Steyn On A Roll

No, it's not a new offering from the Carnegie Deli.

Mark's latest NRO article, covering the twin topics of the Boston bombings and the Kermit Gosnell case.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346768/tk

And two pieces in the May 6 National Review, one an essay on Michael Bloomberg and the other, Steyn's (very funny) biweekly Happy Warrior column on the Canadian Museum For Human Rights - a new institution which has various ethnic groups vying for space in what has become a showcase of dueling genocides. (Sorry, no links).

All good stuff.

Medication Without Representation

Kevin Williamson (NRO) examines the District of Columbia's Obamacare regulators decision to designate smoking "a pre-existing condition".

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/345153/smoking-preexisting-condition-kevin-d-williamson?pg=1

There are many ways to implement a bad idea. For instance, Congress might have passed a law requiring that all U.S. insurance companies no longer charge smokers more for their coverage. The state of Connecticut might have passed a similar law. New York City might have passed that law. But in each case, voters who saw that stupidity for what it is would have somebody to vote against. Obamacare eliminates the option for democratic response. Instead, it creates a body of political appointees immune from being held accountable at the ballot box. And who are those appointees? In the case of D.C., you will find few surprises: The SEIU has a man on the board, along with a lot of time-serving political types, a fellow from the Brookings Institution, a lobbyist, etc. Don’t like their boneheaded decisions? Too bad.   

...The notion of insuring a preexisting condition is an oxymoron; insurance is by nature concerned with that which may happen in the future rather than with that which already has happened. In very large groups, human health outcomes are predictable with a fair degree of precision: Given 10 million people, actuaries can make pretty accurate predictions about how many people are going to get lung cancer and how many are going to be in car accidents. Some factors are relevant to some conditions: Being 17 years old and getting in a car accident, for example, or smoking and heart disease, emphysema, cancer, etc. Insurance, which places a price on calculated risks, will take some of those factors into account. But you cannot in any meaningful sense insure somebody against cancer when they already have cancer.
Obamacare is designed to destroy the insurance market. Markets do not function without prices, and Obamacare ensures that prices will not be allowed to emerge. There is a medical price associated with smoking, but the District of Columbia has decided to suppress that price by law. Pretending that smoking has no relationship with health-care costs does not make it so - it is only a way to push costs around in a way that is agreeable to the likes of Barack Obama, converting a system that prices risk into a system of entitlements.



Conservative Health Care Reform

Leftists interested in learning of conservative alternatives to Obamacare (I know there must be one or two of you out there) should read the following NRO article written by Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/344837/beyond-obamacare-ramesh-ponnuru?pg=1

For more detailed discussions, follow the authors' embedded links. Particularly edifying is this piece on how to cover pre-existing conditions.

http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/how-to-cover-pre-existing-conditions

Obama's America, Obama's Goals

In today's WSJ, Mortimer Zuckerman, editor in chief of U.S. News and World Report, describes the true state of our ongoing unemployment crisis.

After four years America remains in a jobs depression as great as the Great Depression...

More than 48 million Americans are in the food-stamp program - an almost incredible record. That is 15% of the total population compared with the 7.9% participation in food stamps from 1970-2000. Then there are the more than 11 million Americans who are collecting Social Security checks to compensate for disability, also a record. Half have signed on since President Obama came to office.

In 1992, there was one person on disability for every 35 workers; today it is one for every 16. Such an increase is simply impossible to connect to direct disability experienced during employment, for it is inconceivable that work in America has become so dangerous. For many, this disability program has become another form of unemployment compensation, only this time without end...

The U.S. labor market, which peaked in November, 2 when there were 139,143,000 jobs, now encompasses only 132,705,000 workers, a drop of 6.4 million jobs from the peak...

The broadest measure of unemployment today is approximately 14.5%, way above the 7.9% headline number. The 14.5% reflects the unemployed and three other categories: the more than eight million people who are employed part-time for economic reasons, the 10 million who have stopped looking for work, and those who are "marginally attached" to the workforce...

Sometimes the employment numbers that are announced are simply not understood. January was supposed to have seen 157,000 jobs created. The news provoked relief and even enthusiasm in some quarters. But the supposed hiring was based on seasonally adjusted numbers - - numbers adjusted to reflect regularly occurring shifts in employment, such as increased hiring of farm workers during crop harvests or retail employees after Thanksgiving. The real, unadjusted figures for January show that nearly 2.8 million jobs disappeared, which happened to be worse than the 2.63 million lost in January 2012. Even though the 157,000 jobs created were fewer than the 311,000 of January, 2012, many commentators cheered because they don't understand the effects of seasonal adjustment. 

And the latest from the treasure that is Mark Steyn, 

I'm also issuing a new goal for America," declared President Obama at his State of the Union on Tuesday. We'll come to the particular "goal" he "issued" momentarily, but before we do, consider that formulation: Did you know the president of the United States is now in the business of "issuing goals" for his subjects to live up to?

...Take the "goal" Obama issued: "Let's cut in half the energy wasted by our homes and businesses over the next 20 years." What does that even mean? How would you even know when you've accomplished that "goal"? What percentage of energy used by my home and business is "wasted"? In what sense? Who says? Who determines that? Is it 37 percent? Twenty-three percent? So we're going to cut it down to 18.5 per cent or 11.5 per cent by 2033, is that the "goal"?

Barack Obama is not the first president to "issue" "goals". John F. Kennedy also did, although he was more mindful of the constitutional niceties:

"This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

That's a goal! No wiggle room. A monkey on the moon won't count, nor an unmanned drone. We need an actual living American standing on the surface of the moon holding Old Glory by December 31, 1969.

Whoever’s writing Obama’s speeches these days either has a tin ear — you don’t “issue” goals, you set them — or he has a very refined sense of the ersatz nature of contemporary political discourse. Old-school monarchs issued “edicts.” One thinks of King Charles the Bald in his Edict of Pistres in a.d. 864, announcing among other things that henceforth selling a horse to a Viking would be punishable by death. No doubt the odd equine transaction slipped through the regulatory net, but historians seem to agree that the sale of mounts to Norsemen certainly diminished. And more to the point his courtiers would have thought Charles the Bald was an even bigger schmuck than they already did if, instead of an edict, he was issuing a new goal to reduce the sale of horses to Vikings by 50 percent by the year 884.

The Anti-Obama

There hasn't been much to celebrate on the political front since November 6, 2012. One notable exception was Dr. Ben Carson's speech at the National Prayer breakfast last Thursday (2/7) where Barack Obama was put in the unfamiliar position of being on the receiving end of a lecture. The exceptional Dr. Carson expounded to his audience, which included the president, his views on a myriad of subjects including political correctness, personal responsibility, fiscal irresponsibility, tax reform, health care reform, poverty, and patriotism. Watching Obama hearing uncomfortable truths, looking down, and appearing generally unhappy made me very happy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFb6NU1giRA

The Wisdom Of Barack Obama

On Thursday (1/17), the Wall Street Journal printed the entirety of a speech given by then Senator Barack Obama on the Senate floor, March 16, 2006.

Mr. President, I rise today to talk about America's debt problem. The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies.

Over the past five years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion. That is "trillion" with a "T." That is money we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers. And over the next five years, between now and 2011, the president's budget will increase the debt by almost another $3.5 trillion.

Numbers that large are sometimes hard to understand. Some people may wonder why they matter. Here is why: this year, the federal government will spend $220 billion on interest. That is more money to pay interest on our national debt then will spend on Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance program. That is more money to pay interest on our debt this year than we will spend on education, homeland security, transportation, and veterans benefits combined…

Our debt also matters internationally. My friend, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, likes to remind us that it took 42 presidents 224 years to run up only $1 trillion of foreign held debt. This administration did more than that in just five years. Now, there is nothing wrong with borrowing from foreign countries. But we must remember that the more we depend on foreign nations to fund this money, the more our economic security is tied to the whims of foreign leaders whose interests might not be aligned with ours.

Increasing America's debt weakens us to domestically and internationally. Leadership means that "the buck stops here." Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt limit.

Random Quotes

What dismays is the utter lack of class in such businesses and businessmen here parading their skills in distortion. What is going on is phony. It is shoddy, it is contemptible, and it is philosophically blasphemous. WF Buckley (on corporate officers - Contrary to current mythology, corporatism is a leftist phenomenon).

I'm a black Republican, Some people think of that as zany – that a black person would be a conservative. But to me what is zany is any person – black, white, red, brown or yellow – not being a conservative.
Tim Scott (Governor Nikki Haley's choice to replace retiring Jim Demint as South Carolina Senator)

Is it any wonder today's Republicans have so much trouble with voters? Here we have a class A demagogue running up our deficits and debt to nation-bankrupting levels through runaway spending and obstructing entitlement reform, and Republicans allow him to establish the counterfactual narrative that we have a revenue problem -- caused by the rich, no less.
David Limbaugh

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the latest triumphant (fiscal) deal includes $2 billion of cuts for fiscal year 2013. Wow! That’s what the government of the United States borrows every ten hours and 38 minutes. Spending two months negotiating ten hours of savings is like driving to a supermarket three states away to save a nickel on your grocery bill.
Mark Steyn

Nobel laureate (Al) Gore has sold his interest in a failing cable-television station for about $100 million — and to the anti-American Al-Jazeera, which is owned by the fossil-fuel-rich royal family of Qatar. Gore rushed to close the deal before the first of the year to avoid the very capital-gains tax hikes that he has advocated for others less well off. That’s a liberal trifecta: enhancing a fossil-fuel consortium, attempting to beat tax hikes, and empowering an anti-American and anti-Semitic media conglomerate run by an authoritarian despot — all from a former vice president of the United States who crusades for ending our reliance on fossil fuels and for raising taxes on the wealthy.
Victor Davis Hanson

We’re going to help you get it all together. I promise. You’re going to be okay.
I want to make sure that she knows that we’re going to immediately get the help that she needs to get this all back together again.
BHO assurances to Hurricane Sandy victim Donna Vanzant, October 31, 2012

BHO posing for a campaign photo-op with Donna Vanzant following Hurricane Sandy

After his visit, I sent an email to President Obama. Many days later, I got a response back. It was disturbing.

It had nothing to do with what I was asking him. It was a form letter. It thanked me for supporting the troops. He made a promise to rebuild on national television, and I can’t even get this money. It’s heartbreaking, really. I did reach out to Senator Whelan, and I got a response that they were forwarding my email to the person that Governor Christie put in charge of Sandy relief. But from President Obama, I got a form letter.
Donna Vanzant, January 4, 2013

Where is the government? We need gasoline! We’re gonna die. We’re gonna freeze.
Staten Island resident to NY Senator Chuck Schumer four days after Sandy hit

Near the end of Obama’s second term or in the first term of his successor, the American people will face a choice so clear that even the liberal media cannot obfuscate it: Do we all want to pay higher income taxes, a national sales tax, $10 gas, and much higher social security taxes to keep Obama’s entitlement state that guarantee everyone, irrespective of circumstances or effort, a “decent standard of living,” and “universal access” to health care, income security, and “healthy” food. Yes or no?

Paul Roderick Gregory, Forbes Magazine (Gregory says the answer will be "no")

Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’

BHO 2006

The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children . . . so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman, and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.
BHO 2008

And that’s why today I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office. I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay.

BHO 2009

Immediately after the failure of the Camp David [negotiations], I met him (Yasser) in Paris upon his return… Camp David had failed, and he said to me, ‘You should remain in Paris.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because I am going to start an Intifada.'

Suha Arafat (wife of Yasser Arafat) 12/2012

Both Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a war not of their making...Israel must take steps to show its commitment to peace.
Obama's choice for Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel, during the height of the intifada, 7/2002

Victor Davis Hanson projects what Barack Obama would say if here were honest about his wholesale adoption of Bush's antiterror policies.

We rejected these protocols when, as outside critics, there was partisan advantage in doing so. But after assuming office, we found them useful, embraced most of them and even expanded some, preferred to ignore that about-face, assumed that the global and the domestic Left would not object any longer — given that their opposition was more to Bush than to his policies per se — and wish to continue these measures even as we keep quiet about them.
 

Susan Jacoby wrote a column for the New York Times attempting to provide consolation to the victims of the Newtown massacre from an atheist perspective. Dennis Prager found her words predictably empty and gave what he considers a more accurate atheist response to the tragedy. 

As atheists, we truly feel awful for you. And we promise to work for more gun control. But the truth is we don't have a single consoling thing to say to you because we atheists recognize that the human being is nothing more than matter, no different from all other matter in the universe except for having self-consciousness. Therefore, when we die, that's it. Moreover, within a tiny speck of time in terms of the universe's history, nearly every one of us, including your child, will be completely forgotten, as if we never even existed. Life is a random crapshoot. Our birth and existence are flukes. And you will never see your child again.