Heard this thought on right-wing talk radio today (Hugh Hewitt, to be exact):  The polls don’t show that most people are for a public option, it shows that they’re for a public option that doesn’t cost anything. 

I’m for a bigger house.  Doesn’t mean I’m going to (or should) get it.  The polls (or "cricket races" to our own Mark Olsen" show what people think about what they’ve been sold, not necessarily what they’re going to get.  Liberal blogs proclaim that the public wants the public option, when the public has been lied to about that option. 

Just more bread and circuses given away in order to coax the people to give government more power. 

Nancy Pelosi called them "immoral".  But by what standard is she measuring them?  Certainly not based on the numbers.

Health insurers posted a 2.2 percent profit margin last year, placing them 35th on the Fortune 500 list of top industries. As is typical, other health sectors did much better – drugs and medical products and services were both in the top 10.

The railroads brought in a 12.6 percent profit margin. Leading the list: network and other communications equipment, at 20.4 percent.

HealthSpring, the best performer in the health insurance industry, posted 5.4 percent. That’s a less profitable margin than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach and Molson and Coors beers.

The star among the health insurance companies did, however, nose out Jack in the Box restaurants, which only achieved a 4 percent margin.

UnitedHealth Group, reporting third quarter results last week, saw fortunes improve. It managed a 5 percent profit margin on an 8 percent growth in revenue.

It’s been higher in the past, but comparatively speaking, not as big a deal as Democrats have been making them out.

Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.

Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans.

Trim those profits, by undercutting them with a public option subsidised by you and me, and help put them out of business.  Quite the Big Government way.

And Obama et. al. know this.  They have all the same data the Associated Press has.  And they’re trying to pull one over on an unsuspecting public.

What we really need, based on the numbers, is socialized Tupperware!  I mean, shouldn’t fresh food and leftovers that last longer be the right of all Americans?  Isn’t fresh food more necessary than health care?  And please, they’re raking in 7.5% profit. The time is now to put all those evil Tupperware parties out of business.

From CNN, Obama declares H1N1 emergency.

President Obama has declared a national emergency to deal with the “rapid increase in illness” from the H1N1 influenza virus.

“The 2009 H1N1 pandemic continues to evolve. The rates of illness continue to rise rapidly within many communities across the nation, and the potential exists for the pandemic to overburden health care resources in some localities,” Obama said in a statement.

Later, the article states,

Since the H1N1 flu pandemic began in April, millions of people in the United States have been infected, at least 20,000 have been hospitalized and more than 1,000 have died, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Yet, Michael Fumento writes, in Swine Flu Piglet ‘Pandemic’,

…total deaths since Aug. 30 from “Influenza and Pneumonia-Associated” illness are 2,029 reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Web site FluView. But only 292 of those have been laboratory-confirmed as flu of any type. (And yes, people die of pneumonia from many causes other than flu.) By comparison, the CDC estimates about 260 Americans die each day from “regular” flu during each season.

While our first inclination might be to ask, “What’s going on here?”, perhaps we should, instead, be concerned with what might happen in the future if we come face to face with a genuine wolf.

From Chuck Asay (click for a larger version):

Clearly, the White House hasn’t quite figured out the difference between the two.  Now, I will say that some many who complain about liberal bias in the media and quote Keith Olbermann to, in part, prove it also need this bit of education.  (Quoting Keith Olbermann to show he’s an unserious clown is an entirely different matter.)  But the White House ought to certainly understand the difference.

After spending the week declaring that Fox News Channel isn’t a real news organization because it has perspective (while at the same time ignoring perspective of a worse kind from so many other news organizations), Jake Tapper of ABC News got White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to determine what the standard was for “perspective”.

Tapper: “That’s a sweeping declaration that they’re not a news organization. How are they different from say, ABC, MSNBC, Univision?”

Gibbs: “You and I should watch around 9:00 tonight or 5:00 this afternoon.”

Tapper: “I’m not talking about the opinion programs or issues you have with certain reports. I’m talking about saying that thousands of individuals who work for a media organization do not work for a news organization. Why is that appropriate for the White House to say?”

Gibbs: “That is our opinion.”

On FNC, the 9:00 hour is Sean Hannity’s show, and Glenn Beck runs at 5:00.  So expressing viewpoints, on shows that are not news shows but are transparently and openly opinionated, by the White House’s lights, disqualifies you from being a news organization.

Well, apparently there’s more to that than just expressing viewpoints.  Else, why would the President himself have had MSNBC’s Olberman and Rachel Maddow as part of an off-the-record briefing?  Apparently it’s not just perspective that’s the problem.  It’s disagreement they’re trying to suppress.

Because you know that other news organizations are watching how this administration is treating FNC.  The message is clear, “If you want access, you will tow the line.”  True, other administrations have had issues with the press, and with specific networks or newspapers, in the past.  But Obama is taking this into uncharted territory.

Ostracizing a news network for it’s opinion shows critical of you is way, way out of line.  While it’s not technically violating the First Amendment, since there are no legal impediments being thrown up to Fox News, the spirit of the amendment is being violated.  This is either thin skin or something worse.  I hope it’s the former, but I’m watching out for the latter.

Update: A commenter on this post (which tries to make an equivalence between Obama’s general dissing of FNC to when Bush would try to get NBC to air unedited quotes of himself) make a great point.

All three networks to opinion after 5, what’s the big deal? I don’t think FOX has tried to hide the fact that Beck, O’Relly, Hannity or Greta are opinion. Hell, it’s not like any of those three were ANCHORING the presidential elections.

A la Olberman.  Ouch.

How’s that working out for President Obama?  Charles Krauthammer takes a look back at the past nine months and ticks off this administration’s biggest foreign policy initiatives.

What’s come from Obama holding his tongue while Iranian demonstrators were being shot and from his recognizing the legitimacy of a thug regime illegitimately returned to power in a fraudulent election? Iran cracks down even more mercilessly on the opposition and races ahead with its nuclear program.

What’s come from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking human rights off the table on a visit to China and from Obama’s shameful refusal to see the Dalai Lama (a postponement, we are told)? China hasn’t moved an inch on North Korea, Iran or human rights. Indeed, it’s pushing with Russia to dethrone the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

What’s come from the new-respect-for-Muslims Cairo speech and the unprecedented pressure on Israel for a total settlement freeze? "The settlement push backfired," reports The Post, and Arab-Israeli peace prospects have "arguably regressed."

And what’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign policy stroke — the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.

But maybe not gratuitous. Surely we got something in return for selling out our friends. Some brilliant secret trade-off to get strong Russian support for stopping Iran from going nuclear before it’s too late? Just wait and see, said administration officials, who then gleefully played up an oblique statement by President Dmitry Medvedev a week later as vindication of the missile defense betrayal.

The Russian statement was so equivocal that such a claim seemed a ridiculous stretch at the time. Well, Clinton went to Moscow this week to nail down the deal. What did she get?

"Russia Not Budging on Iran Sanctions; Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart." Such was The Post headline’s succinct summary of the debacle.

Note how thoroughly Clinton was rebuffed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that "threats, sanctions and threats of pressure" are "counterproductive." Note: It’s not just sanctions that are worse than useless, but even the threat of mere pressure.

There’s more; read the whole thing(tm).  Now granted, nine months is not time enough to make great strides.  Heck, it’s barely enough time to win a "peace" prize.  But if the world has a collective thrill up its leg over the election of He Who Is Not Bush, it’s having a difficult time showing it. 

As I noted 3 years ago, the facade is just that; a false front.  Goodwill was not squandered because little of it was there in the first place.  The world is just as difficult to work with now as it has ever been, especially for those European leftists who keep trying to remake American in their image, those radical Islamists who hatched a massive terrorist attack plan while we had a Democrat in the White House, and a Russian government deeply paranoid of America, no matter who is in power.

Fine oratory, promises, and a medal given because of them, will not change the world.  There are too many enemies out there that will be placated only by a credible threat of force.  The more credible the threat, the less likely it is that it need be used. 

Well, I had an long day (12 hours is long for me) and am fighting off a bug hanging in the wings. So, for tonight … a few hasty thoughts and we’ll see where that gets us:

Perhaps if we accept the ontological aspect of human dignity as a starting point in a discussion on abortion that might help make the argument more useful. For discussion based on human dignity can serve as on both sides. The dignity of the mother and father as well as the child. One side can point to the necessity of insuring that the parents dignity, specifically the recognition of their personal ethical choices need to be respected. The other to the fact that human life, any human life, needs to be treated exceptionally. Forming policies and arguments that respect both sides of this matter is the essential element. One which the radicals on both sides fail to accomplish.

A few Econ Nobel prizes ago (Stigler I think) taught me one lesson on investing by which I live … and which lead to my portfolio being dominated by index funds. Whether or not it really does beat playing the market or some other complicated (or simple) strategy (which Mr Stigler argues it indeed also does) … there is one thing it does really well, which might be more important. It take the time wasted on the whole investment aspect of life out of the equation. This years prize will be grist for plenty of later blog posts (after I get some reading on the matter behind me). But commenter JA, might need to re-orient his thinking some ultimately … as he has used the tragedy of the commons numerous times in discussions to amplify on why government intervention is necessary … but alas, when you study the matter … perhaps that assumption is wrong.

And getting wrong reminds me that a quote from Paul Collier’s book on Democracy keeps springing back. In which he notes that spreading democracy in the third world as a good thing to do … is an assumption both Mr Bush and Mr Soros agree. To bad it’s wrong.

Frankly I can’t understand why any White House would declare war on a single media outlet but that’s exactly what the Obama Administration has decided to do with Fox News. Fox’s own Brit Hume succinctly points out what a huge losing strategy this is:

Hat tip: Don Surber

So how’s all that "capitulate to their demands and get them on our side" plan going?  Not so well, apparently.

Denting President Obama’s hopes for a powerful ally in his campaign to press Iran on its nuclear program, Russia’s foreign minister said Tuesday that threatening Tehran now with harsh new sanctions would be “counterproductive.”

The minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said after meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton here that diplomacy should be given a chance to work, particularly after a meeting in Geneva this month in which the Iranian government said it would allow United Nations inspectors to visit its clandestine nuclear enrichment site near the holy city of Qum.

“At the current stage, all forces should be thrown at supporting the negotiating process,” he said. “Threats, sanctions and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive.”

Mr. Lavrov’s resistance was striking given that, just three weeks before, President Dmitri A. Medvedev said that “in some cases, sanctions are inevitable.” American officials had hailed that statement as a sign that Russia was finally coming around to the Obama administration’s view that Iran is best handled with diplomacy backed by a credible threat of sanctions.

It also came after the Obama administration announced that it would retool a European missile defense system fiercely opposed by Russia. That move was thought to have paid dividends for the White House when Mr. Medvedev appeared to throw his support behind Mr. Obama on Iran, though American officials say the Russian president was also likely to have been reacting to the disclosure of the secret nuclear site near Qum.

See, if Iran gets a nuke, it’s highly unlikely that Russia will ever be a target, given how close these two have worked in the past.  So Obama, instead of proving his Jedi diplomacy skills, got played instead.  Apparently, Medvedev is immune to those Jedi mind tricks.

Even Obama’s supporter in the punditocracy are complaining about this administration’s efforts.

And, no, Obama hasn’t reset the American relationship with Russia. He was taken for a ride. Maybe his vanity won’t let him admit it. But, believe me, the Russians know they have taken him (and us) for a big ride, indeed.

Here are the facts:

After Obama agreed to cancel the missile defense program for Poland and the Czech Republic, the president got Moscow to give him an inch. Maybe, they said, we’d have to move on tougher measures against Iran if Tehran doesn’t satisfy us on its nukes. “Hallelujah!” said the president and his entourage.

All of this good cheer is now over. Lavrov greeted Clinton in Moscow with the bad news: “At the current stage, all forces should be thrown at supporting the negotiating process. … Threats, sanctions and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive.”

Just before Hillary arrived in Moscow, she warned that America was impatient. With whom? With the Iranians, of course. But her impatience with Tehran will be useless unless we get impatient with Russia.

“We did not ask for anything today,” she said. “We reviewed the situation and where it stood, which I think was the appropriate timing for what this process entails.”

Of course, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. In fact, with the Russians, if you don’t demand and threaten a little, you get zero.

As history has shown us.  No, not everybody can be trusted, reasoned with or impressed upon.  Sometimes you just gotta’ be the cowboy.  They may complain about it and say they don’t like us, but being liked by the rest of the world shouldn’t really be a main goal of US diplomacy. 

That’s what Nobel "Peace" Prizes are for.

So asks the BBC:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

The article continues on, referring to to Sun output and ocean cycles, and how the climate models didn’t predict this, even though the guys who program the models say they took all this into consideration.

My point is not to debate what is or isn’t heating or cooling the planet, but rather to point out that there is so much that governments around the world want to legislate based on these climate models, while these models are failing in their near-term predictions.  But that doesn’t stop Al Gore from his itinerant preaching, nor the climate scientists from insisting that, never mind the past decade, now it’s going to get warmer, nor governments from trying to save us with new taxes based on models that aren’t predicting properly.

No, instead we’re pushing all our chips in based on buggy climate software. 

That’s what the Nobel Peace Prize has become.  This was evident when Yassar Arafat won it in 1994 for pretending to go along with a peace agreement with Israel while continuing hostilities.  This was evident when Al Gore won it in 2007 for his work on climate change of all things, because it might, maybe, in the worst of all possible worlds, lead to conflict.

When Jimmy Carter won it in 2002, it was not so much for his work on peace in the Middle East, because that was in 1978 and when he rightfully should have shared in it.  No, the belated award was a poke in George W. Bush’s eye, and the committee said as much.

Little by little, this award is becoming more about politics & intentions than about actual peace.  And today’s awarding of it to President Barack Obama continues that descent.

For one of America’s youngest presidents, in office less than nine months — and only for 12 days before the Nobel nomination deadline last February — it was an enormous honor.

The prize seems to be more for Obama’s promise than for his performance. Work on the president’s ambitious agenda, both at home and abroad, is barely underway, much less finished. He has no standout moment of victory that would seem to warrant a verdict as sweeping as that issued by the Nobel committee.

When even the Associated Press recognizes that this is entirely premature, that’s saying something.

Lech Walesa had this to say:

“So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far,” former Polish President Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, said Friday. “He is still at an early stage.”

In 1983, Walesa actually did something to promote peace. That was well-deserved.

12 days after taking office? Again we see, starkly, that for the liberal elite, talk is more important, promises more esteemed, than action actually is.  “If you want what we want in the way we want it, that’s good enough”, is the message.  The Nobel Peace Prize is slowly losing its meaning.

Even in Norway, where Mr. Obama enjoys huge popularity, the decision raised eyebrows among some. “It is just too soon,” said Siv Jensen, leader of Norway’s main opposition party, the Progress Party. “It is wrong to give him the peace prize for his ambition. You should receive it for results.”

She said that the decision to bestow the award on the president was the most controversial she could remember and was one of a number that had moved the prize further away from the ideals of Alfred Nobel.

Others made the same point in somewhat more diplomatic language. Amnesty International, which won the peace prize in 1977, congratulated Mr. Obama but said he couldn’t stop there. “President Obama has taken some positive steps towards improving human rights in the U.S.A. and abroad, but much remains to be done,” said Irene Kahn, Amnesty’s secretary general.

The Nobel Committee, by trying to give clout to someone who hasn’t produced results yet, is watering down the very clout that they’re intending to confer.  If results don’t matter, neither will the prize.

UPDATE: Apparently now I’m a terrorist sympathizer.

Eric Scheie at "Classical Values" points out that the word "deregulation" doesn’t mean what some users of it think it means.  After noting that some consider it an unmitigated evil, it seems that they are making it the scapegoat for many of our economic ills when in fact quite the opposite is true.

I’m no economist, but the problem is that deregulation is being seen in a vacuum, without reference to the bigger picture, and I think the bigger picture was influenced — possibly even dominated — by something worse than regulation.

I refer to the complete absence of any standards. Not long ago, Glenn Reynolds made a nostalgic reference to the stuffy uptightness of old-fashioned bankers:

You know, we may just find that all those "stuffy" and "uptight" traits that old-fashioned bankers used to be mocked for were actually a good thing. . . .

Truer words have never been spoken and I’ve blogged about this before. It used to be that you had to actually qualify for a loan. You had to demonstrate income, creditworthiness, equity in the home, that the downpayment wasn’t borrowed, etc. before the stuffy uptight pinstriped guys would even think about giving you a loan. It was good that they were uptight. The "system" (for lack of a better word) worked.

So, what made these stuffy uptight guys decide they could get away with ditching the old uptight unfair standards that said (among other things) that some people are more worthy of getting loans than others?

The answer, as most of us know, is the government. It wasn’t as if these guys just stripped off their pinstripes and dove into the economic orgy room; they did something that’s really perfectly in character for stuffy uptight guys — they did as they were told. And they were told not to ever under any circumstances do anything that might in any way be interpreted by anyone at ACORN to have so much as a smidgen of an appearance of anything resembling discrimination. (A word denoting pure, unmitigated evil.)

Bad as the loss of banking standards might be, it’s not what I think is the overarching problem.

In my view, the biggest the loss of standards came in the form of the all-encompassing government guarantee. It was a gigantic blank check, and it operated to cover all sins. That no bank could ever be allowed to fail, and every mortgage would be backed by big daddy at FANNIE and FREDDIE meant that there really was no downside to anything, whether deliberate irresponsibility or government-mandated irresponsibility. The taxpayers would be responsible.

This may be many things, and it may of course be profoundly immoral, but to call it "deregulation" or "an excess of the free market" is absurd.

This is the same thing as when Barney Frank blamed the housing crisis on a failure of the free market.  At the time, Republicans wanted to regulate more heavily Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; two entities that are themselves a demonstration of how non-free-market the mortgage industry is.  Democrats are blaming all the usual suspects and hoping their base isn’t paying attention.

Regular commenter JA offers today the following observation:

However, I would (and do) distinguish between tribalism for minority “tribes” and tribalism for the majority in the most powerful nation on Earth. Black pride, Jewish pride, Mormon pride, Catholic pride — these, while (and this is where I probably disagree with Sharansky) still falling short of the ideal of universalism, can be useful for societies which contain them. It’s when the primary group of a powerful society shows too much tribalism that it becomes dangerous. But, again, I think universalism is ultimately best.

A few remarks might follow from this. (I might note that these remarks stem from the book Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy, by Nathan Sharansky) Read the rest of this entry

"The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike." – C. S. Lewis, The Poison of Subjectivism (from Christian Reflections; p. 108)

And the results are absolutely hilarious……