The Great Health Care Summit, Part 2

It was also pretty interesting that Obama kept saying he wanted to talk about the issues and chastised Republicans numerous times about talking points (when they were reading from the previous bills or bringing up legitimate concerns, like McCain bringing up special interests in the bill). Here is how Democrats talk about the issues:

OBAMA: I can certainly remember Malia coming into the kitchen one day and saying, "I can't breathe, Daddy." ... My mother didn't have reliable health care and she died of ovarian cancer.

REID: A young man by the name of Jesus Gutierrez.

MURRAY: I remember a little boy, who was 11 years old, who's name was Marcellus.

HOYER: I had a message on my machine: "I was just diagnosed with a tumor."

HARKIN: Got a letter yesterday from a farmer in Iowa.

ROCKEFELLER: I knew this kid, Samuel Ford, and he had leukemia.

CONARD: My own father-in-law in his final illness.

WAXMAN: People from California who were told by Anthem WellPoint that their insurance was going to go up 39 percent.

DODD: A guy in my state, Kevin Galvin.

SLAUGHTER: Her sister died. This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister's teeth.

That doesn't really sound like the issues to me. It sounds like sob stories designed to bypass the real issues and any meaningful debate.

The Great Health Care Summit

Seems quite obvious now that the health care summit was nothing but a ruse all along. Obama was to appear bipartisan while Republicans were to be goaded into being rude and appear obstructionist. It has also been clear since Democrats have already been working on a reconciliation bill that would bypass a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, even though it is still unlikely such a bill would pass the House. Regardless, some of the highlights and comments from today's show:

1. Supposedly bipartisan, but Democrats have almost twice as much speaking time as Republicans.


2. Obama doesn't count his time speaking since he's the President.


3. Trying to paint Republicans as obstructionist. Wait...don't Democrats have a majority in both Houses? How can Republicans stop anything even remotely moderate?


4. New tactic? Target talk radio.

Of course, Democrats also played the sob stories right away (wait...didn't Obama say throughout the summit they wanted to talk about issues? A number of Republicans brought up legitimate issues, and to be honest I though the President was rather rude to them. Anyone else get that feeling?

Random Stuff

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of governement. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years."

Alexis de Tocqueville

Spending Cuts

For the umpteenth time, whenever spending must be cut (as in the case of New Jersey), liberals scream that this will mean fewer policeman and firefighters. Of course, it *could* mean that, but only if you didn't have massive entitlements, bloated public sector union jobs, and wasteful spending across the board. When you have all of the latter that liberals will refuse to cut, of course it could mean more essential things could be cut. Naturally, Republicans will take the blame for being heartless (though thankfully Christie has stuck to his guns to restore some sense of fiscal sanity), when it is really Democrats who should be blamed for years of incompetent management of the state.

Random Stuff

A lot of things have been bugging me lately...

1) The trend of the left to rely more and more on appeals to consensus. It has always been the case with climate science. Al Gore has shouted for years about how all scientists agree, even though a simple Google search would reveal that not the case. Any scientist, expert in the field or not, who agrees with global warming is embraced, and any scientist who does not, qualified or not, is ignored or destroyed. We see this same tactice with Obama. With talking about the stimulus, he said that no economist he knows of is against it. In regards to Iraq and the surge in 2007, he said that no expert in the region he knows of or has spoken to has said that will make any difference. It did. And the point being that politicians will use that from time to time, but we should be wary, since any appeal to authority magically seems to favor the politician's approach.

2) Again with global warming. Of course, no amount of evidence to the contrary will be enough the shake the faith of the believers. If it had been an oil company, or a Republican-favored group perpetrating some of the things we've heard about from the IPCC, Democrats and liberals would be holding Congressional investigations. The media would be insisting the guilt of the accused parties with or without any evidence.

3) A must read book is The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell. One of the main themes of the book is about how liberals think that they can solve problem X, even if X isn't a problem or X has been getting better for years. Liberals get their hands involved and all of the sudden we are worse off for decades (see black unemployment). The vision is that of that there are perfect solutions and no tradeoffs involved. One can easily see this in things like the "right" to housing. Well, it is a right as long as other people subsidize you. Which of course, is the antithesis of a right in the classical sense.

4) Ever notice how most discussions of race and ethnicity leave out Asian Americans? In a lot of areas, Asian Americans do better than even whites. Of course, that doesn't fit the template of racist white Americans getting rich off the back of minorities. If we group blacks and whites (which I don't like doing because those groups are made of individuals making their own choices, which I think they are fully capable of doing), we could say that both groups could learn a lot from the habits of Asian Americans.

5) When liberals talk of rights, it isn't in the classical sense we would think, that the right is God-given, and with that right comes responsibility. On their terms, they think it means giving something to someone at taxpayer expense (surely infringing the rights of taxpayers), with no expectation that any responsibility lies with the person receiving the gift. For example, home ownership. I should subsidize other people living in houses they can't afford or those who took out multiple home loans to try to "flip" them, but they shouldn't have any responsibility in the first place. Such as, can they make payments, did they have an adjustable rate mortgage, or should they even have a house in the first place?

More IPCC Fraud

Mark Steyn sums it up perfectly.

New Precedent?

Mike I know you and I agree on a lot and we disagree on some things. I think the most dangerous thing is allowing these terrorists any kind of judicial leeway whatsoever. At what point does freedom of speech and protecting your citizens end? Once you give freedoms you can't take them back (see: abortion, etc.) so its best to give rights to non-citizens slowly. If you don't, you are setting a precedent that probably can't be taken away.

Giving The Enemy Constitutional Rights

I don't know how many of you listen to Rush Limbaugh on a regular basis, but he made a great point today. You can't bestow constitutional rights on someone without giving them the presumption of innocence.

Of course the administration is trying to have it both ways. Satisfy the left-wing base by trying them in civilian court (and somehow try to blame it on Bush, naturally) while trying to act tough. Regarding acting tough, the administration keeps saying that Khalid Sheik Mohammed will get his due and he will be executed. Hell, if they are certain he is guilty and will be executed anyways, then pretty much we are just rubber stamping it, giving a show trial. There is nothing grand about that. The hostile Muslims will not see true justice, only the illusion of it (if they really care about justice in our sense...I doubt they do).

Of course, that brings in all other sorts of questions which we have discussed previously - Miranda rights, evidence illegally obtained, right to jury (all it would take is one crazy leftist who thinks Bush was responsible for the poor fellow turning to terrorism...even though he was a terrorist before Bush...Bush has that kind of power), and so on and so on. Many in the left wing base truly believe Bush created terrorists.

Of course the conclusion is obvious. We cannot project military might (or even deter) when we allow the enemy more benefits than we allow our own soldiers. We can't have an effective fighting force when our soldiers are just as concerned about being punished for normal wartime activites as they are about being killed by the enemy. And literally, we cannot defend ourselves that way.

Is that the goal? One would hope not.