue.” So yes, the AMA got a little bit of neo-Clintonian triangulation, as well as pain-felling, but no commitments.
The President added more soothing words, even as he denied the central policy goal of the AMA--that is, to impose caps on damages as a way of disincentivizing their enemy, the trial lawyers. Finally, he shifted the focus back to his own goal at the time, which was garnering support for his healthcare legislation:
While I’m not advocating caps on malpractice awards which I believe can be unfair to people who've been wrongfully harmed, I do think we need to explore a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first, let doctors focus on practicing medicine, and encourage broader use of evidence-based guidelines. That's how we can scale back the excessive defensive medicine reinforcing our current system of more treatment rather than better care.
The AMA did, in fact, endorse Obamacare--despite its not making any headway on caps. Yet while the AMA might have been an easy sell, others were more suspicious. The day after Obama’s AMA speech, The Wall Street Journal editorial page nailed the issue in a piece entitled, “The Malpractice Gesture.” That edit noted how Obama was able to orate sweet nothings and yet persuade gullible audiences that he was on their side:
The paragraph he appended to his stock speech on health care for the American Medical Association yesterday didn’t offer much detail--"I do think we need to explore a range of ideas," he boldly declared--but trial lawyers and their stratospheric jury awards and settlements have led to major increases in the medical malpractice premiums, thus driving up the overall cost of U.S. health care.
The Journal emphasized that there was nothing specific about med mal in Obama’s words--indeed, that his deeds, in preserving the status quo, contradicted his words:
Mr. Obama's cri de coeur might have had more credibility had he not specifically ruled out the one policy to deter frivolous suits. "Don't get too excited yet," he warned the cheering AMA members. “Just hold onto your horses here, guys. . . . I want to be honest with you. I'm not advocating caps on malpractice awards.” In other words, the tort lottery will continue. California, of all places, has had great success in holding down liability costs for doctors and hospitals after a 1975 reform that limited pain and suffering damages -- balanced against the public interest of fairly treating victims of genuine malpractice.
And so the Journal summed up Obama’s deliberate fuzziness, providing some pointed political context:
Mr. Obama showed again with his AMA speech that he's willing to nod at the concerns of his political opponents and take media credit for brave truth-telling, only to dump his conciliation if it offends liberal interest groups.
Mr. Obama's aides have openly told the press that he views medical liability as a “credibility builder”--that is, a token policy to keep the health-care industry at the bargaining table. Given that the only “bargain” that seems likely to emerge is another major step toward total government control of the health markets, the President seems to be counting on credulity.
So there you have it: Obama said something nice but vague about malpractice reform a year and a half ago--a “credibility builder” for the credulous. And so what has happened since? Who was right: the AMA in its hope that Obama would deliver legal reform of some kind, or the Journal in suspecting that Obama was playing a rhetorical shell game? As we have seen, in Fall 2009, the Obama administration established kumbaya-ish “demonstration projects,” but in his January 2010 SOTU, the President made no mention of malpractice reform.
Indeed, in the two years of Obama’s presidency, virtually nothing has happened on the key issue of malpractice reform--namely, requiring a cap on the shark-like entrepreneurialism of the trial lawyers. Oh wait, something did happen: This past Tuesday night, the President said that he would “look at” malpractice reform. Nevertheless, anyone still thinking that Obama truly wishes to do something about med mal--thereby alienating the trial lawyers whom he needs to finance his re-election--should consult the “Peanuts” character Charlie Brown, still hoping for Lucy to keep the football in place so that he can actually kick it.
One clear-eyed observer is Forbes magazine’s David Whelan, who observed in the wake of the 2011 SOTU that the president’s nice words about malpractice “warrant skepticism.”
OK, Forbes is over on the political right, but even The Washington Post noticed that Obama wasn’t saying very much in his SOTU--about malpractice, or, indeed, about anything else. And this non-specificity, the paper surmised, was a deliberate strategy. And yet, as the Post’s Ruth Marcus noticed, even a few friendly words were enough to make many observers happy. In a Friday column entitled, “From President Obama, lots of talk, little leadership,” Marcus criticized the 44th President for merely outlining, as opposed to advocating, “potentially cost-saving measures to control Medicare spending.” She added caustically, “Emphasis on potentially.” Yet Marcus lamented that “some serious people” had “grasped at wispy tendrils of seriousness” in the president’s speech. And yet detecting such seriousness was an illusion, she concluded: “I hope they are right but fear that they are deluding themselves.” In other words, anything Obama said about a tough issue on Tuesday night was not to be taken seriously--because Obama himself wasn’t taking his words seriously.
So where do we stand? I put the question to Jim Wootton, former president of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, who foresees med mal gridlock ahead:
There is no doubt that the President's stated openness to medical liability reform legislation has put the issue “in play” . . . But it is too early to be very optimistic that the House, Senate and White House will find enough common ground for meaningful medical tort reform to be enacted in the next two years. Each of these institutional players has different incentives which will influences how they approach this issue.
The Republicans in the House want to quickly satisfy their constituents who have been pressing for tort reform for 15-20 years--which to most of them means hard caps on non-economic damages. Yet the Senate Democratic Leadership is known to be quite sympathetic to the personal injury lobby, which is adamantly opposed to all tort reform, particularly caps on damages.
So there the issue sits: in stasis. Obama mentioned med mal in 2011, but his position today--and prospects for any reform--are the same now as they were in January of last year, when he didn’t mention med mal at all.
So the Serious Medicine lesson here is that absent a profound change in thinking, as opposed to mere partisan shuffling, there’s little prospect for med mal reform. Even if Republicans were to win the Senate and the White House in 2012, there’s no reason to think that the med mal situation would change; after all, from 2003 to 2006, when Republicans controlled everything in Washington, nothing happened med mal-wise.
We can conclude: If malpractice reform is merely seen as being for the convenience and enrichment of doctors, drug companies, and medical equipment makers--as is often said--the goal will never be seen as being so important as to justify overturning the status quo.
What needs to be understood, therefore, is that the real issue is not so much what the trial lawyers do to doctors, but rather what the trial lawyers do to the prospect of Serious Medicine--the medicine that saves lives and bends the cost curve. That is, if malpractice suits simply add $100,000 or so to every doctor’s annual costs, well, in the minds of most Americans, that’s acceptable.
Yet if GlaxoSmithKline pays out $6 billion or more for Avandia, as has been reported, that's most likely the end of diabetes research for GSK, and for many other firms, too. Circling trial lawyers are not going to be deterred by any sort of mediation project--they want the money. In addition to caps on damages and limits on contingency fees, the needed reform for pharmaceuticals and medical equipment is this: If the FDA approved the product, the maker of that product can't be sued. The FDA doesn't have to approve anything, but if it does, then whoever makes the product in good faith shouldn't be subject to a lawsuit--period.
In fact, the real cost of medical torts--and it is enormous to the point of incalculability--is the paralysis of scientific progress across the medical sector, because nobody wants to take possession of information that could later inculpate them, in some perhaps unforeseen way, in a future class-action suit.
So what’s the way out? The way out is circuitous: Ultimately, we have to get to cures, because good health is both better, and cheaper, than sickness. But to get to there, to get to better medical outcomes in the long run, we have to change the legal system in the short run. Changes in the legal system will encourage innovation, information-sharing, and mass production of new medical products. That’s a bright prospect that will entice ordinary Americans who are at present indifferent spectators to the ongoing brawl between opponents and proponents of malpractice reform.
Here’s the bottom line: Advocates of legal reform must therefore become advocates of a comprehensive strategy for Serious Medicine, because only by making their argument larger and more promising can advocates make a persuasive case to Middle America. Cures are not just a good idea, cures are a big idea--the kind of idea that blows away the pecuniary interest of trial lawyers and their political grantees. And so it’s that big idea of cures that must be invoked in favor of med mal as part of a Serious Medicine Strategy. Anything less simply won’t get the job done.
As the late management guru Peter Drucker observed, as a general rule, a new idea has to be ten times better than the old idea to be accepted and to replace the old idea. And so we can see what has gone wrong with med mal over the years: People might think med mal is a good idea, but they don’t see med mal as ten times better than the status quo, and so reform goes nowhere. What med mal reformers need to do is link reform to the larger issue of cures. Cures, that is, as both a humanitarian goal and a money-saving strategy. Seen that way, cures are a ten-times-better idea than John Edwards & Co. Present the American people with a choice--what do you want: Cures for killer diseases? Or more trial lawyers flying around in private jets?
If we cure diabetes, for example, we as a nation won’t spend $200 billion caring for diabetes. Although diabetes is often linked to obesity, about a quarter of diabetes patients in America were born with the condition. And even for those who can be said to be “at fault,” the plain reality is that we are paying for their care. So it makes sense for us, as part of our Serious Medical Strategy, to work with those seeking to reduce obesity. And to applaud, for example, the fitness efforts of Michelle Obama.
Moreover, since we have developed a commercial culture which is seemingly dedicated to fattening us up--candy companies, for example, spend their time figuring out new methods of mixing sugar and salt in ways that are irresistible to our lizard-brain food reflexes--we need to develop equally shrewd counter-measures. And yet here again, the trial lawyers are a major obstacle to progress. If the lawsuits keep coming against weight-loss products--Fen-Phen awhile back, Zenical more recently--then we're stuck in a repetitive get-fat rut. (What’s needed, of course, is personalized medicine, so that those relatively few who are at risk from Fen-Phen, or Zenical, or anything else are warned away. And yet such personalization won’t happen, Jim Wootton explains, so long as the trial lawyers are able, through the legal discovery process, to comb through every medical record, looking to make a new class-action lawsuit.)
So once again, the way out is medical science--cures. The idea of cures, that is, as an articulated national goal, the sort of articulation that’s been missing from the debate for the past two decades, as we focused instead on health insurance. A Manhattan Project-like focus on cures would necessitate the sweeping away of the trial lawyers. During World War Two, nobody sued the A-bomb project.
The quest for life-improving, cost-saving Serious Medicine should of course be a bipartisan effort. This is, President Obama should want to cure diabetes, not only because he is a compassionate man but also because he wants to make healthcare--and Obamacare--affordable. But to achieve those goals, Obama will have to do more than talk the talk of med mal; he will have to walk the difficult walk of enacting genuine legal reform.
Perhaps it’s time to recall the old Jack Benny routine, “your money or your life.” In the comedian’s case--Benny portrayed himself as an epic tightwad--the choices of “money” or “life” were almost interchangeable. Even as a menacing robber threatened him, Benny answered, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” In the real world, of course, life is more important. But what if we knew that we could have both: money and life? That is, what if we could come to see that cures are cheaper than sickness-and cheaper than care? That has been true for polio, and smallpox, and tuberculosis, to name three diseases that we have mostly eliminated. So why not take the same cost-effective approach to diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cancer?
Yes, such cure would be a great challenge, but the reward would be much greater. It is simply inconsistent with the work of the nation to let legal pirates and plunderers continue to hollow out our healthcare industry--and our own health. The status quo is costing us both our money and our lives.
Rich Lowry's "The Madness Lobby": For all the craziness in the world, it's the craziness next door that scares us the most. We should seek to cure it, but first we have to get the government to stop subsidizing it.
At that point, the politicos, and the chattering class, start to lose interest. If it's no longer a political fight, well, find another political fight, such as taxes, spending, or the budget deficit.
Yet in view of the horrible carnage that Loughner caused, perhaps we shouldn't turn away from the mental-illness issue so quickly. Perhaps we should realize that there are more Loughners out there--indeed, their numbers could be growing, relative to the population. If so, then as a matter of self-defense, we need to think about how well we are dealing with mental health issues.
For decades, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey has been arguing that we have been badly mishandling mental illness, and that consequences of that mishandling have made all of us worse off. He has argued that the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill--an effort that united liberals, libertarians, and budget-cutters--has in fact merely shifted the burden from institutions to the streets, and then to prisons. That is, as the mentally ill were pushed onto the streets, they were "free" to hurt themselves and to hurt others. The most casual observation--from a safe distance--of many homeless people should be enough to convince an honest observer that the homeless have problems greater than the lack of housing. Indeed, after committing an unknown number of crimes, many of the homeless end up in prison. It's almost hydraulic: Empty out the mental hospitals, fill up the prisons.
In addition, Dr. Torrey advances the theory that schizophrenia is the result of contagion--a virus. This theory flies in the face of the received neo-Freudian wisdom, that schizophrenia is the result of bad parenting of some kind. And it also flies in the face of received neo-Marxist wisdom, that schizophrenia, like all mental illness, is the result of unjust social conditions. And in the face of received neo-Szaszian wisdom, which holds that much mental illness is simply an illusion concocted by bureaucrats and Nurse Ratched types. And in the face of neo-Foucaultian wisdom, which holds that mental illness is at least in part the result of society-wide sexual compulsion and repression. The common thread running through these four "neos" is the general sense that the mentally ill are victims, and that society, instead, is at fault.
And there are plenty of others, of course, who see mental illness deriving from dysfunctional brain chemistry, brought on by genetics, vaccines--although the argument about vaccines and autism has been thoroughly discredited--and the overall environment.
In other words, Torrey's work has plenty of enemies. But it also has plenty of new allies, we might note, as more and more ailments are discovered to be the result of bacteria and viruses. For example, the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to two Australians who confounded centuries of received scientific wisdom by demonstrating that peptic ulcers come from bacterium Heliobacter pylori, and not, say, onions or tabasco sauce. Indeed, in 2009, The New Scientist published a pathbreaking piece, "Six Diseases You Never Knew You Could Catch--citing new research on the communicability of breast cancer, prostate cancer, obesity, diabetes, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and, yes, schizophrenia. Many of these new insights can be traced back to the work of Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, and Gregory Cochran, a physicist and anthropologist at the University of Utah.
In other words, we could be at the edge of a new precipice of discovery--a new dawning of realization that much of what we have thought about disease was wrong, or at least insufficient. If so, surely there should be more Nobel Prizes for this work--perhaps to Torrey, perhaps to Ewald and Cochran.
But in the meantime, as Loughner reminds us, we are still reeling from the consequences of wrong-headed decisions. If schizophrenics have a virus, not only should they be kept under supervision for their own sake, but also for our sake, doubly. That is, not only might they be dangerous, in terms of violence, but they might be dangerous in terms of contagion.
And so to Rich Lowry's brilliant piece in National Review Online, and in his syndicated column around the country, in which he took on those who have worked so sedulously for so long to prevent effective treatment for the Loughners of our world. As Rich wrote, this "madness lobby" is not only working out of ideological zeal, it is working because it is getting paid to work--the madness lobby's efforts are subsidized by the taxpayers. That's right: We have been paying to keep madmen, and madwomen, on the streets. The whole piece is well worth reading, but here's an excerpt:
President Obama was too sweeping when he said we shouldn’t point fingers. Our ire should be directed at the mental-health “advocates,” federal bureaucrats, and crusading civil libertarians who fight to maintain a status quo that makes it hard to treat the mentally ill. They are the madness lobby.
They aren’t responsible for Jared Loughner or his crimes. They do deserve the blame for a system that willfully lets people fall through the cracks and pretends diseased minds can make rational decisions. At its best, this system is cruel in abandoning the ill to their suffering; in exceptional cases, it is reckless in leaving dangerous people to do harm to themselves or others. The madness lobby helps make the literally lunatic act of violence a routine part of the American landscape.
A group of “anti-psychiatrist” thinkers provided the philosophical impetus for emptying our mental institutions. Thomas Szasz, Michel Foucault, and others ably demonstrated the power of idiot ravings to increase the sum total of human misery. Szasz compared psychiatry to slavery, while idealistic lawyers who wanted to vindicate the civil rights of patients launched an assault on commitment laws.
In a combination of foolish budget-cutting and misconceived compassion (some of the institutions were indeed horrors), states began to dump people out of mental hospitals in the 1960s. In his book The Insanity Offense, Dr. Torrey documents how, as the numbers of mentally ill in institutions declined throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the numbers on the streets or in jails increased. For many of the mentally ill, deinstitutionalization was essentially a shuffle — from hospital to prison.
In the 1970s, a Wisconsin court struck down the state’s civil-commitment law in a decision that reverberated nationally. In writing his 2008 book, Dr. Torrey visited Alberta Lessard, the schizophrenic woman whose case prompted the decision. Still untreated, she had spent time homeless and had never held a job, had been charged with ten crimes, and lived with constant delusions of people persecuting her.
In the wake of Lessard and similar decisions, it became the rule in most states to wait until someone is on the very cusp of suicide or murder to commit him. And it nearly became impossible to force the mentally ill to take their medication, in or out of the hospital.
Today, even with the human wreckage of its handiwork all around us, the madness lobby persists. The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) funds efforts to liberate the seriously ill from their treatment. Writing in The Weekly Standard, Sally Satel recounted a case in Maine where a SAMHSA-funded outfit got a patient out of the hospital over the objections of his parents; he killed his mother with a hatchet two months later.
Mental illness is the only disease that has an influential lobby devoted to not treating it.
So there we have it. If the Loughner issue fades away, not only will it be a lost opportunity, in terms of doing justice for the Tucson victims, but it will also be a lost opportunity in terms of safety and security for the rest of us.
Bloomberg's Bikes Are Made For Riding...Right On Over You
You keep saying you've got something for me.
something you call love, but confess.
You've been a messin' where you shouldn't have been a messin'
and now someone else is gettin' all your best.
New York's Michael Bloomberg takes a deep breath, sighs loudly, and tells angry New Yorkers, "OK, let me try explaining myself again. I'll talk even slower and use even tinier words so you middle class dolts can understand me, all right? Here goes...":
What, you don't like bike lanes? It couldn't be that they're a menace, waste millions of dollars and add to traffic congestion and more parking tickets.
No, it's just because you don't understand their virtue. That's Mayor Bloomberg's story and he's sticking to it.
After hundreds of people at a meeting booed new lanes in the Rockaways, the mayor threw the taxpayers a bone. "I don't think we've done a very good job of explaining and planning," he told the crowd. The implicit message is that he knows best, and you will agree once he explains it all. And if you don't, tough noogies. You're still getting bike lanes because he wants them.
You keep lying, when you oughta be truthin'
and you keep losin' when you oughta not bet.
You keep samin' when you oughta be a changin'.
Now what's right is right, but you ain't been right yet.
Sounds like a certain president and his beloved social programs that we're all just too f*cking stupid to appreciate, no? The pattern is a perfect match: Importing the trappings of "social democracy" into America, and when the people protest, tell them it's because they're too stupid to understand what's best for themselves - that's a job best left to the government, assuming it is run by Democrats.
Bloomberg, like Obama, has been pretty much given up on by the people he claims to govern. The city was sick of the "independent" Bloomberg by 2009, when, after spending over $102 million dollars - an average of per $175- voter and more than 16x his Democratic opponent, he still barely won the NYC mayoral election by a tally of 50%-46%. But like Obama, who saw his party get pounded in the midterms for his policies, Bloomberg sees no need to govern in a way that reflects the will of the people. It's about his ideology, democracy be damned.
He's pretty much done as mayor of New York, and few will weep at his departure, but is this guy serious as he contemplates a 2012 presidential run, offering voters an imperious snob as a replacement for another imperious snob?
The voters have already gotten your message, Mikey, and they don't like it. But I guarantee they have a message for you - and it's already in the mail:
These boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do
one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.
Are you ready boots? Start walkin'!
something you call love, but confess.
You've been a messin' where you shouldn't have been a messin'
and now someone else is gettin' all your best.
New York's Michael Bloomberg takes a deep breath, sighs loudly, and tells angry New Yorkers, "OK, let me try explaining myself again. I'll talk even slower and use even tinier words so you middle class dolts can understand me, all right? Here goes...":
What, you don't like bike lanes? It couldn't be that they're a menace, waste millions of dollars and add to traffic congestion and more parking tickets.
No, it's just because you don't understand their virtue. That's Mayor Bloomberg's story and he's sticking to it.
After hundreds of people at a meeting booed new lanes in the Rockaways, the mayor threw the taxpayers a bone. "I don't think we've done a very good job of explaining and planning," he told the crowd. The implicit message is that he knows best, and you will agree once he explains it all. And if you don't, tough noogies. You're still getting bike lanes because he wants them.
You keep lying, when you oughta be truthin'
and you keep losin' when you oughta not bet.
You keep samin' when you oughta be a changin'.
Now what's right is right, but you ain't been right yet.
Sounds like a certain president and his beloved social programs that we're all just too f*cking stupid to appreciate, no? The pattern is a perfect match: Importing the trappings of "social democracy" into America, and when the people protest, tell them it's because they're too stupid to understand what's best for themselves - that's a job best left to the government, assuming it is run by Democrats.
Bloomberg, like Obama, has been pretty much given up on by the people he claims to govern. The city was sick of the "independent" Bloomberg by 2009, when, after spending over $102 million dollars - an average of per $175- voter and more than 16x his Democratic opponent, he still barely won the NYC mayoral election by a tally of 50%-46%. But like Obama, who saw his party get pounded in the midterms for his policies, Bloomberg sees no need to govern in a way that reflects the will of the people. It's about his ideology, democracy be damned.
He's pretty much done as mayor of New York, and few will weep at his departure, but is this guy serious as he contemplates a 2012 presidential run, offering voters an imperious snob as a replacement for another imperious snob?
The voters have already gotten your message, Mikey, and they don't like it. But I guarantee they have a message for you - and it's already in the mail:
These boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do
one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.
Are you ready boots? Start walkin'!
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Limbaugh/Yee dust-up proves media has learned NOTHING from Tuscon
Folks, this is all it takes for the Democrats to demand suppression of the 1st Amendment, and for the media to make dark insinuations about the Right's alleged propensity for violence:
"ching cha, ching chow cho cha, chan cha ching, chee ba ba ba, hon chong hee, ee kah ah ahh! Che, cheech eh! Jing ja, bo ba, ya ya, cha che cheech che! Cha gee! Doohhh, kit bah le bah! Bah, cheech cho bah!’”
That's Rush Limbaugh, imitating Chinese despot Hu Jintao, and saying that's about all he got out of the joint press conference with Barack Obama. Yahoo concurs, somewhat:
Indeed, the afternoon presser was marred by long stretches of time where translation would be conducted only after each statement from the two leaders was concluded...
But it was enough to send at least one Democrat into a complete meltdown:
“Today, Rush Limbaugh reached a new low as he mocked the Chinese language and culture,” read a January 19th statement from Senator Leland Yee, Democrat of San Francisco....
Yee demanded an apology from Limbaugh. After realizing this was a fruitless endeavor, something else unusual, quite coincidentally, happened:
On January 26th, a follow-up statement by Senator Yee entitled, “Racist Limbaugh Fan Sends Death Threat to Yee,” detailed a fax purportedly sent to the senator’s office that was rife with racial epithets, a reference to “Rush…kick[ing] your Chink ass,” and a death threat against “all Marxists! Foreign and Domestic!”
“It is quite disturbing that such racist sentiment still exists in our country,” said Yee. “As I have said in the past, it is unfortunate acts like these that demonstrate why we must continue to be vigilant against hate and intolerance. Such vitriol has no place within our political discourse or anywhere in our society.”
And since civility now means "shut the f*ck up and don't you dare disagree with me, that's hate speech!", we get this:
Yee has since launched a campaign for a boycott against the talker’s radio program entitled “Help Stop the Hate from Rush Limbaugh.”
No surprise, it's not about civility, it's about silencing of dissent. But back to the "fax", Brian Maloney points out the media has gone totally Tuscon on Rush Limbaugh here, with no rational reason for doing so:
Almost immediately, news media outlets in all parts of California and elsewhere across the nation seized upon the opportunity to smear Limbaugh without any verification of the n
ote's authenticity. Many have reported the "Rush fan" allegation as fact without the slightest indication of who may have really sent it.
With a few hours of the first report, this "controversy" had already been picked up by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Fresno Bee, Sacramento Bee, KGO, assorted free weekly throwaways in San Francisco, the Washington Post, NBC News local coverage and many more.
A curious mishmash of racist images and language, the letter seems strangely designed to place Limbaugh front and center in the resulting controversy. But why would someone with such extreme views use Rush's name in this way?
Because perhaps the person with extreme views is...Yee himself:
Interestingly, Yee happens to be running for mayor of San Francisco this year, so a fresh injection of sympathetic publicity is just what the campaign strategists ordered.
And there's also a convenient history of other faxes sent to Yee during similar political grandstanding stunts, including an anti-Palin campaign last year.
So a desperate candidate, with a history of creating false controversies via fax(?), makes wild, unsubstantiated claims, and what does the media do?
Run with it, without question. Much like they ran with the storyline that Sarah Palin shot Gabrielle Giffords. Until which point when they were proven incorrect, at which time the media then begged for a "new civility", in order to keep criticism of themselves to a bare minimum. So they could do it again, to another conservative figure, just a few weeks later.
"ching cha, ching chow cho cha, chan cha ching, chee ba ba ba, hon chong hee, ee kah ah ahh! Che, cheech eh! Jing ja, bo ba, ya ya, cha che cheech che! Cha gee! Doohhh, kit bah le bah! Bah, cheech cho bah!’”
That's Rush Limbaugh, imitating Chinese despot Hu Jintao, and saying that's about all he got out of the joint press conference with Barack Obama. Yahoo concurs, somewhat:
Indeed, the afternoon presser was marred by long stretches of time where translation would be conducted only after each statement from the two leaders was concluded...
But it was enough to send at least one Democrat into a complete meltdown:
“Today, Rush Limbaugh reached a new low as he mocked the Chinese language and culture,” read a January 19th statement from Senator Leland Yee, Democrat of San Francisco....
Yee demanded an apology from Limbaugh. After realizing this was a fruitless endeavor, something else unusual, quite coincidentally, happened:
On January 26th, a follow-up statement by Senator Yee entitled, “Racist Limbaugh Fan Sends Death Threat to Yee,” detailed a fax purportedly sent to the senator’s office that was rife with racial epithets, a reference to “Rush…kick[ing] your Chink ass,” and a death threat against “all Marxists! Foreign and Domestic!”
“It is quite disturbing that such racist sentiment still exists in our country,” said Yee. “As I have said in the past, it is unfortunate acts like these that demonstrate why we must continue to be vigilant against hate and intolerance. Such vitriol has no place within our political discourse or anywhere in our society.”
And since civility now means "shut the f*ck up and don't you dare disagree with me, that's hate speech!", we get this:
Yee has since launched a campaign for a boycott against the talker’s radio program entitled “Help Stop the Hate from Rush Limbaugh.”
No surprise, it's not about civility, it's about silencing of dissent. But back to the "fax", Brian Maloney points out the media has gone totally Tuscon on Rush Limbaugh here, with no rational reason for doing so:
Almost immediately, news media outlets in all parts of California and elsewhere across the nation seized upon the opportunity to smear Limbaugh without any verification of the n
ote's authenticity. Many have reported the "Rush fan" allegation as fact without the slightest indication of who may have really sent it.With a few hours of the first report, this "controversy" had already been picked up by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Fresno Bee, Sacramento Bee, KGO, assorted free weekly throwaways in San Francisco, the Washington Post, NBC News local coverage and many more.
A curious mishmash of racist images and language, the letter seems strangely designed to place Limbaugh front and center in the resulting controversy. But why would someone with such extreme views use Rush's name in this way?
Because perhaps the person with extreme views is...Yee himself:
Interestingly, Yee happens to be running for mayor of San Francisco this year, so a fresh injection of sympathetic publicity is just what the campaign strategists ordered.
And there's also a convenient history of other faxes sent to Yee during similar political grandstanding stunts, including an anti-Palin campaign last year.
So a desperate candidate, with a history of creating false controversies via fax(?), makes wild, unsubstantiated claims, and what does the media do?
Run with it, without question. Much like they ran with the storyline that Sarah Palin shot Gabrielle Giffords. Until which point when they were proven incorrect, at which time the media then begged for a "new civility", in order to keep criticism of themselves to a bare minimum. So they could do it again, to another conservative figure, just a few weeks later.
It's OK, though. The mainstream media no longer serves any purpose in the United States anymore, save to expose to the citizenry the true aims of the Left, and the methods they intend to use to get there.
So ironically, unintentionally, in its final waning days, in its agonizing, hard-to-watch death throes, the media is serving a purpose and doing a noble deed, albeit without even realizing it is doing so....
How Many Americans Will Freeze To Death In Their Electric Cars?
What will American roads look like in the not-to-distant future if Barack Obama realizes his version of Hitler's dream to create a volkswagen for the American people - an electric car for every man, and for every man an electric car (purchased from Government Motors with taxpayer subsidies)?
At the Washington Post, Charles Lane sits stuck in Wednesday's snowstorm, and contemplates life in Obama's bizzaro world:
The situation could have been worse, I realized: My fellow commuters and I could have been trying to make it home in electric cars, like the ones President Obama is constantly promoting, most recently in his State of the Union address.
It is a basic fact of physical science that batteries run down more quickly in cold weather than they do in warm weather, and the batteries employed by vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf or the Chevy Volt are no exception.
When the temperature drops the chemical reactions happen more slowly and the battery cannot produce the same current that it can at room temperature. A change of ten degrees can sap 50% of a battery's output.
...The batteries also have to work harder so the effective range of the car is also significantly reduced...Cold has a negative impact on all aspects of battery operation.
Alongside the negative impact on the batteries cold also has a negative impact on the driver as well. Drivers need to be warm to operate the vehicle effectively so on top of the reduced range and power of the batteries just from the temperature they also must operate the car heater to keep you warm. This will further reduce the range of the car.
...for the Leaf, which touts a 100-mile range under optimum conditions (i.e., mild weather and no big hills like the ones I had to negotiate on 16th Street), Nissan is designing a "cold weather package" of options. But neither the cost nor the availability date has been announced.
So if Obama's goal of 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015 bears fruit, and if global warming continues its curious course of not actually occurring, expect to see thousands of Americans who took Obama at his word to be killed, most likely by exposure, as they freeze to death in discharged cars, or who lie frostbitten in snowbanks after attempting to walk home those last few miles after the battery has coughed it's last frozen wheeze...
Just think of the third-world imagery - a nation brought to heel by a snowstorm, with abandoned cars and dead bodies littering the streets, while somewhere, a sanitation department, upset with their union contract, refuses to plow streets.
And just think - this is the future Barack Obama aspires to, for all of us...
At the Washington Post, Charles Lane sits stuck in Wednesday's snowstorm, and contemplates life in Obama's bizzaro world:
The situation could have been worse, I realized: My fellow commuters and I could have been trying to make it home in electric cars, like the ones President Obama is constantly promoting, most recently in his State of the Union address.
It is a basic fact of physical science that batteries run down more quickly in cold weather than they do in warm weather, and the batteries employed by vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf or the Chevy Volt are no exception.
When the temperature drops the chemical reactions happen more slowly and the battery cannot produce the same current that it can at room temperature. A change of ten degrees can sap 50% of a battery's output.
...The batteries also have to work harder so the effective range of the car is also significantly reduced...Cold has a negative impact on all aspects of battery operation.
Alongside the negative impact on the batteries cold also has a negative impact on the driver as well. Drivers need to be warm to operate the vehicle effectively so on top of the reduced range and power of the batteries just from the temperature they also must operate the car heater to keep you warm. This will further reduce the range of the car.
...for the Leaf, which touts a 100-mile range under optimum conditions (i.e., mild weather and no big hills like the ones I had to negotiate on 16th Street), Nissan is designing a "cold weather package" of options. But neither the cost nor the availability date has been announced.
So if Obama's goal of 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015 bears fruit, and if global warming continues its curious course of not actually occurring, expect to see thousands of Americans who took Obama at his word to be killed, most likely by exposure, as they freeze to death in discharged cars, or who lie frostbitten in snowbanks after attempting to walk home those last few miles after the battery has coughed it's last frozen wheeze...
Just think of the third-world imagery - a nation brought to heel by a snowstorm, with abandoned cars and dead bodies littering the streets, while somewhere, a sanitation department, upset with their union contract, refuses to plow streets.
And just think - this is the future Barack Obama aspires to, for all of us...
Friday, January 28, 2011
As Egypt Burns, Barack Obama Does His Best Jimmy Carter
A Middle Eastern despot, facing tens of thousands in the streets, sees his power tilting on a fulcrum whose 
point grows increasingly thinner. Desperate, he turns to the United States for support, and gets it, both in public statements and whispered into his ear. Nevertheless, the revolution succeeds, and old regime is overthrown, and a new power emerges, who's view of the United States is based upon it's unwavering support for the man who held them down for decades....
Egypt 2011? Actually, this is Iran 1979:
....the administration of then President Carter followed "no clear policy" on Iran. The U.S. ambassador to Iran, William H. Sullivan, recalls that the U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski “repeatedly assured Pahlavi that the U.S. backed him fully." On November 4, 1978, Brzezinski called the Shah to tell him that the United States would "back him to the hilt." ... Brzezinski and Energy Secretary James Schlesinger were adamant in their assurances that the Shah would receive military support...the Carter administration was consistently supportive of the Shah and urged the Iranian military to stage a "last-resort coup d'etat" even after the regime's cause was hopeless.
And we made an enemy that has grown in (evil) power and is still tormenting us today. With that lesson in mind, what actions are "student of history" Barack Obama and his stooges taking to avert a similar epic failure?
Well, actually...it seems as if they are doing everything they can to make sure they repeat the most horrific misjudgement in recent US foreign policy history.
Hillary Clinton seems as if she can't answer a 3AM phone call either - witness her mealy-mouth statement full of the moral equivalence that makes liberal feel so good about themselves, but invariably leads to the death of others:
"We are deeply concerned about the use of violence by Egyptian police and security forces against protesters. We call on the Egyptian government to do everything in its power to restrain security forces. At the same time, protesters should also refrain from violence and express themselves peacefully. We urge Egyptian authorities to allow peaceful protests and reverse unprecedented steps it has taken to cut down means of communications.
We strongly believe that the Egyptian government needs to engage with its people on immediate reforms. We want to partner with the Egyptian people and its government.”
What does Hillary think, this is a union bargaining session? This is revolution, and our elite are too stupid to see it (then again, they couldn't see the Tea Party forest for the trees, and that was much closer to home). Abe Greenwald comments further:
The protests are not peaceful and the regime is not so much cracking down as it is fighting for its survival. The time to urge a dictator to grant his people freedoms is before he’s flitting between burning buildings. But back when that was the case the Obama administration was too busy being pragmatic and humble to raise the issue of human rights in Egypt...
Joe Biden pooh-poohs any talk of human rights, freedom, and revolution, and throws high-profile support behind the Mubarack regime:
JIM LEHRER: Some people are suggesting that we may be seeing the beginning of a kind of domino effect, similar to what happened after the Cold War in Eastern Europe. Poland came first, then Hungary, East Germany.
We have got Tunisia, as you say, maybe Egypt, who knows. Do you smell the same thing coming?
JOE BIDEN: No, I don’t. I wouldn’t compare the two
JIM LEHRER: The word — the word to describe the leadership of Mubarak and Egypt and also in Tunisia before was dictator. Should Mubarak be seen as a dictator?
JOE BIDEN: Look, Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interests in the region: Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel.
And I think that it would be — I would not refer to him as a dictator....
point grows increasingly thinner. Desperate, he turns to the United States for support, and gets it, both in public statements and whispered into his ear. Nevertheless, the revolution succeeds, and old regime is overthrown, and a new power emerges, who's view of the United States is based upon it's unwavering support for the man who held them down for decades....Egypt 2011? Actually, this is Iran 1979:
....the administration of then President Carter followed "no clear policy" on Iran. The U.S. ambassador to Iran, William H. Sullivan, recalls that the U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski “repeatedly assured Pahlavi that the U.S. backed him fully." On November 4, 1978, Brzezinski called the Shah to tell him that the United States would "back him to the hilt." ... Brzezinski and Energy Secretary James Schlesinger were adamant in their assurances that the Shah would receive military support...the Carter administration was consistently supportive of the Shah and urged the Iranian military to stage a "last-resort coup d'etat" even after the regime's cause was hopeless.
And we made an enemy that has grown in (evil) power and is still tormenting us today. With that lesson in mind, what actions are "student of history" Barack Obama and his stooges taking to avert a similar epic failure?
Well, actually...it seems as if they are doing everything they can to make sure they repeat the most horrific misjudgement in recent US foreign policy history.
Hillary Clinton seems as if she can't answer a 3AM phone call either - witness her mealy-mouth statement full of the moral equivalence that makes liberal feel so good about themselves, but invariably leads to the death of others:
"We are deeply concerned about the use of violence by Egyptian police and security forces against protesters. We call on the Egyptian government to do everything in its power to restrain security forces. At the same time, protesters should also refrain from violence and express themselves peacefully. We urge Egyptian authorities to allow peaceful protests and reverse unprecedented steps it has taken to cut down means of communications.
We strongly believe that the Egyptian government needs to engage with its people on immediate reforms. We want to partner with the Egyptian people and its government.”
What does Hillary think, this is a union bargaining session? This is revolution, and our elite are too stupid to see it (then again, they couldn't see the Tea Party forest for the trees, and that was much closer to home). Abe Greenwald comments further:
The protests are not peaceful and the regime is not so much cracking down as it is fighting for its survival. The time to urge a dictator to grant his people freedoms is before he’s flitting between burning buildings. But back when that was the case the Obama administration was too busy being pragmatic and humble to raise the issue of human rights in Egypt...
Joe Biden pooh-poohs any talk of human rights, freedom, and revolution, and throws high-profile support behind the Mubarack regime:
JIM LEHRER: Some people are suggesting that we may be seeing the beginning of a kind of domino effect, similar to what happened after the Cold War in Eastern Europe. Poland came first, then Hungary, East Germany.
We have got Tunisia, as you say, maybe Egypt, who knows. Do you smell the same thing coming?
JOE BIDEN: No, I don’t. I wouldn’t compare the two
JIM LEHRER: The word — the word to describe the leadership of Mubarak and Egypt and also in Tunisia before was dictator. Should Mubarak be seen as a dictator?
JOE BIDEN: Look, Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interests in the region: Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel.
And I think that it would be — I would not refer to him as a dictator....
The 3AM moment is now, and Barack Obama is frozen by fear, while his high-level appointees mouth empty support for the protesters but offer a full-throated endorsement of the "Egyptian government", which is not run by a dictator, apparently...
Let's see how the Egyptian people see this a few weeks down the road. Will the chants of "Death to America!" fill the streets of Cairo? If I were in a foreign embassy out there, I'd be trying to get my sorry ass out. And fast.
We always said that Obama would be another Jimmy Carter, but never thought he could actually create another Iran.
We underestimated him.
ABC News in bed with new Obama press secretary Jay Carney...literally
Here's all you need to know about Obama's newest propaganda chief:
Carney, now the communications director for Vice President Biden...will assume perhaps the most high profile staff job in the White House.
He came to the Administration in 2008 after a long career in journalism that included serving as Washington bureau chief of Time magazine. Carney is married to ABC News' correspondent Claire Shipman.
How will this shape Claire Shipman's - and ABC's - coverage of the Obama administration? No doubt anything Shipman now writes/reports on domestic politics has to be taken with more than a grain of salt, although that's been true of her for a while. She's perhaps most famous for her Barack Obama as "prom king" analogy, which in a sense also forshadowed the "Tuscon libel" conducted by the media just weeks ago:
It would have been great had he come home (from Copenhagen) a winner,” Shipman wrote. “Great for all of us. But maybe not so much for him. Why? Because then he would have then really irked his critics.”
“[Obama’s critics] already secretly and not so secretly peeved that he’s been voted the world’s prom king. Another victory would have just started a wave of dangerous, uncontrollable seething.”
But that's only the tip of Shipman's iceberg of liberal bias. See here for links to preposterous stories she has penned claiming that Rahm Emmanuel is a "centrist", a title she hands to Sonia Sotomayor as well. Not to mention other articles hinting racial aspects to Obama's unpopularity, as well as a doozy where she equates a young Israeli girl slaughtered by terrorists (on her way to buy groceries) with the animals that murdered her.
Again - this woman's title is Senior National Correspondent for ABC's Good Morning America. Shouldn't the fact that she's sleeping with a key figure in the Obama administration give ABC some pause about keeping her in that position, a position in which she can slant and shape news to fit and reflect her husband's boss's needs?
How about a disclaimer, at the very least? Or is my request for any kind of journalistic honor and decency simply laughable in these last, crumbling days of the mainstream media empire?
Somewhere, Edward R Murrow spins like a top in his grave...
Carney, now the communications director for Vice President Biden...will assume perhaps the most high profile staff job in the White House.
He came to the Administration in 2008 after a long career in journalism that included serving as Washington bureau chief of Time magazine. Carney is married to ABC News' correspondent Claire Shipman.
How will this shape Claire Shipman's - and ABC's - coverage of the Obama administration? No doubt anything Shipman now writes/reports on domestic politics has to be taken with more than a grain of salt, although that's been true of her for a while. She's perhaps most famous for her Barack Obama as "prom king" analogy, which in a sense also forshadowed the "Tuscon libel" conducted by the media just weeks ago:
It would have been great had he come home (from Copenhagen) a winner,” Shipman wrote. “Great for all of us. But maybe not so much for him. Why? Because then he would have then really irked his critics.”
“[Obama’s critics] already secretly and not so secretly peeved that he’s been voted the world’s prom king. Another victory would have just started a wave of dangerous, uncontrollable seething.”
But that's only the tip of Shipman's iceberg of liberal bias. See here for links to preposterous stories she has penned claiming that Rahm Emmanuel is a "centrist", a title she hands to Sonia Sotomayor as well. Not to mention other articles hinting racial aspects to Obama's unpopularity, as well as a doozy where she equates a young Israeli girl slaughtered by terrorists (on her way to buy groceries) with the animals that murdered her.
Again - this woman's title is Senior National Correspondent for ABC's Good Morning America. Shouldn't the fact that she's sleeping with a key figure in the Obama administration give ABC some pause about keeping her in that position, a position in which she can slant and shape news to fit and reflect her husband's boss's needs?
How about a disclaimer, at the very least? Or is my request for any kind of journalistic honor and decency simply laughable in these last, crumbling days of the mainstream media empire?
Somewhere, Edward R Murrow spins like a top in his grave...
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