Libertarian Leanings

We'll Thank Them For It In The End

Perhaps believing that the opposition to health care reform that has plagued Democrats' town hall meetings is fake, Democrats plan to pass health care reform legislation on their own, without cooperation from the Republicans.

On the other hand, such a change could alter the dynamic of talks surrounding health care legislation, and even change the substance of a final bill. With no need to negotiate with Republicans, Democrats might be better able to focus their energy to move more quickly, relying on their large majorities in both houses. Democratic senators might feel more empowered, for example, to define the authority of the nonprofit insurance cooperatives that are emerging as an alternative to a public insurance plan.

Republicans, on the other hand, have apparently begun listening to the voters.

"I think it is safe to say there are a huge number of big issues that people have," Kyl told reporters in a conference call from Arizona. "There is no way that Republicans are going to support a trillion-dollar-plus bill."

According to Rasmussen, a solid majority of voters would rather see no health care bill passed than the one that is working its way through congress right now.

Thirty-five percent (35%) of American voters say passage of the bill currently working its way through Congress would be better than not passing any health care reform legislation this year. However, a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that most voters (54%) say no health care reform passed by Congress this year would be the better option.

Apparently the Democrats think the health care reform they impose will be so good when it's done, voters will thank them for it when November, 2010 rolls around.  Or not.

Which Way To The War Protest?

Cindy Sheehan replied to Byron York's column which asked, what happened to the anti-war movement? 

I read your column about the "anti-war" movement and I can't believe I am saying this, but I mostly agree with you.

The "anti-war" "left" was used by the Democratic Party. I like to call it the "anti-Republican War" movement.

While I agree with you about the hypocrisy of such sites as the DailyKos, I have known for a long time that the Democrats are equally responsible with the Republicans. That's why I left the party in May 2007 and that's why I ran for Congress against Nancy Pelosi in 2008.

I have my own radio show, "Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox," and I was out on a four-month book tour promoting the fact that it's not about Democrats or Republicans, but it's about the system.

Even if I am surrounded by a thousand, or no one, I am still working for peace.

Sincerely,

Cindy Sheehan

Anti-war rage, it turns out, is useful only for gaining power.  With Obama installed, a committed leftist, there is no need for it any more.  Let the fighting go on.

Calling a Spade a Spade

David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen, admires Sarah Palin for knowing when to call a spade a spade as she did when she referred to those bureaucratic arrangements for deciding who should be entitled to medical treatment as "death panels."

Candour is when you tell a truth that is disturbing, in language so unambiguous that persons in polite company will not want to hear you. It is a way to lose the respect of the genteel -- of those who are "respectable" in the shallowest sense. Rude language is quite unnecessary to this end: the hard truth itself, spoken plainly and publicly, will give sufficient offence.

Thuggery is unrelated to this. It consists not of candid argument but of naked intimidation. It may be done crassly -- for instance, by the union thugs who have begun to appear at U.S. townhall meetings, to confront opponents of the Democrats' health-care agenda. Or it may be done smoothly, with the politically correct gesture, that conveys the threat of later reprisal against anyone who utters the contrary, "incorrect" thought. A good example would be the "flag@whitehouse.gov" e-mail address that was set up on the official White House website, to which Obama supporters across the country were invited to report "fishy" opposition to that health-care agenda.

[...]

It is assumed she will be running for president on the redneck ticket. But as we saw last week, she does not need any office to get results. For after many nice legislators had condemned her for her "unreasonable" criticisms, the U.S. Senate finance committee this week dropped a key provision to which she had referred, from the House health-care bill before them. According to the ranking Republican member, it was dropped "because it could be misinterpreted or implemented incorrectly."

The truth is, Sarah doesn't have to run for office, or even be in office to to have a profound impact on politics and political outcomes.

Via Real Clear Politics.

Casually Demonizing

Hot Air thinks the public option is dead.  Ed Morrissey reports that Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, who is a key member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, went on TV to say that pursuit of the public option for health reform is a “wasted effort” that will kill any chance of getting a bill through the Senate. 

In an update to the post, Hot Air provided a video clip, which I purloined and have below, of Kathleen Sebelius "gently retreating from the public option," says Ed.

It doesn't sound to me as if Sebelius is backing away at all.  In fact she assures us that there will eventually be a public option.

Well, I think there will be a competitor to private insurers. That's really the essential part, is... is... You don't turn over the whole new marketplace to private insurance companies and trust them to do the right thing.

Amazing.  If there's one thing these town hall meetings have shown, voters do not trust their Democratic senators, congressmen, or the Obama administration to do the right thing.  If anything voters are much more comfortable trusting the insurance companies and would rather have no health reform bill, than the mess now under consideration in congress. 

It must be habit with Democrats like Sebelius.  They just can't help but demonize, but at least this one's bright enough to pick a new target.  Last week it was the voters.  But then that didn't work out so well, did it.  So she's going after the insurance companies with a casual observation. Of course they can't be trusted to do the right thing.  Everybody knows that. It's just so obvious. 

So it's better to trust the likes of her and Arlen Specter?  Right.

Bill Clinton Channels The Libertarian Leaner

Robert Reich has come up with an extraordinary article spelling out how progressives can fight back against the fearmongers and demagogues, and pass the president's plan for health care reform.  His analysis of what's behind the big push back against Obama's plan (when instead we little folk should be delirious with joy that our betters are looking out for us) is extraordinary because he's nailed a crucial point:  There's no plan.

Why are these meetings brimming with so much anger? Because Republican Astroturfers have joined the same old right-wing broadcast demagogues that have been spewing hate and fear for years, to create a tempest.

But why are they getting away with it? Why aren't progressives—indeed, why aren't ordinary citizens—taking the meetings back?

Mainly because there's still no healthcare plan.

Exactly.  There's no plan.  And because there's no plan, anyone opposing health care reform is spewing hate and fear.  You have to admit, Reich's argument is a thing of beauty.  People's worst fears about health care reform are misguided because whatever they object to is not in the plan.  Couldn't be.  There's no plan.

Which is not to say there is no misinformation.  President Obama stood in front of a town hall style meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire this week.  He urged the tight little group of hand picked supporters who were allowed in, to engage in a rational discussion of real issues.

Where we do disagree, let's disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that's actually been proposed. (Applause.) Because the way politics works sometimes is that people who want to keep things the way they are will try to scare the heck out of folks and they'll create boogeymen out there that just aren't real. (Applause.)

Ah, the voice of sweet reason.  We simply can't afford to worry about imaginary bogeymen.  Especially when there are those real ones out there.  Obama names one:  Surgeons.

Nothing against surgeons. I want surgeons -- I don't want to be getting a bunch of letters from surgeons now. I'm not dissing surgeons here. (Laughter.)

All I'm saying is let's take the example of something like diabetes, one of --- a disease that's skyrocketing, partly because of obesity, partly because it's not treated as effectively as it could be. Right now if we paid a family -- if a family care physician works with his or her patient to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they're taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance. But if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that's $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 -- immediately the surgeon is reimbursed. Well, why not make sure that we're also reimbursing the care that prevents the amputation, right? That will save us money. (Applause.)

But wait a minute.  There's something fishy about this.  It turns Obama was spewing disinformation.  Linda Douglass call your office.  There's fearmongering and demagoguery going on.  

As it happens, a New Hampshire surgeon, who blogs at Joust The Facts has real facts to share.

Let's start with the reimbursement for foot amputations, which is never "immediate."  Since the President was in New Hampshire, we'll use the New Hampshire rates that, for example, I might get paid as an orthopaedic surgeon.  

The code for amputation through the mid-tarsal joint, or midfoot, is CPT 28800  Reimbursement?  $526.75.  The code for amputation through the forefoot, or trans-metatarsal, is CPT 28805, paid at $694.14.  A ray amputation of one gangrenous toe, including the metatarsal, is CPT 28810, paid at $406.12.  So reimbursement for a variety of foot amputations for serious diabetic infections, which can be life-threatening if left treated inadequately, range from roughly $400-$700.  I only wish it was $40,000.  Maybe he's thinking of the amount his trial lawyer friends might make from suing the surgeon.

Next, let's recall that that $400-$700 is not just for the surgery.  No, that reimbursement is under a 90 day global.  "What's that," you ask?  Well, the 90 day global means that the reimbursement covers not only the surgery, but also the follow-up care, to be certain that healing occurs, for the next three months.  No additional office reimbursement is paid for post-op care during that time, and most patients in this situation would require at least three visits to the office during that post-op period. (Emphasis in the original).

My point in bringing up this discrepancy is not to call the president a liar, but to ask, why go blindly along on health care reform when so often the president's arguments are not correct?  Why, when nearly every Obama claim is questionable or false, from the number of Americans who are uninsured, to scare stories about people currently being denied care, to his imagined cost savings.  What is the point?  And why are progressives so hot for a single payer system, when single payer systems have been shown time and again to result in reduced quality of care and government directed rationing?

It so happens, Bill Clinton delivered the answer at a convention for progressive bloggers in Pittsburgh.

PITTSBURGH - Former President Bill Clinton told an audience of liberal online activists Thursday evening that the nation has “entered a new era of progressive politics” that could last for decades if Democrats can pass ambitious measures such as health care reform and climate change.

In a nearly hour-long keynote address to the fourth annual Netroots Nation convention in Pittsburgh, a gathering of roughly 1,500 progressive bloggers and activists, Clinton said the nation—and public opinion—has dramatically changed in the 16 years since he took office. But he noted that President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress needed the support of the online community to achieve their agenda.

“We have entered a new era of progressive politics which, if we do it right, can last 30 or 40 years,” Clinton said. “America has rapidly moved to another place on a lot of these issues.”

“The president needs your help,” he said, “and the cause needs your help.”

Clinton warned against the dangers of failing to compromise on some elements of health care reform, calling for agreement on a plan that includes a handful of elements that have widespread public support and perhaps conceding on those that have little support among voters.

“I want us to be mindful we may need to take less than a full loaf,” he said. “We can’t be in the peanut gallery. We have to be actors. We can’t ask the President to go it alone. We can’t ask Congress to go it alone."

Clinton had a similar message on climate change legislation.

“The President stuck his neck out here and the Congress stuck its neck out,” he said, “but we have to have a bill.”  (My emphasis).

According to Clinton, as a consequences of failing to pass a bill, any bill, progressives will miss out on their golden opportunity for 30 or 40 years of political control in Washington.  Actually, I think he's conservative in his estimates.  If progressives can successfully crush the "fearmongers and demagogues" who've been showing up to ask tough questions at these town hall meetings, they might just remain in power indefinitely.  Here's how I used to think the stategy worked.  Said I:

But let's be realistic.  The objective of Obama and the Democrats is not health care reform.  The objective is an enduring progressive congressional majority that they hope to achieve by forcing Americans into a dependence upon progressive government for life supporting medicines and medical care.

I've revised that thinking.  While I have no doubt that health care is the vehicle not the objective, it's not the average American that progressives hope to control through their arcane legislative boondoggles.  It's the special interest money they're after.

A memo obtained by the Huffington Post confirms that the White House and the pharmaceutical lobby secretly agreed to precisely the sort of wide-ranging deal that both parties have been denying over the past week.

The memo, which according to a knowledgeable health care lobbyist was prepared by a person directly involved in the negotiations, lists exactly what the White House gave up, and what it got in return.

It says the White House agreed to oppose any congressional efforts to use the government's leverage to bargain for lower drug prices or import drugs from Canada -- and also agreed not to pursue Medicare rebates or shift some drugs from Medicare Part B to Medicare Part D, which would cost Big Pharma billions in reduced reimbursements.

In exchange, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA) agreed to cut $80 billion in projected costs to taxpayers and senior citizens over ten years. Or, as the memo says: "Commitment of up to $80 billion, but not more than $80 billion."

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not here to beat up on the drug companies.  But in order to get in on this debate you have to be a player and that means you have to have some serious money.  First, you have to get into the back room, then maybe you can make a deal.  What gets you in?

Indeed, throughout the past six months, Obama and his top aides have routinely consulted with some of the titans of the private health care, insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Jeff Kindler, the chairman and CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, whose employees donated $124,053 to Obama's presidential campaign, has met with the president three times to talk health care. Karen Ignani, the president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans whose employees contributed only $2,251 to the Obama campaign, has visited the White House four times. Tauzin, whose association contributed a scant $3,555 to the Obama campaign, has visited the president four times. And Stephen Hemsley, CEO of the UnitedHealth Group, a managed care and insurance company that contributed nearly $30,000 to the Obama campaign and $50,000 to his inauguration committee, has visited the White House twice.

Lobbyists and industry groups are under big pressure to get in with their campaign contributions and buy a seat at the table or face the possibility that progressive plans will put them on the short end of the stick or maybe even out of business.  Not only will they pony up the election campaign funds, they'll bankroll TV commercials in favor of the program.

WASHINGTON — Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion.

Drug industry lobbyists reacted with alarm this week to a House health care overhaul measure that would allow the government to negotiate drug prices and demand additional rebates from drug manufacturers.

In response, the industry successfully demanded that the White House explicitly acknowledge for the first time that it had committed to protect drug makers from bearing further costs in the overhaul. The Obama administration had never spelled out the details of the agreement.

“We were assured: ‘We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal,’ ” Billy Tauzin, the former Republican House member from Louisiana who now leads the pharmaceutical trade group, said Wednesday.

[...]

But failing to publicly confirm Mr. Tauzin’s descriptions of the deal risked alienating a powerful industry ally currently helping to bankroll millions in television commercials in favor of Mr. Obama’s reforms.

Robert Reich insists that the details of the health care plan must be spelled out if there's to be any hope of passing a bill.  But there's a reality, evident to  both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  The millions going into TV commercials in favor of the plan will overpower the other messages.  Who needs details?  Neither Clinton nor Obama care in the least what gets passed, as long as it gives progressive politicians control over special interests and their money.  Health care reform and climate change legislation are designed for maximum political control, which means there is one thing we can know with a certainty.  Whatever comes out of this health care reform exercise, the least likely is a better health care system.

Update:  Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, confirms it.  A plan for the drug companies to spend $150 million on TV commercials pushing the Obama plan is part of the deal between the drug companies and the White House.  There are a couple of ways we can look at it.  The drug companies are bribing the White House.  The White House is extorting money from the drug companies.  It's all quite legal, though, but not what I would call good government.

No Town Hall Meetings On The Schedule

Neither member of New Hampshire's congressional delegation has plans to meet with constituents on the subject of health care reform during the August recess, says NowHampshire.com.  Instead, Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter will be in Pittsburgh.  That would be Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, not Pittsburg, New Hampshire.

Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (NH-01) will speak in Pittsburg, PA today at Netroots Nation, an enclave of liberal bloggers intended to promote liberal public policy, educate activists on internet communication techniques and even enjoy “everything from massages to beer tastings to author signings.”

Netroots Nation is sponsored by several politically powerful unions as well as the influential liberal blog Daily Kos.

Shea-Porter has not held any town hall meetings with constituents this August recess and has no such publicly scheduled events for the balance of the month. Her office did not respond to our request for comment.

Though she appears unwilling to discuss health care with her constituents, Shea-Porter touts her support for “a robust public option” in an e-mail distributed by Netroots Nation.

Meanwhile, Congressman Paul Hodes will attend a party for liberal bloggers in Concord.  At least he'll be in New Hampshire, but apparently not for the purposes of listening to his constituents.

Democratic Rep. Paul Hodes (NH-02) has no publicly scheduled town hall meetings with constituents planned for the August recess but he will appear in Concord as the “featured guest” at the Blue Hampshire Bash, a party for liberal bloggers on August 24th, NowHampshire.com has learned.

Controversial San Francisco-based blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga will also be a featured guest at the event.

Paul Hodes is the only Democrat seeking the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Judd Gregg. Hodes’ office did not immediately respond to our inquiries.

Blue Hampshire calls itself the “progressive online community for the Granite State.” Markos Moulitsas runs the powerful and influential liberal blog Daily Kos.

It may be that our representatives plan to avoid town hall meetings with actual constituents only until such time as "grassroots" support for their positions in favor of nationalized health care can build.  Here's how that will happen.

New Hampshire Democratic State Chairman Ray Buckley is threatening to “muster” Organizing For America, the Obama administration’s political arm, while promising liberal Granite Staters, “you are going to see significant push back on these thugs.”

By “thugs” Buckley means taxpayers who have expressed discontent at recent congressional town hall meetings.

Writing on the liberal blog Blue Hampshire Wednesday, Buckley commented, “I have been thinking about Al Gore alot (sic) lately with all of the similarities between the Florida GOP riot in 2000 and what they are now doing to congressional town meetings.”

To which a commenter replied, “I’d really like to see OFA [Organizing For America] come up big on this. Who could think of a better reason to call a muster?”

“Yes,” said Buckley. “I think you are going to see significant push back on these thugs.”

Buckley’s tough talk is ironic however as to date none of the Democratic members of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation has publicly announced they will host a town hall meeting this August. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, will host a “tele-town hall” on Thursday night, but it is expected to be little more than a tightly scripted conference call with supporters.

Via Hot Air.

The Inevitability of Rationing

Wall Street Journal editorialists say opposition claims about euthanasia and "death panels" are over the top.  But when they go on to describe the logical result of Obamacare and the actual result of nationalized medicine in Europe, you might as well have death panels. 

Far from being a scare tactic, this is a logical conclusion based on experience and common-sense. Once health care is a "free good" that government pays for, demand will soar and government costs will soar too. When the public finally reaches its taxing limit, something will have to give on the care and spending side. In a word, care will be rationed by politics.

Mr. Obama's reply is that private insurance companies already ration, by deciding which treatments are covered and which aren't. However, there's an ocean of difference between coverage decisions made under millions of voluntary private contracts and rationing via government. An Atlantic Ocean, in fact. Virtually every European government with "universal" health care restricts access in one way or another to control costs, and it isn't pretty.

The British system is most restrictive, using a black-box actuarial formula known as "quality-adjusted life years," or QALYs, that determines who can receive what care. If a treatment isn't deemed to be cost-effective for specific populations, particularly the elderly, the National Health Service simply doesn't pay for it. Even France—which has a mix of public and private medicine—has fixed reimbursement rates since the 1970s and strictly controls the use of specialists and the introduction of new medical technologies such as CT scans and MRIs.

Yes, the U.S. "rations" by ability to pay (though in the end no one is denied actual care). This is true of every good or service in a free economy and a world of finite resources but infinite wants. Yet no one would say we "ration" houses or gasoline because those goods are allocated by prices.

In Obamacare there won't be any "death panel" deciding the fate of any particular patients.  Obama's panel will consist of those rule makers who draw up guidelines that say when a medical treatment is futile.  Once guidelines are in place, there is no "death panel" to blame when treatment is denied to a patient who is just too old and too sick to benefit from it.

Here and There

An Investors Business Daily editorial offers examples from the U.K. of what we can expect from a nationalized health care system.

When you don't want to talk about some of the realities of government-run medical care, you change the subject. You may call elderly town hall protestors a coached mob.

It's easy to ignore the fact that data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, hardly a right-wing organization, show that the U.K.'s heart-attack fatality rate is almost 20% higher than America's, and that angioplasties in Britain are only 21.3% as common as they are here.

Or it's easy to forget that in March, the U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) ruled against the use of two drugs, Lapatinib and Sutent, that prolong the life of those with certain forms of breast and stomach cancer.

So it's no surprise to discover that while breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate, in Britain it's almost double at 46%. Prostate cancer is fatal to 19% of American men who get it; in Britain it kills 57% of those it strikes. We are not making this up.

Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York and an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote on Feb. 9 on Bloomberg.com that in 2006, a U.K-based board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took three years to get that outrageous decree reversed.

Oh sure.  The Obama says he's against a single payer system, but then virtually everything he says has an expiration date.  Here is the rationale behind his new plan which includes the public option.  Here is his earlier stance on the single payer issue. 

It Must Be Love

Or if not love, denial.  What else could it be?  She seems bright enough.  She's observant enough to see Obama's plan for health care reform for what it is -- a disaster -- but Camille Paglia is utterly incapable of understanding why.  Liberals are the good people, after all.  Why the disastrous health care plan, she wonders.

Aug. 12, 2009 | Buyer's remorse? Not me. At the North American summit in Guadalajara this week, President Obama resumed the role he is best at -- representing the U.S. with dignity and authority abroad. This is why I, for one, voted for Obama and continue to support him. The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair. Obama has barely begun the crucial mission that he was elected to do.

Case in point: the administration's grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton's megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center.

But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress?

Well, as it happens a pretty large segment of the voting public would have thought so, and did, when they cast their ballots for John McCain last year.  Now, that very same large segment has expanded to a majority as congress and the administration hit the road to promote their "vague and slippery promises."  But Camille, true believer that she is, just doesn't get it.  She says so, herself: 

I just don't get it.

What she doesn't get, among other things is why the big rush.

Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

Lest you conclude that Camille is nothing more than a blockheaded dolt, she answers her own question, even if her answer is a pitiful cry for the wit to understand.

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism.

It's right there in front of her, but she must be looking past it.  Her party has been "drifting" to soulless collectivism for at least 40 years.  It's only since the 2006 midterm elections that the drift has picked up some serious speed, and is now a full fledged stampede. 

Yet somehow the thundering herd has managed to escape Camille's attention as it stampedes along.  Somehow she's never noticed that every Democrat-inspired solution involves Byzantine vampiric bureaucracies, nightmares of red tape, and mammoth screw-ups.  Those are all things that Democrats promote in order to help elect more Democrats.  But Camille is looking in the wrong direction for a key that will unravel her mystery.  She just can't seem to get off of George W. Bush.

Surely, the basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm. The present proposals are full of noble aims, but the biggest danger always comes from unforeseen and unintended consequences. Example: the American incursion into Iraq, which destabilized the region by neutralizing Iran's rival and thus enormously enhancing Iran's power and nuclear ambitions.

It wouldn't do any good at all to tell Camille that the invasion of Iraq actually had quite the opposite effect on nascent nuclear ambitions, as demonstrated when Moammar Gadhafi renounced Libya's nuclear weapons program and invited the inspectors in to verify its demise.  Gadhafi said that when the U.S. knocked over Saddam Hussein he thought he was next on the list.  He wasted no time coming clean.

Iran is quite another story.  If Iran's nuclear ambitions were enhanced, it began when Democrats put political opportunism ahead of national security and systematically undermined the war on terror.  The determination of the Democrats to return to business as usual in a pre-9/11 world has served to reassure an apprehensive Iran.  We are now at a point where Iran justifiably believes that a U.S. invasion is absolutely out of the question.  With that guarantee in hand the Ayatollahs confidently crank out the weapons grade uranium, fix elections with Obama's acquiescence, and murder any citizens who object. 

Her focus on the Bush administration must be blinding her.  She just doesn't get it.  She's looking right straight at it, but she just doesn't get it.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

There it is again, that drift.  Except that liberals have been there for years, there where Camille thinks they're drifting.  She thinks this is something new, this strange servility toward big government.  Only in the insulated world of academia could Camille Paglia have been living for the last 62 years.  Ethical collapse of the left?  Collapse from what?  Ethics are for other people, not the left.  Liberals are above that sort of thing.  They can't see totalitarianism.  Liberals are totalitarianism.  How else will they get the lesser people, the stupid ones, to find utopia? 

But Camille just doesn't get it.  Like a wronged lover.  Unwilling to see it.  The last to know.  It must be love.

Reducing The Cost of Health Care

An editorial in today's Wall Street Journal drives home the foolishness of Obama's claim that that we must put the health care industry on the road to nationalization in order to reduce the cost of health care.  However, the Journal piece is not about health care. 

One ingredient in those high costs is malpractice liability, and the most frequently mentioned antidote is the implementation of some kind of tort reform.  But according to the Journal Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania plans to go in exactly the opposite direction.

Arlen Specter became a Democrat this year, but there’s one party we’re confident the Pennsylvania Senator will never abandon—the trial bar. He’s recently introduced legislation to repeal two important Supreme Court business rulings in order to create a new lawsuit bonanza.

In Stoneridge v. Scientific Atlanta, five Justices ruled in 2008 that companies can’t be sued merely for doing business with another firm that commits fraud. This followed the 1994 precedent in Central Bank of Denver v. First Interstate Bank of Denver, in which the Justices limited liability claims against alleged “aiders and abettors.”

[...]

To show what a loyal tort-lobby servant he is, Mr. Specter has also introduced a bill to let attorneys claim an up-front tax deduction on expenses they incur while building contingency fee cases. Amazing but true: Mr. Specter wants to give a tax cut to sustain the likes of Mel Weiss or Dickie Scruggs in the yachts to which they have become accustomed while they await jackpot jury verdicts. Even Democrats are too embarrassed by this giveaway (estimated cost: $1.6 billion) to pass it as a stand-alone bill, so tort lobbyist Linda Lipsen recently said “we have to tuck it into something” else, such as another “tax vehicle.”

And here I thought Democrats were against tax cuts for the rich.  One thing they are against is limiting those massive jury awards, the costs of health care be damned.