February 8, 2010

One issue where we differ with probably 90% of our readers is the "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy for gays serving in military service. It was enunciated in 1993 by Bill Clinton, later endorsed by George W. Bush and John McCain, along with many conservatives. I suspect that for many conservatives, DADT is a compromise between kicking gays entirely out of the service, which they recognize as impossible (gays in the military don't wear neon signs), and open service, which they reject.

If you'll recall, number 12 in my list of conservative characteristics, "Belief in the legislating of virtue," included this example: "laws against 'sodomy' and other forms of unusual sex." I'm quite certain that most conservatives support the ban on gays serving openly in the military; but at least they try to make a utilitarian argument for it, which I have argued against many times on this blog.

But I hope we can all agree that what we don't need is exemplified by an e-mail I received from an advertiser on the Washington Times (not TWT itself), Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt; its subject line is about as deceptive as can be: Top Admiral Lies to Senate about Homosexuality.

Here is the beginning of Klingenschmitt's argument; I faithfully reproduce his emphasis, except that I use our normal blue highlight color, while he uses red:

CHAIRMAN OF JOINT CHIEFS DEMANDS HOMOSEXUALS LIE TO MILITARY

Tuesday the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen deceived the Senate Armed Services Committee, repeating President Obama's demand to repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) prohibition against open homosexual aggression within the ranks of the military. "We have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens," Admiral Mullen fibbed, revealing his personal belief that "allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do."

Sadly, the pro-homosexual Mullen has believed the lies of homosexual propaganda, and deceived himself, and now deceived Congress, all the while claiming he wants a more honest policy that discourages lying, when in fact Mullen actually demands homosexuals tell more lies to their military commanders when enlisting as open homosexuals. Here's a simple proof: Men who were created by God with male body parts are not women, and they lie to themselves, the world, and their commanders when they pretend to be, and act like, women. Women who were created by God with female parts are not men, and they lie to themselves, the world, and their commanders when they pretend to be, and act like, men.

Mullen's confused argument would permit men to deceptively act like women, and women to deceptively act like men, openly deceiving themselves, the world, and their military commanders, and boldface lying against God's very truth, that He created men to be men, and women to be women. But today's confusing homosexual propaganda equates "honesty" with men openly flaunting their femininity, and "truthfulness" with women openly flaunting masculinity. Who's really telling God's truth?

The Bible describes homosexual liars: "Who changed the truth of God into a lie...women did change the natural use into that which is against nature, and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error." (Romans 1). Thank God Senator John McCain (R-AZ) denounced the Admiral's deceptive plan as destructive to the military, but Senator McCain needs your help to fight this open perversion, and protect our troops from open homosexual aggression...[elipses in original]

Klingenschmitt continues at great length (very great length) in a similar vein, but it all boils down to the argument that we must prevent gays from serving openly in the military because they're evil sinners condemned by God (or at least by Paul, who seems to have a powerful lot of condemning in his epistles; were I his pen pal, I'd constantly be looking over my shoulder).

This is a dreadful approach, even for those who support DADT or wish for a stronger prohibition: It damages the conservative cause. I'll explain why:

Politics is the art of the possible.

If a man makes a series of demands on society that cannot possibly be met, due to prevailing social belief, he is not engaging in politics; he is an idealogue engaging in revolutionary agitprop. For example, if some Moslem group demands that Americans all convert to Islam and that we immediately institute sharia law, you cannot call that a political act; since it's not remotely possible we'll do so, and the speaker knows it, he's not serious about his demand. He expects it to be rejected or ignored.

He makes the demand for other reasons entirely, most likely to buttress his own standing among other radicals and revolutionaries, or even to encourage violent attack on civilians who didn't heed his warning. But whatever his motive, unless he's a complete dope, he's not trying to get elected or persuade legislators or regulators to enact his policy.

Anyone who is engaging in politics should steer well clear of such people; they are poison to a political campaign.

Most Americans rightly despise religious doctrine injected into politics

Note that I do not mean they reject moral principles in politics; I specifically mean political arguments taken directly from the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and so forth.

We worry, based upon bitter history, that when political factions demand we should vote for them because God is on their side -- then every political dispute has the potential to erupt into religious civil war.

The only political curse worse than factionalism is religion-based factionalism.

We are a nation of natural tolerators, not of haters.

Americans have a tremendous capacity to tolerate alternative and deviant views, far more so than the citizens of any other country, despite the fact that we're the most religious people in Western civilization. Is this a contradiction? Not at all -- because one of our most sacred community beliefs is the sanctity of the individual.

Americans have an underlying default in favor of minding our own business. The contradictory impulses towards controlling one's neighbors sit as an uneasy overlay atop this default, and they require constant rationalization to justify them to ourselves.

Thus any political screed that even appears to arise from the realm of hatred will be scorned, and anyone even seemingly associated with it will be shunned.

(I highlighted the most important words in the paragraph directly above.)

The Klingenschmitt argument against DADT fails all three tests.

Klingenschmittism embodies three fatal errors:

1. It demands the impossible.

The same Bible that condemns homosexuality also condemns many other behaviors that Americans will never make illegal -- such as any sex outside of marriage, or even masturbation. Not even the military bans that; the UCMJ bans adultery but not sex between, say, a sailor and his girlfriend. (In theory, the ban on "sodomy" includes a ban on oral sex, even between husband and wife; when is the last time that was enforced, even in the Marines?)

If one accepts the Klingenschmitt argument, then its natural extension requires wholesale changes in the military that will never, ever happen. Thus the argument that the military should ban whatever "God" condemns -- or whatever one of His representatives on Earth claims He condemns -- is not political, it's revolutionary; America is not a theocracy. Even worse is the real argument, which is that the military should hide whatever God condemns.

2. It injects religious doctrine directly into politics.

There are many sects of Christianity that do not believe that homosexuals should be excluded from life and society, or even the military, even if the sect agrees that homosexual activity is sin. There's that strain of "hate the sin, love the sinner" that permeates much of the Christian religion.

Other sects don't even buy the "sin" part. And of course, there are other religions and non-religious people.

But even those who agree with Klingenschmitt that gays shouldn't be in the military might still object even more strongly to making law on the basis of a particular religious doctrine. They rightly understand that "The wind goes toward the south, and turns around to the north": The sect in power today might not be in power tomorrow, and schismaticism is a pernicious precedent that may come back to bite them.

3. His argument appears to arise directly from hatred of gays.

Klingenschmittism strikes me as full of hate, not only of homosexuality but of homosexuals as people; note, for one point, that he continually refers to the opposite of DADT -- that would be gays serving openly -- as "open homosexual aggression within the ranks of the military," as if a gay man mentioning his boyfriend is an act of aggression tantamount to sexual assault. (Frankly, Chaplain Klingenschmitt sounds as squirrely to me as Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church.)

But he won't be the only one to suffer the backlash; to the extent he can convince Americans that his is the conservative position -- not just the policy but the way he argues for it -- he will damage conservativsm far beyond this one policy. Even though I oppose the conservative position in this case, I still agree with conservatives far more often than with liberals; and I would hate to see voters turn against the party of somewhat more limited government, somewhat more robust national defense, a somewhat higher respect for the free market, and a great deal more respect for small business, property rights, lower taxes, gun rights, and individualism.

There are better arguments against repealing DADT, even if I don't buy them.

I fully support the repeal of DADT; I believe gays should serve openly in the military. But I do so primarily because I believe it would make our military stronger, not weaker. (My arguments are detailed elsewhere, recently in Martial Arts and Marital Darts.)

Conservatives should extend the same courtesy, restricting their arguments to the secular and utilitarian, rather than the religious and insulting; on the former plane, debate is at least possible. But the argument that gays should remain in the closet because 'God said so' is designed to shut down debate, not promote it. It's practically an invitation to a bar brawl, equivalent to "This town ain't big enough for the two of us!"

Hard-core conservatives would lose that brawl; moderates of both parties would join with liberals, libertarians, and even some conservatives to swamp the religion-based conservatives... to the detriment of the rest of the conservative agenda, which is far better for America than Obamunism.

As long as this is going to turn into a big magilla in November's election, which I'm sure it will, let's please keep the argument on grounds that will not discredit vital conservativism. To quote some recent interlocutor -- can't quite remember the feller's name -- "we can disagree without being disagreeable."

And Republicans desperately need to remain agreeable, optimistic, and inclusive heading into the most important congressional election since 1994. The infectious optimism of Ronald Reagan, "the great communicator," is as important for winning votes today as it was in 1966, when he won election as Governor of California, and in 1980, when he won the presidency.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 8, 2010, at the time of 6:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

...in the commandment of "de mortuis nil nisi bonum."

But we do still believe in keeping our mouths shut until we have something to say worth hearing.

We take note of the breaking story, but we'll discuss it at a later date.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 8, 2010, at the time of 2:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Today's episode of Obamic Options is somewhat a corollary to Obamic Options 4, linked at the end. The explosion of the gas pipe in Middletown, CT triggered my cerebral susurration, as my thoughts softly whispered, but what if it was...?

The Connecticut blast appears to have been entirely accidental:

An explosion blew apart a power plant under construction as workers purged natural gas lines Sunday, killing at least five people and injuring a dozen or more in a blast that shook homes for miles, officials said.

But let's postulate, for sake of debate on the response of President Baracjk HY. Obama to future events, that a similar blast occurs; but in this future hypothetical case, the evidence is fairly strong that it was an actual jihadist terrorist attack.

Today's Obamic conundrum is quite simple: In such a case, would the president ever allow that conclusion to be broadcast to the general public? Or would he institute a massive cover-up to make it appear as though it was just an accident?

Please note, I'm not covertly hinting that this particular explosion was anything other than a bone-fide accident; I really think that's all it was. My question is purely a premonitory... if a devastating explosion on American soil in the future is determined by the FBI to be an act of terrorism, and if it can only be attributed to a militant Islamist -- not to a crazed George W. Bush supporter -- would B.O. allow that conclusion to be broadcast?

Or would he attempt, successfully or un-, to suppress it... say, in order to avoid an "anti-Moslem backlash?"

I honestly cannot say whether he would allow us, the people, to know the score; and that makes me very nervous indeed.

A desultory, semi-cardioided search discloses a few other samples of this decadent derision:

1. Obamic Options 001
2. Obamic Options 002: The Limits of Tolerance of Pinkos
3. Another Noble Obamic Musing - Obamic Options 003
4. Could He Ever Bring Himself to Say It? Obamic Options 004
5. Extradition Indecision - Obamic Options 005
6. Will B.O. Run for Reelection? - Obamic Options 006

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 8, 2010, at the time of 4:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

February 5, 2010

First, read this.

Am I missing something? Or does the word "retarded" simply mean slowed, impeded, held back?

What is "crude," "demeaning," or "name calling" about the word? It seems purely diagnostic.

I understand that Sarah Palin has a child with Down syndrome, and she might be sensitive about Trig being teased or bullied. Still and all, words mean what they mean; you cannot make mental retardation go away by demanding nobody speak its name.

Who's with me on this?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 5, 2010, at the time of 7:26 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

I first learned about the "disinformation pyramid" from Robert Anton Wilson; Tim Leary later expanded upon the subject at a seminar I took from him about 25 years ago. Finally, I read a piece in a libertarian mailer titled "New Work for Idle Hands," or somesuch (it's in storage and unavailable to me for the moment); this piece developed several strategies for bringing the market to corporate structure.

You will see its obvious application to the present administration at the bottom of this post.

The basic premise is this: In a classically heirarchical structure, nobody benefits from passing only truthful communications. Contrariwise, everybody has an incentive to lie up, lie down, and lie sideways.

Information disincentive is disinformation incentive

Lying up: Because your boss has the power to fire you, demote you, or at the very least sideline you, and because many bosses love to "kill the messenger," it rarely works to your advantage to tell your boss something he doesn't want to hear, even if true.

Thus there is a great incentive to filter and edit your communications up the chain of command so that you make your boss happy... even if it's a false happiness. In fact, fooling your boss into believing in the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus can work to your advantage: If he gets into trouble with somebody even higher up the chain, you can narc him out and possibly take over his job after he is removed.

Lying down: You know your subordinates are always out to get you (see above); if you tell them what's really going on, you've given them power over you: They know where the bodies are buried and which pressure points will hurt you.

In addition, since your job is probably phoney-baloney anyway, if your junior ever gets all the information, he can do your job alongside his own and not even have to stay late nights. You become vulnerable to redundancy disposal.

Therefore you have two good reasons to severely restrict communications flow to your underlings; not to let anybody see the Big Picture; to give disinformation to them (both to ensure loyalty and also to detect whether information has a way of escaping anybody); and in general to muck up the data flow, which only you know how to unravel, to maintain your own "irreplaceability."

Lying sideways: Your colleagues are not your friends; they are your most dangerous competitors. They work for the same boss; and since most businesses severely restrict either jobs themselves or at the very least power and authority within those jobs, advancement becomes a zero-sum game: You succeed by making your office friends fail -- and vice versa, naturally.

Are you going to tell your rivals everything you know? Are you going to tell them only the truth and never a convenient (to you!) fiction? Everybody reading this post knows the answer to that question.

The pyramid

In a classic corporate/government bureaucracy, power is represented by a pyramid: At the tippy top is one boss, the CEO in a corporate setting, or the head of some branch of government (emperor, king, president, governor, mayor).

Below the boss is a small privy council -- the board of directors perhaps, or else the cabinet or the various department heads.

Each member of that board or council has his own set of advisors, lieutenants, direct subordinates, and so forth all the way down. With every step down the food chain, the pyramid widens. Because of the disinformation incentive above, with every step up or down the pyramid, information quality and reliabilty degrades. The farther information travels vertically or horizontally, the less it resembles the real reality of the outside world.

The surreality based community

In addition, to avoid information overload, nodes at the higher levels must cut off communications from those too far down the chain; if the CEO actually tries to read all the suggestions in the suggestion box himself, he will quickly be overwhelmed.

So each node insulates himself from all but the nearest nodes (up, down, sideways) -- and those above him do the same, more and more ruthlessly with each step up the pyramid.

Thus, the higher up the pyramid we go, the fewer connections do the nodes have to reality, and the more dependent they are upon their direct subordinates -- each of whose greatest dream is to kill the boss and take his place. (Picture the "Mirror Mirror" universe from the original Star Trek.) At the very top, the capo di tutti capi is functionally schizophrenic: fully divorced from reality and non-functional.

If you study multinational corporations and powerful governments, and you sometimes think they must be utterly insane, please be reassured: Your perception is 20-20. Such a top-down, heirarchical structure has in essence implemented an informational Ponzi scheme; and it will end as all Ponzi schemes end: in complete collapse.

This may take a while; as Adam Smith wrote, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation" -- or a multinational corporation. But the fall of General Motors and AIG are two good examples that eventually, all the ruin takes its toll. Both companies were felled, I am convinced, because their disinformation pyramids drove each to madness. Neither could respond to the mutable real world outside the corporate headquarters; each ceased to function as an independent entity... its name was jacked up and a new regime rolled underneath.

Short-circuiting the disinformation pyramid

That's the bad news; the good news is that there are techniques a boss can use to get around this design flaw in communications theory:

• The first key is to cut through the isolation.

Each boss urgently needs sources of information and communications from outside the normal channels; that is, he needs spies and informants to tell him what's really going on. These spies must operate at a high enough level to get the necessary information, but a low enough level that they cannot expect to advance by knocking off their patron; rather, their fate depends upon the patron rewarding them.

The patron must make clear that the spies are rewarded for any information that checks out, good or bad for the patron: There is something to be said for getting a "heads up" about even the worst news! Let multiple spies compete, and give a cookie to the first to bring important information to the patron.

Naturally, each spy is also set to spy on the other spies, to guard against a double agent.

• The second key to cracking the disinformation pyramid is to engage an oversight panel.

The oversight panel must be entirely outside the corporate structure, not subject to the boss' whims or rages. The panel would be an independent agency with a long-term contract, subject to periodic renewal, to continually measure the governmental or corporate behavior against the outer realm, and to report back to whichever boss or bosses engaged the panel.

It's vital that this panel not be directly paid or employed by the boss but rather independently contracted, so there is little incentive for toadying to the boss' prejudice. Basically, the oversight panel would keep checking to see whether the bureaucracy is actually achieving real-world results.

• The third and most radical key is to decentralize the bureaucracy itself.

Instead of a corporate or governmental pyramid, the whole should be broken into independent corporate "business units" or governmental "service units."

- Each such unit is small, no more than twenty to fifty employees; that is about the largest group of humans that can be supervised by a single individual who knows how each member is actually performing.

- Each unit is functionally defined, by what it specifically does rather than by who is a member. (Individual employees can be in multiple units.)

- Each unit "communicates" with other units as in a free market -- by "buying" products from other units with budget funds, turning that input into a more valuable output, then "selling" the output to other units further along the production line. If a unit breaks down and is unable to pull its share, other units can reroute around the damaged unit until it is broken down and rebuilt.

- Each unit is modular and can be joined with other modular units into a functioning super-unit. The super-units can likewise be joined together. The entire corporation or government itself is nothing but a super-super...super-unit formed from many, many modules joined together.

- By analogy, think of a corporation as a mall made up of individual stores. Each store is a "business unit;" the individual mall is a super-unit comprising the individual stores, plus a rental unit, facilities unit, accounting unit, parking unit, security unit, and so forth. The chain of all such malls is a super-super-unit formed from the super-units, and so forth.

A government example

Note that the branch of the United States government that has already done the best job of implementing this decentralization is, oddly enough, the military service: America gives more authority to junior officers and senior NCOs -- and demands more accountability for results -- than any other country in the world. Under Donald Rumsfeld we made our military into an interlinked network of small, individual, self-contained combat units, which can join together or break apart into combined-arms forces of any size necessary (depending on the specific task).

It's a wonderful model for the rest of the government. And upon further thought, it's not odd at all: The military is the branch of government most forcefully and immediately impacted by the real-world result of its efforts, so it's not suprising that it has moved quickest to confront, on our own proactive terms, the fast-moving, adaptive, small, and independent enemy we have faced since the 1970s and Vietnam.

The case at hand

All right, with the prolog out of the way, let's turn our analysis to the current President of the United States, Barack H. Obama:

1. Obama sits atop a heirarchy that is shaped like a classic pyramid.
2. He considers himself a philosopher-king, so he surrounds himself with nothing but acolytes.
3. He isolates himself from other information sources -- and even from his own closest advisors; he always knows best.
4. He makes no effort to reach down the ranks to find out what the "little people" want or how they're doing. Subordinates' only function is to translate his vague pronunciamentos into action plans that more or less match what he said, or at least can be plausibly claimed to match it; they have no independent existence and should be seen but not heard.
5. He does not accept external oversight even in theory; it's an affront to his own absolute moral and legal authority. It gives him a pain even to have to deal with Congress (a task he generally "delegates" to powerless flunkies who cannot even make deals).
6. He certainly has no interest in or intention of decentralizing the federal government; rather, he would like to consolodate more and more power in his own hands, even to the point of nationalizing banks and corporations, allowing him to rule more of the economy by decree.
7. He is not self-reflective enough to realize the pickle he has gotten himself into; he does not comprehend how damaged his own communications have become.
8. Ergo, his is an administration that has become a classic disinformation pyramid.
9. It is increasingly cut off from reality.
10. Its isolation is a feedback loop.
11. It is functionally insane.
12. Q.E.D.

See? Once one properly frames the early lemmas, the final theorem writes itself.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 5, 2010, at the time of 5:06 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

February 4, 2010

Another example of neoconservative Michael Medved fawning over an Obamic oration that simply isn't worth the... well, we'll get into that.

On his radio show today, Medved referred to a speech, which Obama gave today at the National Prayer Breakfast, as "great;" Medved enthusiastically compared it to Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Medved was evidently so impressed by the subject of the speech that he failed to note the superficiality and hypocrisy of its execution.

The subject was civility, about which Barack H. Obama is a subject-matter expert -- for the same reason that Jack the Ripper was a subject-matter expert on human anatomy. Indeed, the president's violent assaults on civility are legion. In today's talk -- the same one where he referred (twice!) to a Navy Corpsman as a "corpse-man" -- he inexplicably neglects covering a number of points:

• Bearing false witness against one's rhetorical opponents; for example, the president accusing Republicans of saying "that they can insure every American for free, which is what was claimed the other day, at no cost" -- when they, or rather Rep. Tom Price (R-GA, 100%), actually said "he has a health-care proposal that expands health insurance coverage to 'all Americans... without raising taxes by a penny.'”
• Making rude and offensive gestures out of view of the target of such mockery; for example, when the president extends his middle finger, visible only to his own supporters, while pretending to rub his cheek during a debate.

• Insulting one's debate partners with crude, adolescent epithets; for example, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY, 100%) calling Sen. Scott Brown a "far-right tea-bagger Republican," which is not only demeaning but drips with homoerotic inuendo. Are Democrats really saying we should despise Brown because Schumer thinks the senator from Massachusetts is homosexual? (Which, by the way, he most certainly is not.)

  That would be a switch.

In fact, whenever Obama in his civility speech drifts away from vague platitudes --

And this erosion of civility in the public square sows division and distrust among our citizens. It poisons the well of public opinion. It leaves each side little room to negotiate with the other. It makes politics an all-or-nothing sport, where one side is either always right or always wrong when, in reality, neither side has a monopoly on truth.

-- into more concrete paeans to civility and condemnations of incivility, the good guys always seem to be liberal, while the black-hats are invariably conservatives:

That begins with stepping out of our comfort zones in an effort to bridge divisions. We see that in many conservative pastors who are helping lead the way to fix our broken immigration system. It's not what would be expected from them, and yet they recognize, in those immigrant families, the face of God. We see that in the evangelical leaders who are rallying their congregations to protect our planet....

We may disagree about the best way to reform our health care system, but surely we can agree that no one ought to go broke when they get sick in the richest nation on Earth. We can take different approaches to ending inequality, but surely we can agree on the need to lift our children out of ignorance; to lift our neighbors from poverty. We may disagree about gay marriage, but surely we can agree that it is unconscionable to target gays and lesbians for who they are[.]

All right, we get it: Obama loves conservatives who support comprehensive immigration reform and Globaloney, and he despises any conservative who opposes universal health care, the government school system, and welfare for all. And he reserves especial hatred for anyone who "target[s] gays and lesbians for who they are." We take judicial notice that liberals by and large believe that any initiative which defines marriage as between one man and one woman falls into that "targeting" category.

Even his one feeble nod to lessons the Left must learn is innocuous, demonstrating their big-heartedness rather than small-mindedness:

We see it in the increasing recognition among progressives that government can't solve all of our problems, and that talking about values like responsible fatherhood and healthy marriage are integral to any anti-poverty agenda.

Yes, it would be nice if progressives recognized the former and talked about the latter. Soon, perhaps?

But where in the president's speech is any reference to the real-world examples where the incivility is entirely on the other shoe? Can we all agree that SEIU thugs shouldn't physically assault black conservatives at peaceful protests? Not until Obama and the Left recognize that it actually happens.

We can all take different approaches to environmental protection, but surely we can all agree that when climatologists who are global-warming alarmists conspire to sabotage the careers of their counterparts who reject global-warming theory, such shenanigans are at the very least uncivil.

Barack Obama seems remarkably averse to self examination. He is the most "do as I say, not as I do" president in my lifetime. Heck, he's the most "do as I say, not as I do" president of Sen. Robert Byrd's (D-WV, 79%) lifetime; and that takes us all the way back to John Quincy Adams!

The president is equally incapable of beholding the beam in the eyes of his allies in House and Senate, in the leftstream media, and on blogs like Daily Kos, Firedoglake, and the Hufflepuffington Post. (See, I'm keeping with the Biblical tone of the prayer breakfast.) When he says, "in reality, neither side has a monopoly on truth," he means neither the progressive nor the moderate Democratic side; he certainly does not extend such magnanimity to the GOP -- which indeed has a monopoly on mendacity in Barack Obama's world.

I understand (but reject) Michael Medved's urge to give the POTUS (and his TOTUS) the benefit of the doubt; but Medved and other former liberals really need to understand that at a certain point, all "doubt" is blown away by the hurricane of rank, uncivil partisanship that surrounds the current administration. At that point, it's far more urgent to extend the benefit of clarity.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 4, 2010, at the time of 7:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

February 3, 2010

I was going to write about the curious fact that it's not only mathematically possible but now even somewhat plausible that Republicans could take over the Senate in November; but everybody and his monkey's paw is already going on about that. So I'm shifting gears: Instead, I'll argue against Michael Medved and every other conservative who repeats the stupid mantra that "Of course we hope President Obama is successful!"

That way, my only competition is Rush Limbaugh, whose explanation is kind of shallow, to tell the truth.

When some caller presses Medved on what the heck he means, he has a pat, memorized answer. Alas, it's a complete non-sequitur. Medved invariably explains that he doesn't mean he hopes Barack H. Obama succeeds in passing card check, implementing energy cripple and tax, closing Gitmo, ending the war against the Iran/al-Qaeda Axis, nationalizing more banks and other corporations, raising taxes, spending us into oblivion, and for dessert, foisting ObamaCare on the charred remains. Rather, Medved insists that by "I hope the president is successful," he means he hopes that Obama succeeds in leading America to prosperity, security, and liberty.

This explanation is nothing but Mueslix on stilts: nutty, flakey, and wobbly all at the same time.

Medved is engaging in what I call "Argument by Tendentious Redefinition." With that rhetorical trick, proponent takes an ordinary, simple English-language word (such as "success") and secretly redefines it to a meaning whose only purpose is to win the argument -- while still relying upon people imagining that he still means the generally accepted definition. In this case, the word "success" (meaning, achieving a goal one has set) is transmogrified to mean, achieving the goal diametrically opposite what one has enunciated, but which happens to be more congenial to the "well-wisher."

When Michael Medved or any of a score of conservative pundits says he hopes Obama succeeds, it's really code for saying he hopes Obama converts to conservatism. While that may be a laudible wish, it's definitely not covered by the word "success."

By the definition commonly accepted throughout the English-speaking world, what Medved, et al, really should say is that they hope B.O. fails miserably in his attempt to implement Obamunism, to remake America in the image of Sweden, Venezuela, or Cuba. That at least would be clear; one can disagree with the sentiment (though it's self-evident to any thinking person), but one cannot be confused.

I certainly haven't investigated this, but it seems to me that most of the Republicans and self-labeled conservatives who say they hope the president is successful -- meaning they hope he turns his coat -- grew up as liberals and only came to conservatism later in life. Medved certainly fits this profile, as he was a left-liberal activist and protester back in the late 60s; he flip flopped (he would say "wised up") during the Ronald Reagan era, making him a "neoconservative" by the most classical definition.

By contrast, Rush Limbaugh has never been a liberal, so far as I know; and he brazenly hopes Obama fails. But why does one's political life-journey make such a difference in rhetoic? Let's look a little deeper...

The prime directive of the Left is that "Everything is political." For example, Karl Marx taught that the core of history is a class struggle between what Saul Alinsky would later dub the Haves and the Have Nots; and that this class struggle was ultimately political in nature. Contemporary liberals chant, "the personal is political," which is functionally equivalent to my phrasing above.

This axiom on the Left means that every question is answered by politics, that reality itself is naught but a convenient consensus of political accomodation. If the Indiana state legislature votes that π, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, is equal to 3.0, then that becomes the new consensus reality -- regardless of the fact that it's wrong, in a literal sense. (The constant ratio π is actually an irrational number that begins 3.141592653589793... and goes on like that forever in more or less random fashion.)

To put it bluntly, liberalism teaches that Reality is infinitely malleable: If the political power changes hands, reality itself shifts correspondingly. "Truth" to a leftist or liberal means that which advances the Vision; while a "lie" is whatever contradicts or damages the Vision. (See Thomas Sowell's the Vision of the Anointed.)

It's an easy step from there to the Argument by Tendentious Redefinition: If reality can be changed by political action, then words themselves (which are part of reality) can be changed by strident repetition... and this in turn alters the concept at which the word points.

Here's a really good real-world example. A liberal wants to continually grow the scope and reach of government; but that can be expensive, as we see with the Obamacle's budget proposal.

So the people, the voters, demand that the liberal-run government cut spending. "All right," say the liberals, "we bow to the will of the people." And they do proceed to cut... they cut the rate of growth of spending. They had planned to raise spending by 10%, but they raise it by only 8% instead -- and announce a 2% "spending cut."

The tendentious redefinition here is that spending cut, which used to mean a reduction in actual spending, now means a reduction in the increase of spending, or a reduction in projected spending. To the extent liberals can keep the redefinition secret, they can pose as deficit hawks and get themselves reelected.

Liberals and leftists are steeped in such tendentious redefinitions by their peer groups; they may already have used that rule of inference long ago, even as children, which might be what drove them to liberalism in the first place; but in any event, such thinking is reinforced and rewarded within lefty circles.

But even when they depart the Left for warmer climes, they often take such thought processes with them as excess baggage. This led me to my own definition of a neoconservative: a person who thinks like a liberal but usually arrives at conservative conclusions. People like Medved, David Horowitz, and Sen. Norm Coleman (to pull a few at random), who used to be on the left, still use the same thought mechanisms that they used back then... but now in service to a different master. And their reflexes are still knee-jerk leftist; they often must argue themselves out of a reflexive reliance on liberal tropes and back towards a more conservative position. (A lot of libertarians came to that philosophy from the left, and they too carry a lot of lefty thought-baggage.)

One particular piece of lefty thought-luggage retained by Medved and his Obama well-wishing pals is an overwhelming feeling of guilt at hoping someone, especially a black someone, fails. Even when they honestly do hope the man does not achieve his goals, they're afraid to say such a thing out loud. So they frequently fall back on yet another lefty valise or steamer trunk, and tendentiously redefine the word "success" as noted above.

But I have never in my entire life been a liberal; I was never trained to think of a black man or some other minority as a representative of some group, or that his failure was due to the white man "holding him down for 300 years," as many blacktivists insist. Consequently, I feel no guilt whatsoever wishing abject failure upon Barack H. Obama: Success as Obama defines it is anathema to me, so why on Earth would I wish for it?

In fact, one of our most important rights is the right to fail: By failing, we learn, we grow, we mature... or at least we can. And I would never be so cruel as to take away anybody's right to fail by, e.g., supporting a government Bureau of Bad Breaks, which tries to make good (at taxpayer expense) any setback or adverse result of poor judgment -- like not buying health insurance and then getting sick or injured. That's a liberal idea, and I despise it as unAmerican and infantalizing.

I will defend with my life Barack Obama's fundamental right to fail. But I just wish he would get busy and exercise it... soon!

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 3, 2010, at the time of 7:02 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

February 2, 2010

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov -- personally appointed by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin -- has ordered the wholesale demolition of houses in a Moscow neighborhood, based upon ambiguous land-title laws dating from the Soviet era; erstwhile residents are simply tossed into the street in subzero temperatures, while bulldozers obliterate their homes, whether "mansion" or "quaint cottage."

But here's the real kicker, Luzhkov's professed reason for decreeing such destruction:

Mr. Luzhkov, who in his 18 years as mayor has not been given to tolerating affronts to his authority, has stood firm. In an interview published Thursday in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, he called the residents “impostors” squatting on land that he said was zoned to be a park. “These cottages are located in a protected environmental zone,” he said. “The city has been saying for years that construction in this area was forbidden.”

The reality is quite another story -- a story of corruption, greed, raw power, and tyranny. (Corruption and tyranny in Russia? Say it ain't so, Uncle Joe!) We continue quoting:

Critics have accused the mayor, whose wife is a billionaire real estate developer, of using ambiguous land laws to acquire prime property and resell it to private interests. Just over a year ago, several dozen similar homes were destroyed in a neighboring community that was in the same nebulous legal situation.

So let's add it all up. We have:

• A feigned and spurious exercise in environmentalist zeal by "watermelons" (green on the outside but red to the core) --
• -- designed to cover up what appears to be naught but a tawdry land-snatching scheme --
• -- enabled by corrupt but well-connected "nomenklatura," whose rank and whose friends in high places make them unassailable under the law, such as it is.

Say... sounds like tactics employed by every radical environmentalist movement in the world, from ELF to ALF to Greenpeace: They live for the chance to burn down a housing construction site or file a federal lawsuit expropriating private land to declare it a "preserve" for gnat catchers, snail darters, or Delta smelt.

Enviro-mental cases have colluded with the Obama administration and other Democrats to prevent us from drilling for oil in ANWR, in the Gulf of Mexico, in Colorado, or indeed anywhere else. They misuse and abuse litigation and "action directe" (fancy phrase for eco-terrorism) to stop nuclear-power plants, freeze construction, put the kibosh on animal testing of pharmaceuticals, ban the exhalation of carbon dioxide, and outlaw Capitalism.

In fact the only real difference I can see in the two situations, here and in Russia, is that in the United States, the watermelons have the ear of the government; whereas throughout Europe, the watermelons are the government.

Take a good look at Moscow, where the mayor throws Baba Yaga into the snow so Mrs. Mayor can buy the land for a song and make another cool billion. That's Barack H. Obama's America... if we let him.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 2, 2010, at the time of 8:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

February 1, 2010

I'm just now picking my jaw up from the floor: Barack H. Obama has just decided to privatize -- space exploration?

The Obama administration today will propose in its new budget spending billions of dollars to encourage private companies to build, launch and operate spacecraft for NASA and others. Uncle Sam would buy its astronauts a ride into space just like hopping in a taxi.

The idea is that getting astronauts into orbit, which NASA has been doing for 49 years, is getting to be so old hat that someone other than the government can do it. It's no longer really the Right Stuff. Going private would free the space agency to do other things, such as explore beyond Earth's orbit, do more research and study the Earth with better satellites. And it would spur a new generation of private companies - even some with Internet roots - to innovate.

It's a wonderful idea, and I couldn't agree more: If we actually give a green light to private space exploration -- and a modest guaranteed market by renting space for our astronauts to fly on private launches -- then the Moon will come soon enough: Thar's gold in them thar craters! (Along with every other element we could possibly need to sustain an industry, and even extract breathable oxygen and create potable water for "Lunatic" colonists.)

Obama has underfunded it, of course, committing only $5.9 billion; but at least we're headed in the right direction. Here's the part where the president is bang on:

The White House said the program was too much like the 1960s Apollo mission and would require large budget increases just to get astronauts back on the moon by 2030.

The (unsourced) CBS report gets to the heart of the problem with the American space program (and everyone else's, to be fair) -- though even this piece misses the "why" of it. The "back to the Moon" proposal by President George W. Bush was a big-government, top-down, military-style reenactment of the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo program of the 1950s-70s: The govenment creates a massive bureaucracy (NACA/NASA), which throws billions of dollars at the project, achieves its goals in the worst way possible... and then cancels the entire program. And leave us not forget that it was a big-government Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, who killed it.

The legacy of the government monopoly approach to space explation is an aging Shuttle fleet (currently three [3] flyable birds), plus a misguided and mismanaged "International Space Station," as our entire space program for the last thirty-plus years.

By the time Nixon canceled Apollo, NASA's bureaucracy had become sclerotic, unimaginative, anti-capitalist (seriously -- they actively suppressed private space launches), penny-foolish and pound-foolisher (killing the Air Force's X-15/X-20 program, for example, so it wouldn't "compete" with NASA's Mercury program), and in many ways an impediment to space exploration and colonization, not a boon.

NASA still conducts desultory research into more long-term goals; but where are the solar sails for long-range manned space exploration? Where is a truly reusable space "taxi" for shuttling spacefarers up and down the gravity well?

Where are the alternatives to launching from ground to low-Earth orbit (LEO), something to replace the "disintegrating totem poles" of the Saturn V or the one-shot solid booster rockets used to lift the Shuttle? There are many remarkable launch designs out there, but NASA seems uninterested in developing them.

For that matter, where is such a simple vehicle as the unmanned orbital booster, which would orbit in LEO; then upon radio command, latch onto some cargo (like a satellite) in low orbit, and just boost it up to a higher one? That way we wouldn't have to put boosters on every satellite we launch, an incredible extra mass that must be carried up.

And as is obvious from the subject of this post, it's been thirty-seven years, one month, and 21 days since we last put a man on the Moon; and if everything went well, it would be an additional twenty years before we returned: More than half a century between Moon landings is unconscionable. Clearly, the big-government approach to space exploration, industrialization, and colonization is a complete flop... as is the big-government approach to virtually everything, with the possible exception of national defense and interstate highways.

But the Regulators already have their long knives out for the irregulars; back to the Long Beach Press-Telegram story:

But there's some concern about that - from former NASA officials worried about safety and from congressional leaders worried about lost jobs. Some believe space is still a tough, dangerous enterprise not to be left to private companies out for a buck. Government would lose vital knowledge and control, critics fear.

Yes, God forbid we should allow filthy capitalists out for a buck into the space program. Far better that everything be in the hands of altruistic federal bureaucrats -- out for a pension.

The Press-Telegram notes the example of the airline industry. Let's expand upon that: If the federal government were still in charge of air transportation, there would be one airline for the entire country. Every flight would originate from the same airport, and planes would depart once every three months; each would carry no more than eight passengers -- three of whom would be decorated military pilots or flight officers, and the rest would be Highly Trained Specialists™ certified by the "National Air Transportation Administration".

Every airplane flight would cost $800 million, and half the takeoffs would be scrubbed on the runway, with no refunds.

And upon getting airborne, each plane would jettison half its engines into the drink, requiring six months of maintenance and a total rebuild before its next flight. (That's why we need a massive fleet of three Shuttles.)

Why is private enterprise better for space exploitation? Manifold reasons:

• Cost: A private space-launch business has to turn a profit, so it must keep costs down; this in turn keeps the price down, and more and more customers can launch to orbit, creating a positive feedback loop dragging the human race into space.
• Reliability: A business must hit its schedule nearly every time, or it loses business to its competitors (think of FedEx); therefore, reliability becomes much more of a premium than with a government monopoly.
• Responsiveness: It must continually offer new services to stay ahead of said competitors; it must create markets, create and exploit opportunities, and move rapidily to seize the initiative.
• Wealth creation: It would open up whole new markets for orbital manufacturing of machine parts, pharmaceuticals, and very large structures that would collapse under Earth's gravitational pull (see next bullet); new markets mean new wealth for everyone.

• Energy abundance: Entrepeneurs would quickly realize that the biggest market of all would be energy: solar cells in orbit -- outside 99% of the Earth's atmosphere and 100% of Earth's weather -- can generate orders of magnitude more electricity than terrestrial solar cells, and considerably more than even a nuclear power plant.

  Remember, in orbit, you can make the collection surface as big as you want, several square kilometers; energy can be beamed back to Earth by microwave lasers or somesuch.

  Here is where the conservatives' demand for large power availability and liberals' demand for non-carbon energy production can meet in the middle in a true bipartisan Kosmic Kumbaya!

• Innovation: Finally, it's the private sector, not the government, that is truly innovative; if we want humans in space on a full-time, permanent basis, it's private enterprise or bust.

  At the moment, we've got "bust."

It's a little odd that such a lover of big-government Obamunism and nationalization of private resources would suddenly go all capitalist over the space program; I worry that this will just turn out to be more empty rhetoric. But entrepeneurs can use even empty rhetoric to fly below the radar and actually bring about some of the dreams that Obama has woven, perhaps unintentionally and against the president's own better judgment. Certainly there is no lack of players champing at the leash to jump into a newly revitalized private space-launch industry:

The leading contenders - most are mum at this point - to build private spaceships include established aerospace giants, such as Boeing Co. of Chicago and Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, Md., which built most of America's rockets and capsules.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin have existing rocket families in Delta and Atlas, which launch commercial and government satellites regularly and reliably, but for the moment aren't rated by the government to be safe enough for humans. That may change.

But it's the newer space guard that brings some excitement to the field. PayPal founder Elon Musk may be ahead of most. His SpaceX already has a Falcon rocket and Dragon capsule. Other companies being mentioned include Orbital Sciences of Dulles, Va., Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas and Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, Nev.

Republicans should seize this idea to show they're not just the "party of No," as Obama loves to claim. Here's a chance to champion science, space research, and private enterprise and entrepeneurship, all while showing some bipartisan flair! The GOP would have to be utter morons to let this fish loose.

Oh, wait...

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 1, 2010, at the time of 6:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

January 30, 2010

Prosperity is just around the corner. A car in every pot, a chicken in every garage:

The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday to a senator who had asked for an antitrust review....

"Importantly, and in addition, the administration also is exploring other options that might be available to address concerns with the college football postseason," [Assistant Attorney General Ronald] Weich wrote, including asking the Federal Trade Commission to review the legality of the BCS under consumer protection laws....

"The administration shares your belief that the current lack of a college football national championship playoff with respect to the highest division of college football ... raises important questions affecting millions of fans, colleges and universities, players and other interested parties," Weich wrote.

Community Organizer in Chief Barack H. Obama, having already solved all the major problems that face our country -- having saved or created hundreds of millions of jobs (National service!), ended the threat of man-caused disaster (diplomacy!), fixed the economy (nationalization!), eliminated all those confusing choices in medical treatment (ObamaCare!), solved the energy crisis (windmills!), and made the Earth cool and the oceans subside (more windmills!) -- is now at leisure to turn his Obamacle eyes to federalizing college football bowl games.

My goodness, but our philosopher king's jug of benevolent despotism just never runs dry, does it?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 30, 2010, at the time of 12:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

January 28, 2010

A "seminar commenter" on a previous post made an extraordinary claim; he wrote:

Tort reform is a non starter, not because Dems have no backbone, but because tort is a very small factor in health care cost issues. Unless you consider 0.01% of total health care costs an issue.

Actually, tort reform is a "non starter" because of the truly staggering level of political donations (mostly to Democrats) lawyers make to candidates who oppose tort reform; as RealClearMarkets reports:

The reason the president and congressional Democrats don't address malpractice is clear. In the 2008 election cycle, lawyers gave $233 million to political candidates: 76% went to Democrats and 23% to Republicans. Politicians know better than to bite the hand that feeds them.

That seems a more likely explanation of Congress' inaction than the explanation offered by the commenter and his trial-lawyer sources, that "tort is a very small factor in health care cost issues."

Defenders of defensive medicine

The commenter appears to get his talking points from trial lawyers (I have no idea whether he personally is one); oddly, however, he gets them wrong.

A very recent release from the American Association for Justice -- which used to call itself the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA), until they realized how most of us view John Edwards and his cronies -- claims that:

According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the total spent defending claims and compensating victims of medical negligence in 2007 was $7.1 billion -- just 0.3% of health care costs.

So even the trial lawyers admit the direct costs of medical-malpractice trials are 30 times what the commenter claims. We can chalk this error up to faulty memory; however, the ATLA itself plays fast and loose with its own figures.

ATLA uses the figure of $2.2 trillion for the size of the health-care industry, comparing the $7.1 billion they claim is the direct cost of malpractice-litigation judgments, settlements, and lawyers' fees. But that total-cost figure includes many areas of health care that don't need malpractice liability insurance; they either need other types of insurance or no insurance at all.

According to a Kaiser Foundation report (source: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Office of the Actuary, National Health Statistics Group), only 52% of the $2.241 trillion goes to Physician/clinical service (21%) or Hospital care (31%); the rest comprises:

• Investment
• Government public health activities
• Program administration
• Retail - Rx drugs
• Retail - Other products [I'm guessing medical devices -- DaH]
• Home health care
• Nursing home care
• Other professional services

This pie-chart illustrates the breakdown:

So comparing apples to apples, the direct cost of malpractice judgments, settlements, and attorneys' fees on those entities that are subject to malpractice lawsuits is 0.6%, not 0.3%. That's still a small percent, of course -- but it's only the beginning of the story.

What the trial lawyers dance around (and what the commenter ignores entirely) is that the direct costs of malpractice litigation are but a tiny fraction of the total costs imposed upon the health-care system by the threat of litigation.

What are the missing components in the lawyers' calculations?

• Skyrocketing malpractice-insurance rates
• The costs of defensive medicine

Insurance: malpractice aforethought

The monetary cost of the risk of a huge verdict far outweigh the actual awards themselves; a high-risk litigation environment causes insurance companies to jack up their rates -- for the same reason that living on a flood plain or in "tornado alley" jacks up your insurance rates for those disasters.

Doctors pay stunning premiums for malpractice insurance, in some cases more than $200,000 annually for physicians in certain specialties, such as obstetrics or anaesthesiology -- and far more for hospitals -- even for doctors and hospitals with excellent records; see the RealClearMarkets piece linked above.

Virtually every doctor and hospital is guaranteed to be sued several times in his career... no matter how good and careful a doctor he is. This is due not only to shysters like John Edwards pushing bogus cases to force a settlement, but also to the unreasonable expectation of perfection that too many Americans hold about our admittedly wonderful health care: Even when told that a certain procedure carries a certain risk, if that risk becomes a reality, the pressure is on to go ahead and sue anyway. With a sympathetic plaintiff and a runaway jury, who knows how many millions of dollars the patient might win in "jackpot justice?"

Several estimates have found that the cost of malpractice insurance alone is about 10% of the total cost of doctor and hospital care in America, or $110 billion; again, see RealClearMarkets. This is money directly out of the pockets of doctors and hospitals... which naturally means costs directly passed along to all patients.

Defensiveness

But the heaviest costs of malpractice litigation are indirect:

• The actual monetary cost of "defensive medicine;"
• The opportunity cost of overtaxing medical resources by unnecessary use of equipment and needless prescribing of scarce pharmaceuticals;
• The doctor-patient time lost to increasingly onerous paperwork... documentation required to make a strong defense in court in response to the inevitable lawsuit;
• Doctors refusing to accept high-risk patients, knowing they will incur far more lawsuits from such patients than from low-risk patients;
• And worst of all, doctors abandoning entire specialties (such as obstetrics) associated with an unreasonable number of lawsuits -- and doctors fleeing states that strongly encourage malpractice lawsuits, or retiring early. Likewise students opting for another profession, one that's actually thriving... such as being a lawyer.

"Defensive medicine" comprises unnecessary tests, procedures, documentation, and hospital stays ordered, not because the doctor honestly believes they will help treat the medical problem, but rather to "immunize" doctors and hospitals from bogus malpractice lawsuits.

As far as actual money out of the system due to defensive medicine -- that is, due to the threat of malpractice litigation -- estimates range from huge ($60 billion per year) to gargantuan ($200 billion per year). Consider those the "direct" indirect costs imposed by trial lawyers.

But there are even vaster and more indirect damages caused by the congressional majority's love affair with lawyers. The first hidden cost is in resource depletion: Simply put, we have limited resources available for medical tests, such as X-rays or CAT scans. While a patient with no serious injury is being CAT scanned, just so that the doctor and hospital won't be dragged into court later, that particular sanner is unavailable to other patients with more serious injuries. From the Washington Times piece:

Medical resources are scarce In a hospital There are only so many CT scan machines and only so many radiologists to read them. When fear of lawyers causes practically every patient with a bump or bruise who enters the emergency room to get a CT scan whether it's clinically warranted or not, critically ill patients who need the scan inevitably must wait their turn.

While radiologists read unneeded tests, precious minutes tick by with patients suffering from possibly fatal conditions such as subarachnoid hemorrhage (bleeding in the brain) or septic shock (overwhelming infection) waiting quietly in the queue.

Similarly, if a doctor prescribes drugs for patients who don't really need them, because the doctor fears that some persuasive lawyer will convince a jury that he knows best, and the drug would surely have saved the patient's life -- then supplies of that vital drug will become scarce, and it may not be available for patients who really do need it. (It also drives up the price of drugs by the elementary rule of supply and demand.)

One hidden cost that few think about is that doctors must overdocument everything he does, just in order to defend himself when he's sued; all the paperwork extensively cuts into the time he can actually spend with his patients. From the Washington Times piece:

Another opportunity cost of jackpot justice is its effect on the time doctors can spend with patients. Patients often may wonder why doctors spend so little time with them in the hospital. Doctors are not out playing golf or eating bon bons. They are in back rooms writing notes, documenting everything they have done and everything they plan to do.

Every day, a detailed assessment and plan is needed to outline all actions and the reasoning behind them to protect doctors from lawsuits, acknowledging every lab value, test, consult. If nothing changes from one day to the next, doctors must take the time to write the same thing again. If it is not written down in the chart, it never happened.

While some medical cases can be quite complex and such inordinate documentation can help organize the case more clearly in the doctor's mind, often this is not the case. Primarily this degree of documentation is done out of necessity to keep the pesky lawyers at bay. In fact, by wasting valuable physician time that could be better spent actually seeing patients, it can be counterproductive to a patient's well-being.

Finally, fear of litigation produces yet another nasty effect... defensive dumping: Doctors are already refusing to accept high-risk patients, those with serious ongoing conditions or many allergies to drugs and "contrast agent" dyes, because they know a higher percent of them will have problems and complications from treatment -- and that means a corresponding increase in malpractice lawsuits, no matter how proper the treatment was.

Similarly, some medical specialties (obstetrics, for example) are inherently more legally risky; veteran doctors staring at spiraling malpractice premiums -- and especially newly minted doctors right out of residency, who haven't yet chosen a specialty -- will be driven to pick those that don't carry quite as much risk of spending several weeks (or months) in court. Worse, some potential med-school students will look at the costs and legal risks associated with being a doctor and opt for some other career entirely.

Malpractice tort costs amount to a "tax" on the practice of medicine -- and a subsidy for malpractice trial lawyers. What you tax, you get less of; and what you subsidize, you get more of; does America really want fewer doctors and more lawyers?

Finally, states that are litigation-happy, like New York and California, will watch as a flood of doctors leave and head towards states that have already enacted tort reform, like Texas. Great for citizens of Texas; bad for the rest of us. Make the pain universal enough, and we may have to start importing doctors from third-world countries, as the United Kingdom must now do.

Bottom line

It's impossible to make a precise estimate of how much money, resources, and doctor-patient face time tort reform would save; it depends upon what reform, how strong, and where the reform applies: Reform in California, where the health-care industry is virtually run by lawyers, would save a lot more money than a similar reform in Texas, which has already limited the extent to which lawyers can loot the system. But most academic estimates are in the range of $100 billion to $300 billion per year.

That makes tort reform one of the top targets for reducing the cost of medical care in the United States -- and well worth demanding in any so-called "reform" bill.

Unless the American people are willing to cough up donations in the hundreds of millions of dollars range, Democrats are not going to act on that demand; therefore the only viable strategy is to defeat those Democrats in the voting booth, where the opinion of an ordinary American voter is worth just as much as the opinion of a John Edwards clone.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 28, 2010, at the time of 6:51 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1)

January 27, 2010

That's what tonight's State of the Union address (and voter reaction to it) will hinge upon: Does President Barack H. Obama want to be perceived as having succeeded on a handful of issues that resonate with voters? Or does he want to be perceived as having "stuck to his guns" on big-ticket, very left-liberal policies... that all failed?

In other words, is B.O. more interested in promoting the fortunes of B.O., or the fortunes of George Soros, MoveOn, and ACORN?

If the latter, there's nothing to say: If he's determined to go down with the lefty ship, let him. I believe we're past the danger than he would take the rest of the country down with him (except perhaps in terms of debt; but that would take quite a while). But if Obama is seriously interested in his own personal political future, then that brings us to the more interesting question: What could the president realistically say tonight that would start to repair the damage?

Note the highlighted word in that question: The Obamacle is not going to flip to being a Republican; nor is he capable of "triangulating," as Bill Clinton did, playing the Democrats off against the Republicans. He is bound not only by his past statements and behaviors -- which are far more radical than Bill Clinton pre-1994 -- but also by his own character and background: Basically, Obama is best described as "a community organizer for ACORN." Such a man cannot, for example, suddenly sign aboard a policy of reducing welfare, as Clinton did... it's simply not in Barack Obama's nature.

But there are things he can do; let's see if we can figure out a few. Yes, I know the speech is already cast in stone. But this is a fantasy; and anyway, change doesn't have to begin with this one particular speech.

Stop digging

The most important rule about holes: When you find yourself in one, the first step is to...

In this case, considering that each of Obama's signature programs has already flopped -- card check, the energy cripple and tax cap and trade bill, sundry stimuli, and of course ObamaCare -- it costs him nothing to say that he wants Congress to put all those programs of revolutionary change on hold for a while. In fact, he should announce they're on hold until the next Congress is seated; that will simultaneously recognize reality and also position Obama to become much more bipartisan by default, since everyone knows the next Congress will be more balanced.

He should also put on hold his habit of making incendiary, populist, Oogo-Chavez like rants against Big Oil, Big Stock, Big Bank, Big Pharma, and Big Insurance: The speeches aren't playing well with the voters and they're scaring the bejesus out of investors.

Finally, it's long, long past time to stop blaming George W. Bush for all of Barack H. Obama's travails and tribulations. B.O. should man-up and firmly announce that the buck stops at his seat. To wit, Obama should invite George W. Bush to meet with him at the White House to discuss, let's say, strategy in the war against the Iran/al-Qaeda Axis.

Time to give voters a breather.

Make some new friends

Speaking of partisanship, practically the entire country thinks there's been a whole lotta too much of it.

Obama should admit that he lost his focus on bipartisanship, but that he intends to be much more inclusive of Republicans and moderate Democrats this year. Specifically, that he intends to meet with them at the White House, discuss the issues, and press Congress to work out more bipartisan solutions to the nation's problems.

Since everyone knows that such vows are "pie-crust promises, easily made and easily broken," he should make a specific pledge to veto any major bill that comes to his desk with support from only one party. "And not just one or two votes; I want to see a good-faith effort to be inclusive."

Bush famously made a horse-trade after 9/11 and even more so after the Iraq War began: He gave the Democratic minority some of what it wanted on the domestic front (the Medicare prescription-drug extension, for example) in exchange for Democrats not inflicting military defeat on the American people in Iraq and Afghanistan, i.e., by filibustering supplementary Defense authorization bills.

Obama can make the same deal in reverse: He can offer a more robust response to terrorism and the two major wars in exchange for the GOP helping him pass some small-scale version of, say, health-care reform.

This isn't exactly triangulating; there's no 180° flip-flop required for Obama in this deal, since he has never said (post-inauguration) that we should pull out of Iraq immediately or that all terrorists should be treated as civilian criminals. It's just shading the policy a little more towards national security than liberals would prefer.

Start listening to your own best friend -- yourself

Obama often talks a good game (or at least a considerably less awful one) on issues such as deficit reduction, the war against the Axis, Executive transparency, an end to earmarks and other corruption, and private-sector job creation. So why not actually make good on a few of those promises?

These are areas where B.O. already talks the talk; he doesn't need to flip a loud and public flop. But it is long past time he walk the walk.

These three tacks in aggregate could go a long way towards tearing down the wall of separation between Obama and America. Alas, we already know what he plans to say... because evidently, la Casa Blanca has already released its "talking points" for tonight's speech. Power Line has 'em here.

And while I don't like to judge before all the facts are in, it appears as though the president has opted simply to redouble his efforts in all the same directions as the last year.

So it goes.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 27, 2010, at the time of 5:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

January 26, 2010

Actually, it's just no more ObamaCare, according to the New York Times; I'm just going along with the media crowd that continually uses the term "health care" as a synonym for "mandatory, government-controlled, grotesquely expensive health insurance that leads inevitably to health-care rationing."

Here's the Times:

With no clear path forward on major health care legislation, Democratic leaders in Congress effectively slammed the brakes on President Obama’s top domestic priority on Tuesday, saying that they no longer felt pressure to move quickly on a health bill after eight months of setting deadlines and missing them....

Mr. Reid said that he and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, were working to map out a way to complete a health care overhaul in coming months. “There are a number of options being discussed,” Mr. Reid said, emphasizing “procedural aspects” of the issue.

And as we predicted last year, there will be no jam-down of ObamaCare using budget reconciliation:

At the same time, two centrist Democratic senators who are up for re-election this year, Blanche L. Lincoln of Arkansas and Evan Bayh of Indiana, said that they would resist efforts to muscle through a health care bill using a parliamentary tactic called budget reconciliation, which seemed to be the simplest way to advance the measure.

The White House has said in recent days that it would support that approach....

But a plan to win over House members by making changes to the Senate bill in the budget reconciliation process ran into substantial resistance on Tuesday.

Mrs. Lincoln, who faces one of the toughest re-election bids among Democrats, said, “I am opposed to and will fight against any attempts to push through changes to the Senate health insurance reform legislation by using budget reconciliation tactics that would allow the Senate to pass a package of changes to our original bill with 51 votes.”

Mr. Bayh said, “It would destroy the opportunity, if there is one, for any bipartisan cooperation the rest of this year on anything else.”

But they haven't given up entirely on passing something, anything, that they can call a health-care reform bill:

None of the options available to lawmakers, including the use of budget reconciliation, seems viable at the moment. Some lawmakers said they expected Congress to try to adopt a greatly pared down bill once it returns to the issue.

“Frankly, we’re trying to figure out what is possible,” Mr. Hoyer said. “Senator Reid needs to determine what is possible on his side of the aisle, you know, what kind of support he can get. And we’re trying to figure out as well what we can pass."

Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis, famously expressed his perplexity with the distaff sex:

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"

The obvious rejoinder is -- why not ask her? (Freud actually posed his question in a letter to Marie Bonaparte, Napoleon Bonaparte's great-grandniece and a psychoanalyst herself; so perhaps Freud got his answer.)

Similarly, when Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 70%) asks, through his spokesman, "what kind of support he can get," he must surely be asking what kind of Republican support he can get... since the go-it-alone, Democrats-only approach failed miserably and humiliatingly.

And the obvious rejoinder is strikingly similar as above to Freud: Why doesn't Reid simply ask the Republicans what they would support?

The GOP has already offered a couple of health-insurance reform bills, which were so sooner debuted than the Democrats arrogantly flushed them. The Republican suggestions are several variations on putting more power in the hands of individual patients and doctors to decide their own treatment, thus removing much of the power that currently resides in government: both the regulatory regime of mandates and diktats and the judicial regime of medical-liability tort law:

• Medical liability tort reform, to decrease outrageous malpractice verdicts and eliminate the need for "defensive medicine."
• Insurance portability -- from job to job and from state to state.
• Greater flexibility for insurance companies to create groups, coordinating small businesses, clubs, and buying blocs into pools of like-minded insurance customers.
• Removing all government mandates on health-insurance policies, forcing them to cover every imaginable malady, condition, and the normal consequences of poor lifestyle choices. Let's make available a full range of insurance covereage, from minimalist plans to those "Cadillac" plans; you buy what you want and can afford.
• More emphasis on catastrophic care plus medical savings accounts (MSAs), to put more treatment decisions directly in the hands of patients and their doctors and less in the hands of insurance adjusters.
• And with all that, we can still take care of the poor by offering refundable tax credits for low-income families to be used to buy health insurance. There is no need for a "government option" and no voter desire for the government to get involved.

Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana already talked about these ideas in a Wall Street Journal op-ed; didn't Harry Reid read it?

Now that even the Democrats have been mugged by reality, perhaps their own sense of self preservation will triumph over their knee-jerk "progressivism" long enough to make common cause with the GOP and enact the health-insurance reform that Americans actually want.

I plan to hold my breath while waiting...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 26, 2010, at the time of 8:11 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1)

James O'Keefe -- he of the ACORN sting videos -- was arrested today, along with three likely accomplices, by the U.S. Marshal's Service for attempting to "interfere" with the phones in Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA, 65%) office.

This seems peculiar... but we have one tantalizing clue to what might be going on:

Activist James O'Keefe, 25, was already in Landrieu's New Orleans office Monday when Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel, both 24, showed up claiming to be telephone repairmen, according to U.S. Attorney Jim Letten's office. Letten says O'Keefe recorded the two with his cell phone.

Once inside the reception area, Flanagan, the son of acting U.S. Attorney Bill Flanagan in Shreveport, and Basel asked for access to the main phone at the reception desk.

After handling the phone, "Flanagan and Basel next requested access to the telephone closet because they needed to perform work on the main telephone system," Letten's office said.

The men were directed to another office in the building, they're accused of again misrepresenting themselves as telephone repairmen.

To my mind, it's overwhelming likely that O'Keefe was trying to pull off another sting, this time of Landrieu; but what, exactly? Did they really tamper with the phones? Or where they trying to see how easy it was to gain access to the phone system of a United States Senator? That could be important if the phone "interferers" were terrorists, for example, instead of a renegade journalist.

In any event, the sting, if such it was -- and why would O'Keefe be videorecording the activities if it wasn't a sting? -- went badly awry: Whatever vulnerability he was trying to demonstrate, I suspect he actually showed the opposite, at least in Landrieu's case.

Another question: Was this the first such phone "intereference" instance, or just the first failure? Perhaps O'Keefe has a dozen already completed videos where his crew succeeds in... well, in whatever it was they were trying to do.

I doubt that James O'Keefe will want to air any videos he has, however; they might precipitate numerous more charges against him, now that the FBI is already on his track!

In any event, it certainly sounds more like a blown sting operation and less like any real criminal intent was involved. But look for the ACORN-loving Left to go after O'Keefe hammer and tooth, calling him a criminal, a thug, and a terrorist.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 26, 2010, at the time of 2:05 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

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