The fortress built by pundits on the left are starting to crack … from the inside.

In the aftermath of Barack Obama’s overseas trip, the liberal punditocracy has begun to fret. Certainly there is reason for concern. Obama’s poll numbers are within the margin of error in a year in which a generic Democrat would be beating a generic Republican by double digits. And the storylines which dominated the news since the trip have been ones unfavorable to their chosen candidate: his ego, the snub of wounded U.S. soldiers in Germany, a potential flip-flop on offshore drilling and a poorly received attempt to play the race card.

Richard Cohen was one liberal pundit who emerged from the fog of Obama-mania. Cohen threw cold water on the notion that a liberal Senate candidate from Hyde Park showed political courage by opposing the Iraq war, and then recited chapter and verse on the flip-flop orgy:

He has been for and against gun control, against and for the recent domestic surveillance legislation and, in almost a single day, for a united Jerusalem under Israeli control and then, when apprised of U.S. policy and Palestinian chagrin, against it. He is an accomplished pol — a statement of both admiration and a bit of regret.

But what really irked Cohen was Obama’s “tissue thin” record and the nagging sense that despite Obama’s attractive packaging Cohen was “still not sure, though, what’s in it.”

Indeed, these concerns (and other concerns by many other pundits including Dana Millbank; read the whole thing) have been raised by Republicans for some time.  Yet they were dismissed as being racist, jealous, out of touch, and distracting from the real issues.  Some writers chided McCain’s attacks on the media for being in the tank as desperate, but perhaps some have taken it to heart. 

By all accounts, Obama should be trouncing McCain.  That he isn’t, and that this is surprising to the media, is a bigger indicator of who is really out of touch.

[tags]liberal media,Barack Obama,Jennifer Rubin,Dana Millbank[/tags]

Understand this general rule (economically derived): The higher the price of gasoline, the less driving an individual will do.

Now, understand that the Democratic Party’s platform states:

We will create a cleaner, greener and stronger America by reducing our dependence on foreign oil, eliminating billions in subsidies for oil and gas companies and use the savings to provide consumer relief and develop energy alternatives, and investing in energy independent technology.

So, wouldn’t it stand to reason that an economy with higher gasoline prices would be welcomed by Democrats? Wouldn’t such an economy yield, through the effect of less driving, a cleaner, greener and stronger America?

Yet, Nancy Pelosi recently stated,

The President knows, as his own Administration has stated, that the impact of any new drilling will be insignificant – promising savings of only pennies per gallon many years down the road. Americans know that thanks to the two oilmen in the White House, consumers are now paying $4 a gallon for gas. But what Americans should realize is that what the President is calling for is drilling as close as three miles off of America’s pristine beaches and in other protected areas.

…

Today, the New Direction Congress will vote on legislation to bring down gas prices by taking crucial steps to curb excessive speculation in the energy futures market. The President himself could lower prices by drawing down a small portion of our government oil stockpile, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The New Direction Congress will continue to bring forth responsible proposals to increase supply, reduce prices, protect consumers, and transition America to a clean, renewable energy independent future.

Does Pelosi really want to lower the price of gasoline or does she want to play politics under the guise of saving the environment? How high must the price of gasoline go before the Democrats relent, and actually do something?

$10 a gallon?

I’m currently on vacation in Ithaca, NY. My dad’s father, my dad, his 2 brothers, and a whole host of family in-laws and friends have purchases homes here and retired to the beautiful central New York region. Ithaca is home to Cornell University and Ithaca College, and over the years students from those schools essentially paid for the homes while they rented them during the school year. We would take our 3 weeks vacation here every year to mow the lawn (5 feet high by summer; students don’t typically mow lawns) and see our cousins. Because the brothers and their sister tried to coordinate vacations, we got to know our first cousins very well, as well as some second cousins and others of various once-removed or twice-removed situations.

Ithaca lives up to the stereotype of a very liberal college town, politically speaking. Obama will carry this town with greater than 95% of the vote. For a very long time, large, “big box” stores — Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, Home Depot, for examples — were kept out of town so as not to ruin the local town charm. The problem was, suburbs just outside the town were quite accepting of these stores, and they saw their tax revenues jump as the stores came in, while Ithaca found itself in a bit of a crisis. Money came in to the town, but it flowed out to the mall just on the other side of the town line or in burgs 20-30 minutes away. In the end, the “CAVE” people (liberal folks who were labeled “Citizens Against Virtually Everything”) had to relent to the fiscal realities. Ithaca now has a thriving shopping area for those that want the big stores, and after 5 or so years it still has The Commons where you can stroll around to find that corner bookstore.

What the CAVE people were worried about didn’t really happen, or at least not nearly to the extent that they predicted. The Meadow Court and the Grayhaven motels, longtime residents of Ithaca, have survived the introduction of the Hampton Inn chain. The Grayhaven caters to dog owners, one of the ways they stay competitive; defining their market. The local Wicks Lumber, which has a small hardware store attached, is still in business, even with Home Depot less than 2 miles away. The “mom & pop” establishments are essentially still here. The free market didn’t kill them off, and the CAVE people have grudgingly accepted it. (Well, some were simply out-voted. Acceptance isn’t always a given.)

In the end, capitalism worked. People got more choices, and the existing businesses survived, either by defining their markets, trading on their nostalgic or hometown quality, or enjoying customer loyalty going back decades. In Ithaca, both kinds of consumers — for the large and small businesses — exist, and businesses of both types can exist, side-by-side, in a capitalist society.

Read the rest of this entry

When that little boy was (supposedly) shot and killed in 2000 by Israeli security forces, the NY Times reported, and continued to return to, the issues as a seminal event in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This week, however, a judge in France (the footage belonged to France TV 2) has agreed that claims that the footage is a fraud are legitimate.  It’s not the same thing as saying the footage is a fraud, but the defendant had to overcome a huge hurdle.

This is a stunning victory because Mr. [Philippe] Karsenty had to prove to the French court that his claims that the film is a fraud are legitimate claims. Karsenty presented enough evidence for the French court to rule against a state operated entity and this is a big upset in France because this does not typically happen. The state almost never loses.

Karsenty had several experts come to his aid as technical witnesses that the whole thing did not add up but the French court also at last had a look at some more of the film that France 2 TV had steadfastly refused to show up until this point. It clearly showed Palestinian operatives staging a faux fight between themselves and the far off Israeli security forces. It revealed fake rescues of unharmed people, fake casualties and staged injuries. What the court saw was the creation of Palestinian propaganda. In other words, the "death" of Muhammad al-Dura was a staged lie, invented as theater by Palestinian operatives to use as anti-Jewish propaganda.

But the kicker is that this major discrediting of a lynchpin in the Palestinian’s reason for the Intifada has been dealt a serious blow.  Newsworthy, right?  But now, the Time seems to have forgotten the whole story.

Read the rest of this entry

Not content to send mere reporters with Obama when he visits Iraq, all the Big Three network news organizations are going to send their anchors.  Which, of course, they also did for McCain.  Or not.

While Thursday’s New York Times reported that the anchors from all three network newscasts will be joining Barack Obama on his trip to Iraq, they showed no such interest in following John McCain during his visit to Iraq in March. During the week of March 16, McCain’s trip received only four full-length stories during the combined ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news program coverage. Three of those stories were on NBC’s "Nightly News," one of which focused on McCain’s mistaken comment about Iran funding Al Qaeda in Iraq. ABC’s "World News" did only one full-length story on McCain’s Iraq trip, which mentioned the gaffe. The CBS "Evening News" was by far the worst, devoting only 31 words to the Republican nominee’s Iraq visit during the entire week of evening news coverage.

(Emphasis in original.)  This is pointing out yet another disparity from the media regarding news coverage that the Times is now having to grudgingly recognize.

Even the Times article acknowledged that McCain’s Iraq trip received little coverage: "Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last March was a low-key affair: With a small retinue of reporters chasing him abroad…But the coverage also feeds into concerns in Mr. McCain’s campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the news media are imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates."

Oh, but it’s not actually true that the media are ignoring McCain, it’s just that the fact "feeds into concerns" that there is a problem.  Like I said, grudgingly.

And by the way, how much better must the security situation be in Iraq that the Big Three feel comfortable sending their top dogs to the field? 

[tags]Barack Obama,John McCain,liberal media bias[/tags]

Often on the Shire Network News podcast, we’ll satirize extremist Islam by reading a new story and replacing the word “Muslim” with the word “Christian”. Upon hearing this, the listener (it is hoped) understands how really extreme extremist Muslims are because, for all the similar and worse treatment Christians are accustomed to, you never hear about mass groups of extremist Christians beheading someone who drew an unflattering cartoon of Jesus.

Indeed we have our Eric Robert Rudolphs, our lone gunmen outside abortion clinics, but the very fact that we know the first, middle and last names of these guys says there aren’t nearly as many of them as there are mobs of extremist Muslims killing teachers, killing anyone over cartoons, and burning churches.

But the BBC, not content to sticking to the “art imitating life” method of fiction, decided to try to paint a little non-existent moral equivalence on their TV canvas.

A recent episode of the series Bonekickers displayed a graphic scene depicting a moderate Muslim being beheaded by a supposed “extremist Christian”.

It’s being reported that BBC1 has received several telephone complaints from it’s viewers over the episode and earlier this week the corporation stated they ‘regret’ viewers had found the scene ‘inappropriate’, but defended their decision to show it.

Viewers were apparently shocked when actor Paul Nichollswas was seen using a sword to hack off a moderate Muslim’s head in an unprovoked attack.

Nichollswas plays a member of the fictional group called the White Wings Alliance. The fictitious group is far-Right evangelical group of Christians inspired by the Crusades.

Instead of being “ripped from the headlines”, as some TV episodes like to advertise, this seems to be the result of a late-night session of “Mad Libs”, mixing what’s really happening with nouns and adjectives describing Christians. “Give me an angelic adverb.”

The BBC, responding to criticism, insists that the story, in and of itself, is internally consistent, because…well…this sort of thing is believable.

We regret that some viewers felt the beheading scene was inappropriate. It appeared half way through episode one of Bonekickers, by which time the character’s ‘extreme fundamental belief’ had been revealed, providing the audience with a good build up to the scene in question.

This storyline looked at religious fundamentalism within a fictional Christian group, and one character in particular who took his beliefs to an extreme. His ignorance and misguided behaviour lead to the beheading of a peaceful Asian Muslim character in the drama. His actions are clearly condemned by leading Muslim and Christian clerics. The drama also has the balance of a Christian character that has a deep faith which she uses humbly and only for good.

In a media world where folks are falling all over themselves to not portray Muslims as the bad guys (as they did in the movie version of “The Sum of All Fears”, for example), the BBC goes out of its way to concoct a truly unbelievable scenario. Might some extreme group identifying itself with Christians someday behead somebody? It’s not out of the realm of possibility, but right now beheadings are pretty much a signature of extremist Islam. Even revealing a character’s “extreme fundamental beliefs” is not nearly enough to explain this, as there are plenty of extremist Christians, and yet no Muslims have lost their head over it.

Read the rest of this entry

What does it mean, “He’s smart” or “He’s very intelligent?” Largely on the left, we see citations of “that candidate” is very smart or the other one is not so much (typically oddly enough the “smart” ones lean left in the view of the left leaning commentators. Whether that is an attempt at validating their own left leaning predilections or explaining reasons why they admire that particular candidate I will not guess.) What I fail to understand is how they come up with their estimation that a given candidate is smart. I know how I figure that a programmer, physicist, or mathmetician is smart. By looking at their work and asking is it clean? Is it beautiful?

If one was to ask whether an artist was talented. One would ask another performer (or artist in the same field) or perhaps a critic (to be distinguished from a “reviewer”).  However, talent at art is not exactly the same as smart.

Currently, Mr Obama is the politician most often touted as “smart” by the left. Some months ago, blog neighbor David Schraub declaimed that both Mr Obama and Ms Clinton were both “very smart.” What I fail to understand is on what basis he might make such a claim. For the two examples above, one has to look at some sort of body of work to estimate whether a person is smart. There is, of course, another time honored means of deciding if a person is smart, which is to interact personally with that person for an extended period of time. That method of determination by the average citizen with respect to a national candidate is unlikely or impossible so as to be discounted. That pretty much leaves, their corpus of work, which in the case of lawyers like Mr Obama and Ms Clinton would be their body of written opinions.

Rhetoric is of course another key people use to decide whether a person is intelligent. However, in this age of the teleprompter and speechwriters the facility at oration is a actors skill.  However, it is a stretch to thing that those claiming these people are intelligent is based on facility at reading from a teleprompter and calling it oration.

Yet strangely it seems such offerings are absent in the case of these individuals. There are no publicly available opinions written by either of these candidates. Odd that, no? Mr Obama was, for a time, an academic lawyer. To be an academic in the publish or perish environment, yet not to publish seems more than a little strange. If this is a case of lawyers who have read his and her work, deciding that it is good, but that it is to “technical” or abstract or otherwise unfit for general consumption … that seems elitest and very likely to be concealing of a lie.

I would guess that the likeliest reason that these people think, in this case, that Mr Obama is highly intelligent is because they’ve heard it second hand. It is a “meme” if you will, spread by his supporters (and the press) that Mr Obama is very bright. But the question is, why is this to be given credence?
So, if you think, the candidate of the hour, Mr Obama is smart. Why do you think that? On what do you base your appraisal? How does that compare with how you decide or would decide if a candidate is smart?
(disclaimer: I should note, I have no opinion at all on the matter of whether Mr Obama is “smart” or not. I feel I’m not qualified (I’ve read nothing he’s written (or had ghost written)) nor do I have the contact with him. Furthermore, I’m a little disinclined to think “smartness” is a qualification for President. Of our the 19th century Presidents the smartest arguably was John Quincy Adams. Was he the “best” President? Obviously not. Woodrow Wilson was alleged to be very bright … consider the League of Nations and the stellar treaty of Versailles. Clearly intelligence is not what it is cracked up to be in the political arena)

I’m sure you’ve all heard by now the uproar in the blogosphere and the reaction from the Obama campaign about this cover of the "New Yorker" magazine.

Oh, sorry, wrong one.  The one in question that is drawing so much ire depicts presidential candidate Barack Obama.  This particular cover of Bush and Cheney, as well as a couple of others targeting Republicans (highlighted by Don Surber) didn’t elicit complaints from their targets.  It’s just one of those things that a President or politician has to learn to deal with. 

The "New Yorker" is certainly no card-carrying member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.  If Obama can’t handle this sort of treatment from a media source on his side (a source trying to indeed dispel the myths the cover is intended to satirize), he’s got a rough road ahead of him.

[tags]Barack Obama,George Bush,liberal media,satire,humor,The New Yorker[/tags]

When Karl Rove joined FNC as a contributor, the Left howled about bias.  Now, however, either they’ll howl more quietly, or ignore this and howl just as loudly, ignoring, in either case, how this indeed continues to make Fox "fair and balanced".

Howard Wolfson, who was a top strategist for the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is going where some Democrats were unwilling to go during the early days of the election season: the Fox News Channel.

The network is expected to announce as early as Tuesday that it has signed Mr. Wolfson as a contributor who will appear regularly on its programs.

Mr. Wolfson is joining a network that Democrats shunned for a time, complaining that its coverage was unfair. But aides to Mrs. Clinton came to view Fox News as distinctly fair to her in a news media climate that they believed favored Senator Barack Obama.

“I thought that Fox’s coverage during the primary was comprehensive and fair and evenhanded,” Mr. Wolfson said Monday in a telephone interview from Liverpool, England, where he was vacationing. “It’s a huge audience, and it is important to have a strong, progressive voice on the network.”

Even with it’s rightward tilt, FNC continues to be far more balanced than any other news channel.  I will note that CNN has been seeing the light in this area recently — what with adding Glenn Beck as a show host and having Bill Bennett as a contributor during the campaign season — but perhaps that’s because the light was illuminating their dismal ratings compared to Fox.

[tags]media bias,Fox News Channel,Howard Wolfson[/tags]

It seems these two holidays make the Left nervous. Of the half dozen left-leaning blogs I read none seem to manage to actually unabashedly come out and say they love their country. Instead we are greeted by various apologetic nuanced finely crafted arguments how we can be (highly) critical of our country and still love it. Or even how the absence of criticism is a sign of a lack of love, if the left leaning author is feeling testy.

It seems to me, if I had a friend, who on every Valentines day and anniversary for his wife announced (quite spontaneously) to his friends and other around who don’t even really know him that his constant criticism, backbiting, and quarreling with his wife and her ideas, her looks, and her acquaintences was a sign of his affection. Well, after a while, not noticing any real displays of affection, one might wonder if where his true feelings lay.

Just saying. It seems to me if you can’t craft a love letter to your wife on her birthday or anniversary sans critique or correction … then I’d wonder about your relationship.

This post spurred some conversation which led me to further reflections.  My neighbor the Jewish Atheist (blogging here), remarked:

You don’t see it as “problematic” that person A has to work his ass off for minuscule wages, send his kids to the crappy local public school, and go without decent health care, while person B gets paid a king’s ransom to sit on a thousand-dollar office chair in a climate-controlled office for 40 hours a week? B should just count his lucky stars and live it up and not worry about A?

Consider the following:

 Examine a group of  kids in elementary school (or secondary school), compete. Our measure of merit for the day, instead of schooling, healthcare, and wages is speed in a running race. One kid will win, one kid will come in last. It is also likely that the one of the kids coming in close to last will be far greater than those who come in the top few places. Effort it seems does not necessarily grant results.

One might ask, if the winner should feel “guilty” because he won the race, perhaps even won it easily. My contention is that the answer is no. There is no “guilt” inherent in being gifted with greater talents, better circumstances (one might imagine in this second case some of those in the bottom of the race had less “opportunity” at home and had less chance to exercise, perhaps too much food, or other disadvantages).

The (correct) answer it seems to me to this question follows the Scriptural suggestion noted by Mr Carter (linked in the above linked post), to whit the Pentateuchal suggestion that we not covet that which is our neighbors. The winning kid not feeling guilty is the other side of the coin to the losing kid not coveting the winner’s athletic gifts. Neither feeling is any way to arrive at love (agape/charity) for the “Other”. Read the rest of this entry

When you have a balance scale and you put weight on one side of it, it tilts until you have something on the other side to balance it.  The Fairness Doctrine, that the Left would love to bring back, works on this same principle; opinions being presented should represent all opinions, never mind the ratings.  In essence, this is yet another anti-market-forces argument for what would essentially be government-controlled media. 

What this would really do for discussion on the public airwaves is a topic for another day.  What I’m here to note is that the free market has already worked its magic.  On the Internet, there are plenty of opinions to choose from from the entire spectrum.  No need for a Fairness Doctrine there.  But it’s in TV and radio where Democrats really want this doctrine to work.  Never mind all the liberal bias that has been the monopoly for decades, when Rush Limbaugh (who just signed a $400 milllion contract) and Fox News are mentioned, Democrats suddenly discover media bias, though through polarized lenses, and rant on about anything to the right of Ted Kennedy.

But Limbaugh himself noted that, "I am balance", meaning that with all the liberal bias out there on one side of that balance scale, he was on the other side, working to get the information out that the Left wasn’t.  In total, both sides were finally getting aired.  (And the people have apparently agreed in a big way.)

Which brings us to the latest glaring example of this free market balance in action.  Fox News’ "Special Report with Brit Hume" reported on some extremely good war news last night.

     BRIT HUME: Welcome to Washington. I’m Brit Hume. The White House is giving Congress a new indication of how far Iraq’s leaders have come in hitting performance standards established by the U.S. Chief White House correspondent Bret Baier has the story.

     BRET BAIER: In a new nine-page progress report obtained by Fox, U.S. officials in Iraq assessed that 15 of the 18 original political, security and economic benchmarks set for the Iraqi government are satisfactory, while two are unsatisfactory, and one has a split result. The May 2008 report card has almost twice the number of satisfactory marks than the assessment one year ago when the top U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were grilled by Congress over the ’07 report card that showed eight unsatisfactory marks, eight satisfactory marks, and two benchmarks that could not be determined.

Later in the show, there is a discussion segment with folks from the Left and the Right.  During this, Hume made a bold prediction.

     HUME: Let me ask you this question, Mara, before you get to that. Both of you [Mara Liasson and probably Mort Kondrake] suggest that the word of this progress is going to get through. I suspect that this broadcast tonight — and maybe some others on this channel — are the only ones who are going to make a headline out of this. This is not going to be a big story elsewhere.
     LIASSON: I think, over time, if the violence goes down, over time-
     HUME: The violence has gone down.
     LIASSON: Yes, and if it continues to, that’s going to change people’s opinions.

(Emphasis mine.)  The Media Research Center indeed found this to be true.

     Indeed, neither the CBS Evening News nor NBC Nightly News mentioned Iraq while on ABC’s World News anchor Charles Gibson read a short update about "increasing dangers for U.S. troops in Afghanistan" since "in the month of June there were 28 American fatalities in Afghanistan, just one less than died in Iraq last month." CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 was also silent Tuesday night about the benchmarks.

No mention of this improvement, and indeed no mention that the fact that "28 American fatalities in Afghanistan, just one less than died in Iraq last month" means that Iraq casualties are at historic lows for the war.  In this, as in other things, Fox News is the balance the Left says is missing. 

We don’t need a Fairness Doctrine.  We need the free flow of information and opinions that the public can then sort out themselves.  If the mainstream media won’t report thing that don’t fit their narrative, they are not living up to their own stated standards, and have only themselves to blame for the destruction of their market- and mind-share.

[tags]media bias,Fox News,Rush Limbaugh,ABC News,CBS News,NBC News,CNN,Anderson Cooper,Fairness Doctrine,Brit Hume,Mara Liasson,Mort Kondrake[/tags]

Spurred on by the prior post of Doug’s and in attempt to start something more of a conversation here, I’ll offer some thoughts on healthcare.

Liberals and progressives like to hold forth the ideal that healthcare should be affordable and available to everyone. After all, we’re a wealthy country. However, this is one might say a Juan Ponce de Leon gambit, that is holding forth a search for the fountain of life which alas doesn’t exist. Health care suffers from one basic problem, which is so far insurmountable (although I’ll suggest how it might be surmounted at the close of this little essay). The problem is, of course, that health care is infinitely expensive. The amount of care which might be applied to the dying grows almost without bound if one disregards cost. For almost a decade we have been told that the biological “sciences” have been expanding their capabilities exponentially (Moore’s Law) like the computer sciences except … at an even faster rate (the doubling period of capabilities is shorter). However this hasn’t substantially been, as yet, bringing down costs, just making ever more expensive options tantalizingly available. Cancers which would kill 5 years ago are sometimes defeated today, however at great financial cost.

The elephant being missed is, alas, rationing is a necessity. The question is comes down to, how to ration.  Does the market decide unfettered? Do the knuckleheads in our legislative offices decree how rationing will go down. The conservatives would claim that ability to pay is fairest. The liberals and progressives largely deny the existence of the elephant, which is alas either a lie or some other form of self-induced insanity/delusion.  Read the rest of this entry

(Dan Trabue, in a comment here to my previous post on health care, referenced a think tank paper that predicts cost reductions without a loss of effectiveness with a single-payer system, and took issue with my terming this "socialized medicine".  I decided to put my response up as a post.)

From the Wikipedia entry on health care in Canada: "Health care in Canada is funded and delivered through a publicly funded health care system, with most services provided by private entities."  So in Canada, it’s not government-run hospitals but it is a government funded system.  While the writer of this Wikipedia entry insists it’s not truly socialized medicine, the article at the link to the words "socialized medicine" does concede, "The term can refer to any system of medical care that is publicly financed, government administered, or both", I suppose depending on who you ask.

But who’s in charge of the hospitals or what you want to call it is immaterial, as the outcome is the same.  Britain has government-owned hospitals and Canada doesn’t, but the result is still that bureaucracies make medical decisions instead of doctors and patients.  HMOs were the Left’s bogeyman for years, but their solution is to institute the nation’s, perhaps the world’s, largest HMO/insurance company to make our individual health care decisions.  This makes no sense at all.

From the think tank paper cited:

[The Lewin Group, "a nationally respected nonpartisan
consulting firm"] estimates the proposal would cover 99.6 percent of all Americans without raising total national health spending. It would also save hundreds of billions over time – more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years – in national health spending, according to Lewin.

The Lewin Group is inexplicably closing its eyes to the Canadian system, blue-skying his prediction.  The Canadian system uses both government- and employer-based payment system, utilizing private insurance/doctors/hospitals, and they are in crisis.  They are not saving money (Claude Castonguay, quoted in the original post, notes that rationing and "injecting massive amounts of new money" has not helped).  They most certainly do not serve effectively (Wikipedia cites a study showing 57% of Canadians wait 4 or more week to see a specialist).  And it unfortunately affects everyone (read the Wikipedia article sections titled "Government Involvement" and "Private Sector").

Are you really going to believe predictions on the efficiency and cost effectiveness of a massive government program.  No government program of such a size ever comes in under budget; not Medicare, not Social Security, not the Iraq War, nothing. 

The Lewin Group says that the government could bargain for lower costs, and yet Canada’s are skyrocketing.  They may have gone down at the beginning, but as The Acton Institute’s Dr. Donald Condit notes:

Resource consumption increases when people think someone else is shouldering the cost. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman observed, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” More than 60 years of “someone else” paying for health care has led to medical expense inflation. Our predominately third-party reimbursement “system,” beginning after World War II for employees and after Medicare in 1965 for the retired, has resulted in out-of-control spending. Increasing the role of government will spur unbridled medical services consumption and further harm the underserved. Medical resources are limited. An expanded government role in health care will necessarily lead to rationing, shortages of health-care providers, delay in treatment, and deterioration in quality of care.

Medicaid is a socialized medicine microcosm. In that system, price controls and bureaucracy result in rationing by deterring provider participation and delaying treatment, with subsequent deterioration in quality of care. Affluent individuals are able to access better health care outside of any government system.

And this "Medicare model" is what the EPI plan wants to take the "best elements" of, which they only enumerate later on as the federal government administering it.  How can the Left possibly say they care more for the less-fortunate in one breath, and in the other hold up health care rationing as "caring"?  This makes no sense at all.

Canada’s system currently compares favorably to the US in terms of a couple of cherry-picked statistics, but that’s like judging a pyramid scheme based on the first few generations.  They are losing on other fronts, like a drain of doctors.  And they are now at the tipping point of that pyramid scheme, where the choice is either returning a bigger role to the private sector (what Castonguay called "radical" and what conservatives call "sensible") or sliding further down the slope to socialism.  The Left, not wishing to have their utopian vision challenged, will no doubt push for the latter.

Read the rest of this entry

From Joe Carter at EO, we find a gem:

10. Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?

Recent surveys have indicated that conservatives, on average, report being happier than liberals. Two psychologists wanted to know why, so they re-analyzed data from several large national and international surveys. The conservative-happiness relationship was not explained by differences in demographics or thoughtfulness but was largely explained by conservatives’ greater rationalization of inequality, including belief in a meritocratic world. According to the authors, such beliefs serve a “palliative function” or act as an “emotional buffer” when confronted with inequality. The same was true overseas, especially in countries with lower standards of living. Moreover, the authors found that the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives in the United States has widened over the last three decades as inequality has increased here.

Alternate explanation: Lack of covetousness makes one happier.

If indeed part of the reason is that conservatives view inequality as less problematic I’d offer perhaps it’s less disturbing to not be bothered by inequality because it’s intrinsic to reality. The old maxim, “Yes, the game (life) is rigged, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play.” Everyone’s abilities are unequally bestowed, and our luck in finding a way to maximize the abilities we do have to our benefit is unequally distributed as well. Furthermore, our parents and their parents all had unequal abilities and in an unequal fashion bestowed as they saw best what advantages they could on their children … unequally. This is not unjust. It is just a fact of life and nature.

I tell my children that if they are bored, that’s not a problem intrinsic to the universe around them, it’s a problem with them. The universe has plenty to interest everyone all the time (especially in the absence of TV and computers).

By the same token, if you’re bothered by inequality between men, that’s a problem with you, not the universe.