ABORTION AND THE OBAMA HEALTH-CARE PLAN: THE ESSENTIAL FACTS

by Phil Lawler

August 4, 2009

from catholicculture.org

The following information-- which is not my own work, but the work of astute friends in Washington, DC-- provides all you need to know about the Obama White House plans regarding abortion and health-care reform:

From the latest polls:

• 51% of Americans self-identify as pro-life (Gallup Poll, June 2009)
• 61% of Americans say abortion is an important issue and 52% think it is too easy to obtain an abortion in America (Rasmussen Survey, June 2009)
• 62% of Americans want more limitations placed on abortions and only 36% believe abortion should be generally available (CBS Poll, June 2009).

Elections have consequences:

1) One of President Obama's funding requests, the Financial Services Appropriations bill, allows publicly funded abortion in the District of Columbia. This overturns a 13-year ban on taxpayer-funded abortions in the nation's capital. Amendments to restore the ban were either blocked or defeated by the majority. Currently, over 41% of pregnancies in DC end in abortion, giving the capital city the highest abortion rate in the nation.

2) Senator Durbin's amendment to the Financial Services Appropriations bill cleared the way for taxpayer-funded abortions through the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, which covers 8 million federal employees. The FEHBP has been repeatedly discussed as an example of what a government-run health care system could be.

3) The House of Representatives voted against the Pence Amendment to the Labor/HHS/Education Appropriations bill. The amendment would have prevented Planned Parenthood or any business doing abortions from receiving taxpayer funds. Last year Planned Parenthood performed over 300,000 abortions. The Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, reports that abortions increase by 30% when taxpayers foot the bill.

4) Through an amendment offered by Senator Lautenberg, the Senate has permanently reversed the Mexico City Policy, which banned taxpayer funds going to international agencies that perform or promote abortions. This gives the existing policy of funding international abortion services-- set by President Obama's Executive Order on January 23-- the force of law. Future presidents will be unable to re-establish the funding ban.

5) Following President Obama's instructions, Congress has completely defunded abstinence education and has designated a minimum of $164 million for contraceptive-only comprehensive sex education. In addition, the Secretary of HHS has a $640 million fund which can be used for family-planning services, if pro-Planned Parenthood Secretary of HHS Kathleen Sebelius so desires. A Zogby poll found that 80% of parents want more abstinence education. Studies prove that abstinence education is more effective in delaying the onset of sexual activity in young people than is comprehensive sex education. CSE has demonstrated no effect on teen behavior. (And do you find that surprising?)

6) President Obama is supporting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which, through its affirmation of "sexual and reproductive health," recognizes an international right to abortion. He is urging the Senate to ratify the treaty, which sets up an international committee to decide whether the United States complies with the treaty's provisions. If ratified, the treaty would take precedence over all federal and state laws dealing with the disabled. The Vatican objects to the inclusion of the phrase "sexual and reproductive health" because it "may be used to deny the very basic right to life of disabled unborn persons." Like CEDAW (the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, which contains an international mandate for access to abortion services) and CRC (the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which interferes with parental rights over their children) which Obama also favors, this is a treaty that the United States should not ratify.

Heath-care reform:

1) The House version of the health care bill creates an "Advance Care Planning Consultation" for Medicare patients to be counseled on end-of-life decisions. Such consultations would take place every five years, or more frequently if there was a significant change in the individual's health. Two pro-life Congressmen state that "This provision could create a slippery slope for a more permissive environment for euthanasia, mercy-killing and physician-assisted suicide because it does not clearly exclude counseling about the supposed benefits of killing oneself."

2) Senator Mikulski (who identifies herself as a Catholic) offered an amendment to the Senate health-care bill that would provide for any service deemed "medically necessary or medically appropriate." When pressed by Senator Hatch, she admitted this would require the coverage of abortion services by health-insurance companies.

3) As currently written, both the Senate and House health care bills would allow federal officials to require the inclusion of abortion coverage in virtually all health plans, as well as taxpayer funding of abortions, and would expand the number of abortion providers in most parts of the country. Abortion services have been defined by legislatures and courts as being included in the term "essential health care." Because abortion would be "essential," it would be necessary to provide access to abortion, thereby mandating subsidizing the practice with taxpayer monies and increasing the number of abortionists and opening more abortion facilities in areas of the country that now do not have them. Catholic health-care professionals would be required to participate in abortions or run the risk of being charged with "patient abandonment," which could mean the loss of their license to practice.

4) The Capps Amendment to one of the health-care reform bills, presented as a compromise, is not: the government-run health plan offered in every region of the country will include whatever abortions are eligible for public funding and will include all abortions if so approved by the HHS Secretary.

5) A provision of the health-care bills establishes the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality which would do comparative effectiveness research-- that is, it would determine the most cost-effective treatment for a specific medical condition and would override the doctor's decision for his patient. A government bureaucracy dictating health care decisions has, in England, led to rationing of health care, selection of inappropriate or ineffective treatments for individual patients and premature deaths. When a pro-life Senator offered an amendment in committee to prevent rationing of health care services for the old, the infirm and the chronically ill, it was voted down by the majority. President Obama said recently that "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for 80% of the total health care bill."

6) The health-care bills call for a new health-benefits advisory committee whose task it will be to define benefits for all health plans in the United States. As it will be an unelected committee named by the Secretary of HHS, there will be no accountability to the citizenry for what the committee determines will be the necessary components of health coverage.

7) Under the current health-care reform bills, there is no conscience clause allowing an individual or an organization with a religious affiliation to opt out of health plans that include an abortion component. The Senate bill contains a very weak conscience clause for those religions that, as a tenet of their faith, do not seek medical care (they would not be required to carry insurance coverage). Catholic institutions and organizations with Catholic affiliations would be forced to offer abortion coverage in their employee health insurance package.

8) The Senate health care bill contains a hidden provision that matches the provisions of the Freedom of Choice Act; it would preempt any state law hindering a woman's access to "essential health services"-- again, a phrase that includes abortion services. Federal health care legislation would overturn the following state laws:

• 42 states have physician-only laws that limit the practice of abortion;
• 32 states follow the funding limitations of the federal Hyde Amendment (no taxpayer funding of abortions);
• 27 states have abortion clinic regulations to protect the health of women;
• 30 states have informed-consent laws (women receive information about fetal development, fetal pain or the causal link between abortion and breast cancer; or are offered an ultrasound exam);
• 24 states require a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion;
• 36 states require some kind of parental involvement: either parental notice (11 states) or parental consent (25 states);
• at least 5 states have funded abortion alternatives (pregnancy centers, prenatal assistance, adoption promotion).

9) The Hyde Amendment cannot take care of the abortion issue in the various health care bills. Abortion must be explicitly excluded from coverage. Access to abortion also must be explicitly excluded or taxpayer funds will be used to fund abortions and the expansion of abortion services and facilities. This means there must be language in the actual legislation that excludes abortion in "medically necessary or medically appropriate" and "essential" health care.

10) The health-care system in the United States accounts for 14% of our economy. (It equals the size of Great Britain's entire economy.) Any plan to revamp that large a piece of any economy requires thoughtful decision-making, not a rush-to-completion with a majority of the Congress not even reading the legislation. Congressman Conyers said: "What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you've read the bill?" It should be noted that lawyers make up 54% of the Senate and 36% of the House of Representatives.

Get Ready for Obamacare's State-Mandated Euthenasia

I haven't spent a lot of time studying Obama's health care program. It's no surprise to me, however, that one of its features is likely to be government-imposed euthenasia. Of course, no one would ever call it that, but after reading this article, that's the inevitable conclusion.

The article, "Harry and Louise Must Die", is from the liberal web magazine salon.com. The gist of the article is that government healthcare programs spend way too much money on "end of life" care. The message you are supposed to take away is: these people are goners anyway, so let's stop wasting scarce medical resources on them.

Here are some snippets that they use to drive home their message:

• At the end of our long and increasingly longer lives, when we are terminally ill and in the last months of life, we must accept our bodies' decline, face our own mortality, gather our families and say goodbye. Say no to feeding tubes, ventilators, resuscitators, the isolation of ICU.
• Medical experts say feeding tubes extend life for those who, in the past, would die naturally, without medical intervention. When people near death, some can't swallow, some with dementia don't recognize food, others aren't interested in eating. In many nursing homes, when a patient doesn't eat, the choice is to accept end-of-life hospice care or be fitted with a feeding tube. Loss of appetite is simply a stage in dying. Dying patients who stop eating drink water, sleep a lot and typically die within two weeks, of dehydration. It can be a gentle death.
• Why should we care which path people take? Well, it comes out of our pockets. Medicare is funded by Social Security payroll taxes, and 75 percent of those who die each year are 65 or older, enrolled in Medicare. If we died more gently, we'd cut spending.

This is the kind of thinking behind Obamacare. First, they'll kill off those who are "too old" or "too sick". The rationale being that their deaths are inevitable (isn't that true for everyone?), and that the government is spending too much money merely prolonging their lives a few more days or a few more weeks.

Next is sure to be killing off those who have a "poor quality of life" -- those with chronic diseases (except AIDS of course), who are in chronic pain, or "defectives" like kids with Down's Syndrome.

Inevitably, look for Obamacare to dicate contraception and abortion. Once government gets into the healthcare business and can dictate who gets medical care and who doesn't, it can't be inconceivable that some government apparatchik dictates that we can save even more money by ensuring that some children should not be allowed to be born in the first place.

Cogitations from Today's Paper

One of the good things about getting older is the sense of perspective you get for news and events; being older also tends to develop a healthy level of skepticism for what you read -- and don't read -- in the news. Here's some examples.

Pay to Play

The first item is this article from today's WSJ on the looming bankruptcy of commercial lender CIT: "CIT Staked All on Government Aid". What caught my eye was this sentence:

CIT had been trying for months to improve its connections in Washington. It spent close to $90,000 last year on lobbying, and $60,000 in the first quarter of 2009. It brought onto its board of directors former Congressman Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican.

I see a couple of troubling things here. It used to be that for a business to be successful, it needed to do a couple of things -- like provide a product or service people were willing to buy, provide good customer service, maybe do a little advertising to develop awareness of their brand and their product or service.

No more. Now, in order to be successful, a company has to have the *blessing* of who knows how many beauracrats running the plethora of various governmental agencies in Washington. It's one thing to need licenses, permits, and permissions from the government to run a nuclear power plant; it's another to require the permission of numerous government agencies to run a small business.

What's even more offensive here is that the government does not confer their *blessings* equally. No, you need to have the right "connections" in Washington. To do that, you need to spend obscene amounts of money on lobbyists who can provide you access to lawmakers who (in exchange for ... ?) then confer those blessings.

We call people who require payoffs in exchange for permission to conduct business mobsters, and their business is called a "protection racket". But, in Washington it's called "connections" and the payoffs are called "campaign contributions".

Guess the Political Party

The next story that caught my eye was this one about the financial problems in yet another big city: "Philadelphia Halts Payments in Crunch".

What makes this story intersting is not what's said in the story, but what's not said. The story is about Philly Mayor Michael Nutter's whining that the Pennsylvania legislature hasn't raised taxes to help bail him out of the City's financial mess.

Hmm. It's not mentioned in the story, but I wonder what political party this mayor might belong to? Let's check wikipedia.

Gosh -- he's a Democrat! In fact, so was his predecessor (John Street), and so was Street's predecessor (Ed Rendel), and so on and so on. In fact, there have been an uninterrupted line of Democrats as Mayor in Philadelphia back to 1952.

That's almost a sixty year legacy -- of failure. You can see this track record in just about every other large American city. But the mainstream media very conveniently ignores it. But facts are facts and, as John Adams said, "facts are stubborn things".

The stubborn fact here is that Democrats have been in charge of a lot of major American cities for the past 50 years and have largely managed to turn them into crime-infested, business-hostile, crumbling wastelands.

Think I'm exaggerating? Let's look at a couple of others (in no particular order):

Chicago: Exclusively Democrat Mayors since 1931 (78 years)

Detroit: Exclusively Democrat Mayors since 1962 (47 years)

Boston: Exclusively Democrat Mayors since 1934 (75 years)

Pittsburgh: Exclusively Democrat Mayors since 1934 (75 years)

Washington D.C.: Exclusively Democrat Mayors since 1975* (34 years)
* before '75, D.C. was administered by the a board appointed by the President of the U.S.

A Tragic Combination: Dangerous Pets and Human Stupidity

In the News Briefs section, there was a blurb about a new effort in Florida to track and eliminate non-native snakes (like pythons) from the Everglades. It seems that these snakes are becoming a threat to native species and humans. The tragedy that triggered this scrutiny occurred earlier this month when a pet Burmese python *escaped* from its cage and killed a two-year-old girl.

I use the word escape loosely though. Many stories simply reported like this:

Lt. Bobby Caruthers of Sumter County Sheriff's Office said the python was a family pet that apparently broke free from inside a glass aquarium in the home's living room.

The snake then made its way into the girl's bedroom and apparently strangled her in the middle of the night, according to authorities.

I looked at a couple of places though and found the background to be much more disturbing. This 12-foot long python was "secured" in its enclosure with a quilt laid over the top which was tied down. How hard could it be for a 12-foot snake to push its way past a blanket?

"Escape" implies some effort was necessary to effect the release. In this case, it took no effort for this snake to "escape" its enclosure thanks to the galactically stupid owner; unfortunately, his stupid led to the death of a little girl.

The Problem with Big Government is in the Little Details

There was an enlightening article in the WSJ last Friday that has gnawed at me all weekend. The article was about how the State of California has sent letters to hundreds of the vendors who provide goods and services to the State asking them for a 15% price cut in order to help the State reduce its costs. It was not an especially momentus article, but there were certain things about the story that really stuck with me.

Meridian Food Services owner Rebecca Kitchings received a fax from the state's Department of General Services Wednesday night.

"We need your help!" said the letter. An attached worksheet invited the Riverside-based contractor to list ways she proposes to cut the costs of her $15,000 contract to supply cornstarch to prisons.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," Ms. Kitchings said in an interview. "It's a contract. If something happened to my company and I said, 'I mis-bid that and I need another half a penny,' they'd say no way."

Great point by Ms. Kitchings. Anyone who has ever worked on a government (state, local or federal) can recall just how unforgiving they are. Your bid is three minutes late? Too bad, you're disqualified. Made a mistake in your pricing. Too bad, you should've been more careful. Going to be one day late in performing the contract. Too bad, get ready to pay a hefty penalty.

Now, however, the State is in a financial crisis -- of its own making -- and they come crying to the hard-working vendors (who've already been bled dry by the State through their onerous contracts and pricing) and want them to foot the bill to bail the State out.

Among the contractors who got these letters are food companies, information-technology contractors that provide computers for state offices, and others. Mr. Lamoreux said companies that got the letters include Western Blue Corp., a technology consulting firm, and VanWrite, a consulting firm that trains employees on writing, for example, memos and emails.

This was the real "money quote" of this article for me. The State is actually paying a consulting firm to teach State employees how to write memos and e-mails. EXCUSE ME?? Talk about government waste. How many private employers could afford to stay in business if the people they hired didn't even know how basic communication skills?

What really frosts me is the hypocrisy and arrogance of politicians (everywhere, not just in California) who threaten to close parks, lay-off police, release criminals from prison, etc. because they don't have enough money.

OK. I understand that times are tough and government needs to cut back if they can't raise taxes. But, how about saving money by dumping these wasteful things like paying a consultant to teach state employees how to write memos and e-mails.

Dems Steal Another Election

You've got to give them credit, they've got the guts to lie, cheat and steal in order to take elections they lost at the ballot box. And why not? they must ask themselves. The Republicans are too gutless to stand up to us.

They're right. Unless and until the Republicans realize they're in a street fight, they'll keep having elections taken from them. I'm reminded of the classic lines by Sean Connery's character (Malone) in the movie 'The Untouchables':

Malone: And *then* what are you prepared to do? If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they're not gonna give up the fight, until one of you is dead.

Ness: I want to get Capone! I don't know how to do it.

Malone: You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way! And that's how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I'm offering you a deal. Do you want this deal?

Here's a good editorial on this topic from today's Wall Street Journal:

The 'Absentee' Senator

Franken wins by changing the rules.

The Minnesota Supreme Court yesterday declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of last year's disputed Senate race, and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman's gracious concession at least spares the state any further legal combat. The unfortunate lesson is that you don't need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact.

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat's strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

But the team's real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman's lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel's findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn't demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn't lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire's team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn't been counted, setting off a hunt for "new" Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she'd discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don't end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.

No, As a Matter of Fact, I'm NOT Sorry

This Boomer Isn't Going to Apologize
By STEPHEN MOORE

Last weekend I attended my niece's high-school graduation from an upscale prep school in Washington, D.C. These are supposed to be events filled with joy, optimism and anticipation of great achievements. But nearly all the kids who stepped to the podium dutifully moaned about how terrified they are of America's future -- yes, even though Barack Obama, whom they all worship and adore, has brought "change they can believe in." A federal judge gave the commencement address and proceeded to denounce the sorry state of the nation that will be handed off to them. The enemy, he said, is the collective narcissism of their parents' generation -- my generation. The judge said that we baby boomers have bequeathed to the "echo boomers," "millennials," or whatever they are to be called, a legacy of "greed, global warming, and growing income inequality."

And everyone of all age groups seemed to nod in agreement. One affluent 40-something woman with lots of jewelry told me she can barely look her teenagers in the eyes, so overcome is she with shame over the miseries we have bestowed upon our children.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that graduation ceremonies have become collective airings of guilt and grief. It's now chic for boomers to apologize for their generation's crimes. It's the only thing conservatives and liberals seem to agree on. Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, told Butler University grads that our generation is "just plain selfish." At Grinnell College in Iowa, author Thomas Friedman compared boomers to "hungry locusts . . . eating through just about everything." Film maker Ken Burns told this year's Boston College grads that those born between 1946 and 1960 have "squandered the legacy handed to them by the generation from World War II."

I could go on, but you get the point. We partied like it was 1999, paid for it with Ponzi schemes and left the mess for our kids and grandkids to clean up. We're sorry -- so sorry.

Well, I'm not. I have two teenagers and an 8-year-old, and I can say firsthand that if boomer parents have anything for which to be sorry it's for rearing a generation of pampered kids who've been chauffeured around to soccer leagues since they were 6. This is a generation that has come to regard rising affluence as a basic human right, because that is all it has ever known -- until now. Today's high-school and college students think of iPods, designer cellphones and $599 lap tops as entitlements. They think their future should be as mapped out as unambiguously as the GPS system in their cars.

CBS News reported recently that echo boomers spend $170 billion a year -- more than most nations' GDPs -- and nearly every penny of that comes from the wallets of the very parents they now resent. My parents' generation lived in fear of getting polio; many boomers lived in fear of getting sent to the Vietnam War; this generation's notion of hardship is TiVo breaking down.

How bad can the legacy of the baby boomers really be? Let's see: We're the generation that spawned Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google, ATMs and Gatorade. We defeated the evils of communism and delivered the world from the brink of global thermonuclear war. Now youngsters are telling pollsters that they think socialism may be better than capitalism after all. Do they expect us to apologize for winning the Cold War next?

College students gripe about the price of tuition, and it does cost way too much. But who do these 22-year-old scholars think has been footing the bill for their courses in transgender studies and Che Guevara? The echo boomers complain, rightly, that we have left them holding the federal government's $8 trillion national IOU. But try to cut government aid to colleges or raise tuitions and they act as if they have been forced to actually work for a living.

Yes, the members of this generation will inherit a lot of debts, but a much bigger storehouse of wealth will be theirs in the coming years. When I graduated from college in 1982, the net worth of America -- all our nation's assets minus all our liabilities -- was $16 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. Today, even after the meltdown in housing and stocks, the net worth of the country is $45 trillion -- a doubling after inflation. The boomers' children and their children will inherit more wealth and assets than any other in the history of the planet -- that is, unless Mr. Obama taxes it all away. So how about a little gratitude from these trust-fund babies for our multitrillion-dollar going-away gifts?

My generation is accused of being environmental criminals -- of having polluted the water and air and ruined the climate. But no generation in history has done more to clean the environment than mine. Since 1970 pollutants in the air and water have fallen sharply. Since 1960, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh have cut in half the number of days with unsafe levels of smog. The number of Americans who get sick or die from contaminants in our drinking water has plunged for 50 years straight.

Whenever kids ask me why we didn't do more to combat global warming, I explain that when I was young the "scientific consensus" warned of global cooling. Today's teenagers drive around in cars more than any previous generation. My kids have never once handed back the car keys because of some moral problem with their carbon footprint -- and I think they are fairly typical.

The most absurd complaint of all is that the health-care system has been ruined by our generation. Oh, really? Thanks to massive medical progress in the past 30 years, the chances of dying from heart disease and many types of cancer have been cut in half. We found effective treatments for AIDS within a decade. Life expectancy has risen and infant mortality fallen. That doesn't sound so "selfish" to me.

Yes, we are in a deep economic crisis today -- but it's no worse than what we boomers faced in the late 1970s after years of hyperinflation, sky-high tax rates and runaway government spending. We cursed our parents, too. But then we grew up and produced a big leap forward in health, wealth and scientific progress. Let's see what this next generation of over-educated ingrates can do.

Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

A New Approach to Terrorism

Now that our Hero, Obama, has been occupying the Oval Office for six months, we're definitely seeing a new tone in American foreign policy.

The thuggish Bush administration couldn't overcome its cowboy mentality and dealt with terrorists like this:


and this:

















But under Obama, we're enlightened and have a new approach to terrorism. I'm sure this new approach will go a long way to healing those hurt feelings and ensure we won't ever be attacked again.

Here's some terrorists recently released by Obama.

Who says Democrats are soft on national defense?

Chairman Zero "Enlightens" Us

Here's a video of Obama without his teleprompter showing just how clueless he is. After drooling and dribbling for three minutes, he hasn't said anything. This is painful to watch when you realize this buffoon is responsible for leading our country. (And, of course you didn't see this video on CBS, CNN, MSNBC, etc.)

Ann Rocks Too

Welcome back, Carter
Ann Coulter

---

Posted: June 10, 2009
6:18 pm Eastern

Well, I'm glad that's over! Now that our silver-tongued president has gone to Cairo to soothe Muslims' hurt feelings, they love us again! Muslims in Pakistan expressed their appreciation for President Barack Obama's speech by bombing a fancy hotel in Peshawar this week.

Operating on the liberal premise that what Arabs really respect is weakness, Obama listed, incorrectly, Muslims' historical contributions to mankind, such as algebra (actually that was the ancient Babylonians), the compass (that was the Chinese), pens (the Chinese again) and medical discoveries (huh?).

But why be picky? All these inventions came in mighty handy on Sept. 11, 2001! Thanks, Muslims!

Obama bravely told the Cairo audience that 9/11 was a very nasty thing for Muslims to do to us, but on the other hand, they are victims of colonization.

Except we didn't colonize them. The French and the British did. So why are Arabs flying planes into our buildings and not the Arc de Triomphe? (And gosh, haven't the Arabs done a lot with the Middle East since the French and the British left!)

In another sharks-to-kittens comparison, Obama said, "Now let me be clear, issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam." No, he said, "the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life."

So on one hand, 12-year-old girls are stoned to death for the crime of being raped in Muslim countries. But on the other hand, we still don't have enough female firefighters here in America.

Delusionally, Obama bragged about his multicultural worldview, saying, "I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal." In Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, women "choose" to cover their heads on pain of losing them.

Obama rolled out the crucial liberal talking point against America's invasion of Iraq, saying Iraq was a "war of convenience," while Afghanistan was a "war of necessity." Liberals cling to this nonsense doggerel as a shield against their hypocrisy on Iraq. Either both wars were wars of necessity or both wars were wars of choice.

Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan – nor any country – attacked us on 9/11. Both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as many other Muslim countries, were sheltering those associated with the terrorists who did attack us on 9/11 – and who hoped to attack us again.

The truth is, all wars are wars of choice, including the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, both World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. OK, maybe the war on teen obesity is a war of convenience, but that's the only one I can think of.

The modern Democrat Party chooses – really chooses, not like Saudi women "choosing" to wear hijabs – to fight no wars. But the Democrats couldn't say that immediately after 9/11, so they pretended to support the war in Afghanistan and then had to spend the next seven and a half years trying to come up with a distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq.

Maybe next they can tell us why fighting Hitler – who never invaded the U.S. and had no plans to do so – was a "necessity" in a way that fighting Saddam wasn't. (Obama on Hitler: "Nazi ideology sought to subjugate, humiliate and exterminate. It perpetrated murder on a massive scale." Whereas Saddam Hussein was just messing with the Kuwaitis, Kurds and Shiites.)

Meanwhile, Muslims throughout the Middle East are yearning for their own Saddam Husseins to be taken out by U.S. invaders so they can be liberated, too. (Then we'll see how many women – outside of an American college campus – "choose" to wear hijabs.) The war-of-choice/war-of-necessity point must be as mystifying to a Muslim audience as a discussion of gay marriage.

Arabs aren't afraid of us; they're afraid of Iran. But our aspiring Jimmy Carter had no tough words for Iran. To the contrary, in Cairo, Obama endorsed Iran's quest for nuclear "power," while attacking – brace yourself – America for helping remove Iranian loon Mohammad Mossadegh.

The CIA's taking out Mossadegh was probably the greatest thing that agency ever did. This was back in 1953, before it became a collection of lawyers and paper-pushers.

Mossadegh was as crazy as a March hare (which is really saying something when your competition is Moammar Gadhafi, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein). He gave interviews lying in bed in pink pajamas. He wept, he fainted, and he set his nation on a path of permanent impoverishment by "nationalizing" the oil wells, where they sat idle after the British companies that knew how to operate them pulled out.

But he was earthy and hated the British, so left-wing academics adored Mossadegh. The New York Times compared him to Thomas Jefferson.

True, Mossadegh had been "elected" by the Iranian parliament – but only in the chaos following the assassination of the sitting prime minister.

In short order, the shah dismissed this clown, but Mossadegh refused to step down, so the CIA forcibly removed him and allowed the shah's choice to assume the office. This "coup," as liberal academics term it, was approved by liberals' favorite Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, and supported by such ponderous liberal blowhards as John Foster Dulles.

For Obama to be apologizing for one of the CIA's greatest accomplishments isn't just crazy, it's Ramsey Clark crazy.

Obama also said that it was unfair that "some countries have weapons that others do not" and proclaimed that "any nation – including Iran – should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty."

Wait – how about us? If a fanatical holocaust denier with messianic delusions can have nuclear power, can't the U.S. at least build one nuclear power plant every 30 years?

I'm sure Iran's compliance will be policed as well as North Korea's was. Clinton struck a much-heralded "peace deal" with North Korea in 1994, giving them $4 billion to construct nuclear facilities and 500,000 tons of fuel oil in return for a promise that they wouldn't build nuclear weapons. The ink wasn't dry before the North Koreans began feverishly building nukes.

But back to Iran, what precisely do Iranians need nuclear power for, again? They're not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse. Iran is a primitive nation in the middle of a desert that happens to sit on top of a large percentage of the world's oil and gas reserves. That's not enough oil and gas to run household fans?

Obama's "I'm OK, You're OK" speech would be hilarious, if it weren't so terrifying.

Rush Rocks

'Nuff Said

Sotomayor: A Case Study in Liberal Agitprop

Boy, there were a LOT of "interesting" stories following the announcement of the nomination of liberal activist judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Just reading the headlines of stories showed how well liberals have their game down.

Step 1 was to find a sufficiently liberal and activist judge to nominate.

Step 2 was to find one that conservatives might be hard-pressed to criticize. In this case, they chose one who is both a woman and a minority.

Step 3 is to have your willing accomplises in the media frame the narrative of news coverage in such a way that any less than fawning commentary will be construed as a vicious racist and sexist attack on a humble, up-by-her-bootstraps minority woman.

Here's a sampling of some story headlines I noticed this week:

• An Easy Choice: Souter with a Salsa Beat - Ruth Marcus, Washington Post
• Attacking Sotomayor as Too Darn Human - Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
• GOP Risks Losing Hispanics - Adam Nagourney, New York Times
• Sonia Sotomayor: A Justice Like No Other - Richard Lacayo, Time
• Diversity Helps Ensure Justice - William Marshall, Kansas City Star

I particularly like the warning: oppose Sotomayor and "risk" losing Hispanic voters. Guess what? There are hardly any Hispanic voters to lose!

Notwithstanding the fact that Pres. Bush had a number of high-level Hispanics in his administration (Alberto Gonzalez White House Counsel, and later Attorney General, Sect. of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, HUD Sect. Mel Martinez), 67% of Hispanics - 2/3rds -- voted for Obama. This I suspect is due to successful efforts by liberals and the media to caste Republicans as anti-minorty and anti-immigrant. Notwithstanding the fact that this is another untruth, the fact is that it is widely accepted.

However, it begs the question: Republicans don't "risk" losing Hispanics by leveling legitimate criticism of Sotomayor. They don't have them to lose.

It's Not About the Climate -- It's About
Cash; It's About Control

The Climate-Industrial Complex

Some businesses see nothing but profits in the green movement.

By BJORN LOMBORG

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers -- the Copenhagen Climate Council -- hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.

The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.

Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."

The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.

Even companies that are not heavily engaged in green business stand to gain. European energy companies made tens of billions of euros in the first years of the European Trading System when they received free carbon emission allocations.

American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.

U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities -- including Duke -- spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.

The massive transfer of wealth that many businesses seek is not necessarily good for the rest of the economy. Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created.

The cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, an internal memo was sent within Enron that stated, "If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory business."

The World Business Summit will hear from "science and public policy leaders" seemingly selected for their scary views of global warming. They include James Lovelock, who believes that much of Europe will be Saharan and London will be underwater within 30 years; Sir Crispin Tickell, who believes that the United Kingdom's population needs to be cut by two-thirds so the country can cope with global warming; and Timothy Flannery, who warns of sea level rises as high as "an eight-story building."

Free speech is important. But these visions of catastrophe are a long way outside of mainstream scientific opinion, and they go much further than the careful findings of the United Nations panel of climate change scientists. When it comes to sea-level rise, for example, the United Nations expects a rise of between seven and 23 inches by 2100 -- considerably less than a one-story building.

There would be an outcry -- and rightfully so -- if big oil organized a climate change conference and invited only climate-change deniers.

The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else.

Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, and author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" (Knopf, 2007).

Basic Economics: Higher Taxes = Less Prosperity

Great Journal op-ed on what should be plain old common sense in a rational country:

Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich

Americans know how to use the moving van to escape high taxes.

By ARTHUR LAFFER and STEPHEN MOORE

With states facing nearly $100 billion in combined budget deficits this year, we're seeing more governors than ever proposing the Barack Obama solution to balancing the budget: Soak the rich. Lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Oregon want to raise income tax rates on the top 1% or 2% or 5% of their citizens. New Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn wants a 50% increase in the income tax rate on the wealthy because this is the "fair" way to close his state's gaping deficit.

Chad Crowe

Mr. Quinn and other tax-raising governors have been emboldened by recent studies by left-wing groups like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities that suggest that "tax increases, particularly tax increases on higher-income families, may be the best available option." A recent letter to New York Gov. David Paterson signed by 100 economists advises the Empire State to "raise tax rates for high income families right away."

Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

And the evidence that we discovered in our new study for the American Legislative Exchange Council, "Rich States, Poor States," published in March, shows that Americans are more sensitive to high taxes than ever before. The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.

Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

Did the greater prosperity in low-tax states happen by chance? Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No. Dozens of academic studies -- old and new -- have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.

Martin Feldstein, Harvard economist and former president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, co-authored a famous study in 1998 called "Can State Taxes Redistribute Income?" This should be required reading for today's state legislators. It concludes: "Since individuals can avoid unfavorable taxes by migrating to jurisdictions that offer more favorable tax conditions, a relatively unfavorable tax will cause gross wages to adjust. . . . A more progressive tax thus induces firms to hire fewer high skilled employees and to hire more low skilled employees."

More recently, Barry W. Poulson of the University of Colorado last year examined many factors that explain why some states grew richer than others from 1964 to 2004 and found "a significant negative impact of higher marginal tax rates on state economic growth." In other words, soaking the rich doesn't work. To the contrary, middle-class workers end up taking the hit.

Finally, there is the issue of whether high-income people move away from states that have high income-tax rates. Examining IRS tax return data by state, E.J. McMahon, a fiscal expert at the Manhattan Institute, measured the impact of large income-tax rate increases on the rich ($200,000 income or more) in Connecticut, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 5% from 4.5%; in New Jersey, which raised its rate in 2004 to 8.97% from 6.35%; and in New York, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 7.7% from 6.85%. Over the period 2002-2005, in each of these states the "soak the rich" tax hike was followed by a significant reduction in the number of rich people paying taxes in these states relative to the national average. Amazingly, these three states ranked 46th, 49th and 50th among all states in the percentage increase in wealthy tax filers in the years after they tried to soak the rich.

This result was all the more remarkable given that these were years when the stock market boomed and Wall Street gains were in the trillions of dollars. Examining data from a 2008 Princeton study on the New Jersey tax hike on the wealthy, we found that there were 4,000 missing half-millionaires in New Jersey after that tax took effect. New Jersey now has one of the largest budget deficits in the nation.

We believe there are three unintended consequences from states raising tax rates on the rich. First, some rich residents sell their homes and leave the state; second, those who stay in the state report less taxable income on their tax returns; and third, some rich people choose not to locate in a high-tax state. Since many rich people also tend to be successful business owners, jobs leave with them or they never arrive in the first place. This is why high income-tax states have such a tough time creating net new jobs for low-income residents and college graduates.

Those who disapprove of tax competition complain that lower state taxes only create a zero-sum competition where states "race to the bottom" and cut services to the poor as taxes fall to zero. They say that tax cutting inevitably means lower quality schools and police protection as lower tax rates mean starvation of public services.

They're wrong, and New Hampshire is our favorite illustration. The Live Free or Die State has no income or sales tax, yet it has high-quality schools and excellent public services. Students in New Hampshire public schools achieve the fourth-highest test scores in the nation -- even though the state spends about $1,000 a year less per resident on state and local government than the average state and, incredibly, $5,000 less per person than New York. And on the other side of the ledger, California in 2007 had the highest-paid classroom teachers in the nation, and yet the Golden State had the second-lowest test scores.

Or consider the fiasco of New Jersey. In the early 1960s, the state had no state income tax and no state sales tax. It was a rapidly growing state attracting people from everywhere and running budget surpluses. Today its income and sales taxes are among the highest in the nation yet it suffers from perpetual deficits and its schools rank among the worst in the nation -- much worse than those in New Hampshire. Most of the massive infusion of tax dollars over the past 40 years has simply enriched the public-employee unions in the Garden State. People are fleeing the state in droves.

One last point: States aren't simply competing with each other. As Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently told us, "Our state is competing with Germany, France, Japan and China for business. We'd better have a pro-growth tax system or those American jobs will be out-sourced." Gov. Perry and Texas have the jobs and prosperity model exactly right. Texas created more new jobs in 2008 than all other 49 states combined. And Texas is the only state other than Georgia and North Dakota that is cutting taxes this year.

The Texas economic model makes a whole lot more sense than the New Jersey model, and we hope the politicians in California, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota and New York realize this before it's too late.

Mr. Laffer is president of Laffer Associates. Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal. They are co-authors of "Rich States, Poor States" (American Legislative Exchange Council, 2009).

AlGore Rushed to Hospital -- Mugged by Reality

Cut and paste from the Wizbang blog:

News Flash: Polar Ice Caps Not Melting

Posted by Kim Priestap
Published: May 16, 2009 - 9:04 PM

James Delingpole brings us the news that a team of global warming explorers headed up to the North Pole to bring attention to all the damage global warming is wreaking on the polar ice caps. Sadly, they ran into a variety of problems that subfreezing temperatures tend to cause, one of which was they found that the ice caps are not melting but - shock!- are freezing.

They set out to the high arctic 73 days ago full of high hopes. They were going to tramp all the way to the North Pole. (But were frustrated by the unseasonal cold.) They were going to march 1000 km (they managed 434). Above all, they were going to raise awareness of "climate change" by drilling lots of holes in the polar ice cap so as to show how worryingly thin it is, and in how imminent danger of doom. (But their equipment broke in the freezing temperatures and anyway, as Christopher Booker reported the other day, there are US Army buoys which already do this job perfectly well and have found that since last March the ice has thickened by "at least half a metre").

And now to cap it all (ho ho), comes the still more tragic news that the Arctic isn't warming up dramatically after all. According to figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute - as posted by Steven Goddard on the inestimable Watts Up With That site - Arctic mean temperatures have barely changed since the start of their records in 1958. The Arctic was in fact warmer in the 1940s than it is now, but cooled between 1940 and 1980.

This is not the first time global warming explorers conducted farces like this one and ended up looking foolish.

"A Bureaucracy-Beclotted Nightmare,
Riven With Waste and Fraud"

John Steele Gordon is an economic historian who wrote a great book on the development of the American economy entitled "Empire of Wealth". Today, he writes a great op-ed in the Journal on government's lousy track record of running businesses.

Why Government Can't Run a Business

Politicians need headlines. Executives need profits. By John Steele Gordon

The Obama administration is bent on becoming a major player in -- if not taking over entirely -- America's health-care, automobile and banking industries. Before that happens, it might be a good idea to look at the government's track record in running economic enterprises. It is terrible.

In 1913, for instance, thinking it was being overcharged by the steel companies for armor plate for warships, the federal government decided to build its own plant. It estimated that a plant with a 10,000-ton annual capacity could produce armor plate for only 70% of what the steel companies charged.

When the plant was finally finished, however -- three years after World War I had ended -- it was millions over budget and able to produce armor plate only at twice what the steel companies charged. It produced one batch and then shut down, never to reopen.

Or take Medicare. Other than the source of its premiums, Medicare is no different, economically, than a regular health-insurance company. But unlike, say, UnitedHealthcare, it is a bureaucracy-beclotted nightmare, riven with waste and fraud. Last year the Government Accountability Office estimated that no less than one-third of all Medicare disbursements for durable medical equipment, such as wheelchairs and hospital beds, were improper or fraudulent. Medicare was so lax in its oversight that it was approving orthopedic shoes for amputees.

These examples are not aberrations; they are typical of how governments run enterprises. There are a number of reasons why this is inherently so. Among them are:

1) Governments are run by politicians, not businessmen. Politicians can only make political decisions, not economic ones. They are, after all, first and foremost in the re-election business. Because of the need to be re-elected, politicians are always likely to have a short-term bias. What looks good right now is more important to politicians than long-term consequences even when those consequences can be easily foreseen. The gathering disaster of Social Security has been obvious for years, but politics has prevented needed reforms.

And politicians tend to favor parochial interests over sound economic sense. Consider a thought experiment. There is a national widget crisis and Sen. Wiley Snoot is chairman of the Senate Widget Committee. There are two technologies that are possible solutions to the problem, with Technology A widely thought to be the more promising of the two. But the company that has been developing Technology B is headquartered in Sen. Snoot's state and employs 40,000 workers there. Which technology is Sen. Snoot going to use his vast legislative influence to push?

2) Politicians need headlines. And this means they have a deep need to do something ("Sen. Snoot Moves on Widget Crisis!"), even when doing nothing would be the better option. Markets will always deal efficiently with gluts and shortages, but letting the market work doesn't produce favorable headlines and, indeed, often produces the opposite ("Sen. Snoot Fails to Move on Widget Crisis!").

3) Governments use other people's money. Corporations play with their own money. They are wealth-creating machines in which various people (investors, managers and labor) come together under a defined set of rules in hopes of creating more wealth collectively than they can create separately.

So a labor negotiation in a corporation is a negotiation over how to divide the wealth that is created between stockholders and workers. Each side knows that if they drive too hard a bargain they risk killing the goose that lays golden eggs for both sides. Just ask General Motors and the United Auto Workers.

But when, say, a school board sits down to negotiate with a teachers union or decide how many administrators are needed, the goose is the taxpayer. That's why public-service employees now often have much more generous benefits than their private-sector counterparts. And that's why the New York City public school system had an administrator-to-student ratio 10 times as high as the city's Catholic school system, at least until Mayor Michael Bloomberg (a more than competent businessman before he entered politics) took charge of the system.

4) Government does not tolerate competition. The Obama administration is talking about creating a "public option" that would compete in the health-insurance marketplace with profit-seeking companies. But has a government entity ever competed successfully on a level playing field with private companies? I don't know of one.

5) Government enterprises are almost always monopolies and thus do not face competition at all. But competition is exactly what makes capitalism so successful an economic system. The lack of it has always doomed socialist economies.

When the federal government nationalized the phone system in 1917, justifying it as a wartime measure that would lower costs, it turned it over to the Post Office to run. (The process was called "postalization," a word that should send shivers down the back of any believer in free markets.) But despite the promise of lower prices, practically the first thing the Post Office did when it took over was . . . raise prices.

Cost cutting is alien to the culture of all bureaucracies. Indeed, when cost cutting is inescapable, bureaucracies often make cuts that will produce maximum public inconvenience, generating political pressure to reverse the cuts.

6) Successful corporations are run by benevolent despots. The CEO of a corporation has the power to manage effectively. He decides company policy, organizes the corporate structure, and allocates resources pretty much as he thinks best. The board of directors ordinarily does nothing more than ratify his moves (or, of course, fire him). This allows a company to act quickly when needed.

But American government was designed by the Founding Fathers to be inefficient, and inefficient it most certainly is. The president is the government's CEO, but except for trivial matters he can't do anything without the permission of two separate, very large committees (the House and Senate) whose members have their own political agendas. Government always has many cooks, which is why the government's broth is so often spoiled.

7) Government is regulated by government. When "postalization" of the nation's phone system appeared imminent in 1917, Theodore Vail, the president of AT&T, admitted that his company was, effectively, a monopoly. But he noted that "all monopolies should be regulated. Government ownership would be an unregulated monopoly."

It is government's job to make and enforce the rules that allow a civilized society to flourish. But it has a dismal record of regulating itself. Imagine, for instance, if a corporation, seeking to make its bottom line look better, transferred employee contributions from the company pension fund to its own accounts, replaced the money with general obligation corporate bonds, and called the money it expropriated income. We all know what would happen: The company accountants would refuse to certify the books and management would likely -- and rightly -- end up in jail.

But that is exactly what the federal government (which, unlike corporations, decides how to keep its own books) does with Social Security. In the late 1990s, the government was running what it -- and a largely unquestioning Washington press corps -- called budget "surpluses." But the national debt still increased in every single one of those years because the government was borrowing money to create the "surpluses."

Capitalism isn't perfect. Indeed, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's famous description of democracy, it's the worst economic system except for all the others. But the inescapable fact is that only the profit motive and competition keep enterprises lean, efficient, innovative and customer-oriented.

Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).

A Man With A Real Sense Of Honor

Unlike the hypocrtical empty suit currently trespassing in the Oval Office, here's a story of a man with a real sense of honor.  I picked up this story from James Taranto's Best of the Web blog:

Chesley Sullenberger has a problem. He borrowed a book from the Danville Library--and it's overdue. To complicate matters, the book was an interlibrary loan from Fresno State.

Sullenberger contacted librarians and asked for an extension on the loan and a waiver on the overdue fine. The reason? The book is in the cargo hold of the US Airways plane that made an emergency landing last month in New York's Hudson River. Sullenberger is the pilot who made that landing. No one was seriously injured.

Fresno State library officials were impressed with Sullenberger's sense of responsibility . . . and waived all fines and fees, even the one for losing the book. The library's going one step further: when the replacement book goes up on the shelf, it will have a special template in front, dedicating it to Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger.

"what can he do, switch back?"

A bit of schadenfreude here. That treasonous lizard, Arlen Specter of Penn., cut and ran over to the Democrats because his RINO credentials were finally catching up with him.

As part of the Benedict Arnold deal he cut with the Demo leaders, Specter was supposed to have kept his Senate leadership. This would enable him to be chairman of one or more Senate committees. Unfortunately, when a lying snake deals with lying snakes, he finds out that maybe they were lying to him too.

And so, according to this article on the RealClearPolitics blog, it appears Specter is not, in fact, going to keep his senior status. Not only is this a slap in the face to Specter, it could spell disaster if he gets challenged in the 2010 Demo primary.

Aw, gee, wouldn't that be just too bad.

Democrat But Not Liberal?

There's an interesting poll being dissected in today's Capitol Journal column in the Wall Street Journal. The graphic particularly caught my eye:

The focus of the article is on Republicans and the problems they are having trying to attract / retain conservatives. But look at the Democrat / Liberal numbers.

42% of Americans identify themselves as 'Democrats', but only 24% identify themselves as 'Liberal'.

Democrats would likely cheerfully respond that they are the party of the "center" attracting moderates and independents. And, based on the last election, there's merit in that viewpoint.

However, I believe there's an alternative explanation. The "dirty little secret" I think Democrats would like to avoid is that the Democrats, with a big assist from the media, portray themselves and their policies as "moderate" and "centrist" even though they're not.

Conservatives have done a good job at giving the liberal brand a bad connotation. There's not too many folks who want to be branded as a "liberal" these days. But, instead of making substantive changes to their policies, the liberals in the Democrat party have simply "rebranded" their policies. They now call them"moderate" and "centrist" policies; and, anything really radical is labeled "progressive".

This way, they can trot out the same old liberal policies and people embrace them because they aren't called "liberal". The policies have changed, only the labels are different.

So, even though the Democrats have been quite successful, the success isn't with substantive ideas but with the effort to fool the electorate that the new labels represent something different.