Libertarian Leanings

So Goes the U.S.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton perseveres with Obama administration efforts to topple a Latin American democracy by forcing Honduras to accept its former president Manuel Zelaya as dictator.  Meanwhile a legal review of the facts surrounding Mr. Zelaya's removal, recently filed by the Congressional Research Service, concludes that Honduran judicial and legislative actions were consistent with the Honduran constitutional and statutory law.  This cuts no ice with Hillary who has sanctioned the country's independent judiciary.

The upshot is that the U.S. is trying to force Honduras to violate its own constitution and is also using its international political heft to try to interfere with the country's independent judiciary.

Hondurans are worried about what this pressure is doing to their country. Mr. Zelaya's violent supporters are emboldened by the U.S. position. They deface some homes and shops with graffiti and throw stones and home-made bombs into others, and whenever the police try to stop them, they howl about their "human rights." 

[...]

In its actions toward Honduras, the Obama administration is demonstrating contempt for the fundamentals of democracy. Legal scholars are clear on this. "Judicial independence is a central component of any democracy and is crucial to separation of powers, the rule of law and human rights," writes Ahron Barak, the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel and a prominent legal scholar, in his compelling 2006 book, "The Judge in a Democracy."

Obama's contempt for the fundamentals of democracy was already apparent here at home.  All we need to do is look at his intrusions into the marketplace.  Massive bailouts and stimulus packages have given Obama leverage to fire the CEO of GM, to dictate executive pay in the financial sector.  And now he wants to take over the nations health care industry.

If more evidence is needed, there are those connections to ACORN, the organization which has racked up several convictions for voter registration fraud.  Obama's 2008 presidential campaign paid an ACORN subsidiary $800,000.00 for get-out-the-vote services.  This was originally misrepresented in campaign reporting to the FEC as payment for as "polling, advance work, and staging major events."  ACORN's get-out-the-vote activities were intended to rig our elections, which is what Manuel Zelaya hoped to achieve in Honduras with his unconstitutional referendum.  How sad that he continues to enjoy the full support of the Obama administration in his efforts to do it.

I Got News

The clip below is from an appearance by Stephen A. Smith on the Mark Levin Show.

The money quote starts at about the 5:00 minute mark.

I ended up surrounded by about fifteen or twenty people, and I was basically saying to them, Mark, listen, at the end of the day, it's about... if you walked up to any African American in this country and you said to them, "You know what , I'm going to give you universal health care, or I'm going to give you a cap and trade tax, or I'm going to give you X, Y, and Z."  If you gave them that option or the option to have money in their pocket, and for them to make their own decision, they would choose the latter.  I said, "I got news for you. That would make you somebody with a conservative point of view. You better wake up and recognize."

When Smith finished that thought Levin made the comment.  "I think I've just found a superstar."

Lifted from Hot Air.

Reflections on our Weekend in DC

About 1:30 Friday afternoon on September 11th we set out from Nashua in Susan's Prius for Washington, DC and the taxpayer tea party.  It was a longer ride than we anticipated.  Traffic reports of an accident on I-91 South of Hartford persuaded us to take the I-84 West route.  This had the Garmin annoyed beyond all reason, complaining about "recalculating" every time we refused to take an exit that would get us back to I-91.  She was still whining about it as far west as Waterbury when we finally shut her off. The Garmin reminds me a lot of our Democrats in congress.  She gave me no credit for knowing how to get where I wanted to go, and she was positively determined that I would go the way she wanted.  On the other hand, if I followed her, she was ultimately going to get me where I wanted to go.  The Democrats have their own destination in mind. We made pretty good time until we got close to the Tappan Zee Bridge, and there the traffic slowed to a bumper-to-bumper crawl.  On the other side of the Hudson it improved some, but a short way down the Garden State Parkway we were into rush hour.  That, the rain, and an accident stretched what was expected to be an eight hour drive into a tiresome but uneventful ten hours. It was nearly midnight when we got to our hotel in Arlington.  We were both tired and testy. Next morning the hotel lobby was crowded with tea partiers.  We had no problem finding out where we needed to go and how we would get there.  Several people were handing out directions to the various gathering points.  A hotel van dropped us at Reagan where we caught a Washington Metro train to the Smithsonian by the Mall.  We shared the van with a couple of kids from New York, a guy, also from New York, who came to promote the Fair Tax, and a group that drove down from Ohio.  The group from Ohio included an aspiring congressman.

That's Dan Moadus on the far right.  OK, so we're all on the right, and no doubt lefties would say we are all on the far right.  But I digress.  Dan is running for the Ohio 17th District congressional seat.  That picture was taken while we were on our way up 13th Street toward Pennsylvania Avenue.  We figured we'd find signs of a crowd there, and we did.  There were signs of a crowd in both directions as far as we could see.  In fact we could hardly see anything else.

We could hardly believe all the people.  We are rookie protesters after all, I suppose.  This was the crowd who stayed home during all those anti-war protests, from  Vietnam to Iraq.  So there we were, at our first protest ever.  It was more of a celebration than a protest, though.  The day was warm and pleasant.  Everybody was smiling. So Susan and I got out into the street and walked with the crowd down toward the Capitol where the speakers would speak and the bands would play.

When we got there we walked around trying to gauge the size of our crowd and entertainment value of the signs on display.  By 11:30 we were ready to stop being protesters and start being tourists. That's when our real march began.  We set off toward the Washington Monument.  The section of the Mall between the Capitol and the Monument was reserved for the 24th Annual Black Family Reunion.  As we walked by, the wind pushed over one of the banner posts that lined the event.  I was right next to it.  I picked it up and set the sand bag back on the base to hold it upright.  A loud "Thank you" came from across the walkway, so I turn and smiled and waved "You're welcome." We must have walked a dozen miles altogether, down Pennsylvania Avenue, from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, to the Vietnam and World War II memorials, then back and forth across the Mall.  We went into the Smithsonian, the National Art Gallery, the Museum of Natural History.  About 4:00 we decided to walk back to the Capitol and see if anybody was still there.  Much to our surprise the crowd was bigger than it was when we got there in the morning.  By that time, though, we were done for the day.  My feet were telling me it was time to sit down. The Metro train back to Reagan was packed.  Susan got a seat, and I stood next to her.  We chatted with a couple from Raleigh, North Carolina, speculating on the size of the crowd.  A policeman working the rally told them the estimate was 1.5 million.  On the van ride from Reagan back to the hotel two ladies from Alabama said they heard the number was 2.1 million.  If 1.5 seemed too high, 2.1 seemed ridiculous.  I wondered if the officials working the event were having a little fun with us rubes from the country. We turned on the news when we got back to the hotel to find very little reporting of it.  We caught a replay of Glen Beck who said there were 60,000 to 75,000.  That seemed low to me, and to Susan too.  Susan tends to be apolitical, but there was a very interesting shift in her perceptions over the course of the weekend.  Before, when I would make a remark about media bias, Susan would be quick to ask, "How can you say that?  How do you know?"  During the weekend in Washington, she had been flabbergasted at the how most of the media coverage tried to downplay such a huge event. Failing that, it comes as no surprise that lefties would then universally condemn it as racist.  That our peanut farmer former president would embarrass himself by saying it was rooted in racism was sadly predictable.  According to Jimmy Carter’s libel against opponents of Barack Obama, “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is black man.” But if there was racism involved, it was hard to find it.  That didn't stop one Washington Post reporter from looking very hard for it.  Yamiche Alcindor's headlines read: "Seeking Healing, Seeing Hostility, Some at Black Family Reunion Criticize Protests Against Obama."  On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters thronged to the U.S. Capitol to angrily accuse President Obama of taking the country in the wrong direction. That's my emphasis above, but if I had to guess, I'd say our intrepid Post reporter got nowhere near the rally.  Her article itself does nothing more than recite the perceptions of a few Family Reunion participants.  Noticeably missing from her article were descriptions of any incidents, of any kind.  There was nothing to report, not even a verbal disagreement. Dorothy Height, president of National Council of Negro Women, which holds the reunion, said that although she was pleased that the protesters and the reunion participants coexisted peacefully, she was disappointed that some marchers were so crass. "They are a bad sign for democracy," said Height, 97, who supports health-care reform. "I've never heard anyone say that they wished the other presidents would fail," she said. "President Obama has shown courage and leadership in trying to tackle various problems." One must wonder where Ms. Height has been for the eight years leading up to Obama's historic election.  If anything, there was a missed opportunity for the racists. A huge conservative protest march went side by side with the Black Family Reunion on the Washington, DC Mall and there was not one incident.  In fact, tea partiers walking by would stop to watch the dance competitions and cheer along with the reunioners at the precision of the dancers.  If there was any racism that would have been the place to see it, but there was nothing. I was actually fearful that lefty agitators would see it as a wonderful time and place to start something that could smear tea partiers as racist, but they apparently didn't think of it.  Either that, or they expected any conservative rally would just naturally be a failure all on its own. I suppose it's sad commentary when opposition to health care reform has to be framed as racist.  It's a false charge and everybody knows it.  Opposition to HillaryCare was just as strong in 1993, and unlike today, we hadn't just tripled the deficit with bailouts and stimulus packages.  I have to say, I came away from the weekend with a fairly high degree of optimism.  There were tens of thousands, probably close to a half a million people there who, like Susan and me, invested a little money and a lot of time to make it to this Washington event.  We spent eighteen hours in the car to get there and back.  Not everybody traveled that far, but there were some who came farther.

This is not the crowd that plans to stay home on election day.  A great collection of pictures of the rally can be found here. Update:  David Brooks bears me out on the absence of any racial tension between the two crowds, the Black Family Reunion and the Tea Partiers. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I go running several times a week. My favorite route, because it’s so flat, is from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol and back. I was there last Saturday and found myself plodding through tens of thousands of anti-government “tea party” protesters. They were carrying “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, “End the Fed” placards and signs condemning big government, Barack Obama, socialist health care and various elite institutions. Then, as I got to where the Smithsonian museums start, I came across another rally, the Black Family Reunion Celebration. Several thousand people had gathered to celebrate African-American culture. I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with the mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands. They had joined the audience of a rap concert. Because sociology is more important than fitness, I stopped to watch the interaction. These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.

Our progressive friends call us racists because their policies and the arguments they make for them have no merit.

Obama's Good War

Fouad Ajami looks back on 9/11 and Obama's "good war" in Afghanistan.

Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands. We were rudely awakened from a decade whose gurus and pundits had announced the end of ideology, of politics itself, and the triumph of the world-wide Web and the "electronic herd." We had discovered that on the other side of the world masterminds of terror, and preachers, and their foot-soldiers were telling of America the most sordid of tales. We had become, without knowing it, a party to a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world between the autocrats and their disaffected children, between those who wanted to live a normal life and warriors of the faith bent on imposing their will on that troubled arc of geography.

Afghanistan belongs to Obama now.  He campaigned against George W. Bush on the notion that Iraq was the wrong war.  Afghanistan was where we have to carry the fight to defeat al Qaeda, he said over and over.  But like everything else he said in the run up to November 2008, it was all campaign talk, intended only to win him the brass ring.  Well, he's got the brass ring now, and fortunately Iraq was mostly stabilized before he got it.  But things aren't going so well in Afghanistan, and Afghanistan is his baby now.  So far, Obama's only discernible policies are to reward special interests with stimulus money and to continue giving campaign speeches.  How's that going to work in Afghanistan?

It Doesn't Work

From the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama began by depicting a crisis in the entitlement state, noting that "our health-care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers," especially Medicare. Unless we find a way to cauterize this fiscal hemorrhage, "we will eventually be spending more on Medicare than every other government program combined. Put simply, our health-care program is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close."

On this score he's right. Medicare's unfunded liability—the gap between revenues and promised benefits—is currently some $37 trillion over the next 75 years. Yet the President uses this insolvency as an argument to justify the creation of another health-care entitlement, this time for most everyone under age 65. It's like a variation on the old Marx Brothers routine: "The soup is terrible and the portions are too small."

There's no way a public option is going to work.  But then, health care reform is not intended to improve health care. 

The Cost of Social Justice

According to the Wall Street Journal, the gap between the rich and poor is shrinking.  Well this ought to have our lefty friends delirious with joy! 

In 2007, the top 1% of U.S. families accounted for 23.5% of all personal income in the U.S., according to economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics. That was a level not seen since the Roaring Twenties.

The top 1%'s share appears to be falling fast. Mr. Saez and other economists expect income going to the top 1% of taxpayers -- currently, those with about $400,000 a year -- will drop to somewhere between 15% and 19% of all income by 2010. That still would leave income distribution more top-heavy in the U.S. than in many other countries.

One early indication: Median chief-executive pay at companies in the S&P 500 fell 15% in 2008 (to $7.3 million), according to University of Southern California pay expert Kevin Murphy.

"Based on past experience, it looks like inequality will go down and change the long-term trend of America becoming a less egalitarian society," says Ariell Reshef, a University of Virginia economist and another student of the equality issue.

This is among several potentially far-reaching changes wrought by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles and the deep recession that ensued.

Unfortunately there is a flip side to this.  So far during recession years of 2008 and 2009 the economy has suffered a net loss of roughly 6,929,000 jobs.  3,851,000 of those losses came in 2009, and we haven't counted September, October, November, and December.

But let's stay focused on the silver lining!  A mere 7 million more people out of work is such a small price to pay in the struggle to keep people from getting richer than lefties say they ought to be!  Right?

Pressing For The Public Option

From the Democrats' perspective, without the public option there's no point to health care reform.  The ultimate goal of reform is a single-payer system.  The public option is the incremental step that just about guarantees we'll get there.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama, in a high-stakes speech Wednesday to Congress and the nation, will press for a government-run insurance option in a proposed overhaul of the U.S. health-care system that has divided lawmakers and voters for months.

White House officials say the president will detail what he wants in the health-care overhaul, as well as say he is open to better ideas on a government plan if lawmakers have them.

Better ideas will not include market oriented reforms that would put more decision making power into the hands of health care consumers.  Better ideas will not include any attempts to reduce actual costs of health care, such as training more doctors, nurses, and other providers.  No.  Obama is open only to better ideas for extending the control of government and making more Americans dependent on it.

So how's that speech going to fly?  Obama's popularity has continued sink according to opinion polls.  In the meantime Rasmussen's generic congressional ballot has the GOP at its highest level of support in years and a 7-point lead over Democrats. The House and Senate leadership say the votes are there to ram through a public option bill or something like it.  Can they be thinking it will somehow improve their popularity?

Preview: The Speech

Obama is set to give his Hail Mary speech on health care reform this evening.  Or is it health insurance reform?  Hard to know without a score card.  The Wall Street Journal carries a "leaked copy" of it in this morning's edition.  A flavor:

Critics wonder: How can a new "public option" bring meaningful competition to the health-insurance marketplace and drive down costs?

They miss the point. The great work done so far has tended to squash competition, and we would continue this work—by restricting the ability of insurance companies to design and market their policies; by regulating what coverage they can offer; by using tax distortions to keep consumers in the dark about what their health care really costs, so they will continue to treat it as a "free lunch" when it actually gobbles up more and more of their disposable incomes.

People, this is why insurance rates keep going up and up, and why a competitive marketplace, in which consumers reward those who provide high-quality care at low cost, hardly exists. And I say again, with all humility, this is a great bipartisan achievement.

Great Leap to the Wrong Side of History

There is one campaign promise that Barack Obama is making good on.  He is working extraordinarily hard to restore America's reputation in the leftist world.  Which is to say, in the interested of keeping up appearances U.S. foreign policy has been refocused on fawning over leftist totalitarian dictators.  Obama says he's reaching out, engaging our enemies, and seeking common ground, though he doesn't really seem to believe they're our enemies.  His stance on Honduras is emblematic of this new U.S. foreign policy. 

Back in June, Zelaya launched an illegal referendum to extend his rule. As recently as Thursday, he called the referendum "necessary to the legislature and the constitution" in a George Washington University speech.

The Honduran Constitution is quite clear: Any president who expresses such talk gets the boot. Hondurans have stood by it.

But the U.S., along with other nations, misread the Honduran Constitution and called it a coup. They vowed to force Honduras to take back Zelaya. The U.S. pulled visas for Honduran officials and businesses. It expelled Honduran diplomats who didn't support Zelaya.

Now it's pulled $30 million in aid and threatens to extend this crisis to forever by not recognizing Honduras' November elections.

What an odd contradiction.  Infuriated that the will of the Honduran people was "suppressed" when an unconstitutional referendum got shut down, what does the Obama team threaten?  Why to ignore the will of the Honduran people as expressed in their constitutionally mandated election this November.  There is sanity somewhere.  The rest of the world is not going along with Obama.

Meanwhile, the European Union announced it wouldn't initiate trade sanctions on Honduras as it had threatened earlier. It knew the deal and knew its interests.

Thursday, the International Monetary Fund announced it would extend a $150 million loan to Honduras, a sharp shift from the lending cutoff announced by the World Bank after the June 28 ouster of Zelaya. Again, game over, back to business.

The Organization of American States, which egged on Zelaya's illegal referendum and helped create the crisis, announced it would now focus on avoiding future "coups" — something that, if they were serious, would mean challenging dictators in democracy's clothing, an unlikely thing. But they, too, are moving on.

Unfortunately, this backwards foreign policy is not limited to Honduras.  Obama has been aggressively courting Syria.  This is the same Syria that sheltered former Iraqi Ba'ath party officials fleeing the American invasion.  The same Syria that was the primary conduit for young jihadists looking to kill American soldiers and Marines in Iraq.  Jonathon Spyer of the International Analyst Network writes:

Since coming to power seven months ago, the Obama administration has been involved in a cautious but energetic attempt to engage Syria. The American desire to mend fences with Damascus derives from Syria's importance in the totality of Obama's apparently very considerable Middle East ambitions.

The Syrians have a carefully nurtured client system which enables them to frustrate progress in a number of conflict zones - including the Israeli-Palestinian arena and Lebanon. But since Obama wants to withdraw from Iraq, and since the Syrians have played a direct role in aiding anti-US forces in that country, it is in Iraq that Washington most urgently requires Syrian cooperation.

The US has indicated that it is willing to make gestures to coax Syrian compliance. Six visits by senior US officials have taken place in recent months; Washington has announced that it will return an ambassador to Damascus; important elements of the US-sanctions policy toward Syria - regarding the supplying of export licenses for aircraft parts - have been quietly waived.

The result so far may be seen in the Baghdad explosions and Maliki's furious accusations against the Damascus regime. Of course, for seasoned watchers of the Middle East in general and Syria in particular, the logic is not hard to infer. Why on earth should Syria give up such a useful tool of pressure on the United States and on Iraq as the fostering of insurgency? It appears to be producing dividends, and its value will only rise as the US withdrawal from Iraq continues.

And it apparently costs nothing. So - best to keep the Americans and Iraqis on their toes, while at the same time professing a commitment to dialogue.

If ambitions for establishing a lasting peace in the Middle East are driving Obama administration policy, one might argue that Obama is naive, thinking good behavior can be bought from coercive dictators.  Naivete hardly seems plausible, though, when you see how the incentives are stacked up to encourage terrorism and insurgency instead. 

Another possibility is that Obama is not naive at all, and he doesn't really expect good behavior.  If that's true his plan would require only that voters to think he does.  Either way, the Obama administration is quite cordial to leftist totalitarian regimes, but cool to the point of being cold toward democratic nations. 

Conventional wisdom says the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the root of the violence in the Middle East.  So with one hand Obama holds out a carrot to Syria; for Israel, our historic ally, the stick he holds in his other.  He ignores repeated Palestinian, Iranian, and Arab promises to destroy the state of Israel, removing the need for any Middle Eastern regime to negotiate.  Clearly, they just need to give the Obama administration time to put pressure on Israel.  Nothing else is required of them.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel stood firm on Sunday on a plan to authorize hundreds of new settler homes in the occupied West Bank before a possible construction freeze, shrugging off a rebuke from Washington.

"The prime minister will decide in the coming days on the building of hundreds of additional housing unitsin order to solve existing problems in various settlements," Transport Minister Yisrael Katz told Israel Radio.

Katz held fast to the plan two days after an aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disclosed the Israeli leader's intention to authorize the new projects before considering a moratorium on new building permits.

Some 2,500 housing units are currently being built in West Bank settlements and Israeli officials said their construction would continue.

The settlement issue is a major obstacle in the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process and has opened the most serious rift in Israel's relations with the United States in a decade.

U.S. President Barack Obama has been pressuring Netanyahu to halt construction in settlements. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said peace talks suspended since December and which Washington seeks to restart, cannot resume without a freeze.

The White House voiced regret on Friday over the new building plan and said such Israeli actions made it harder to create a climate for negotiations.

Let Israel to create the climate for negotiations. Obama will judge when the Israelis have met the conditions, after conferring with our Syrian "allies," of course.

Conventional wisdom also had it that Obama blundered badly with our British allies.  The British press was all over Obama for giving Prime Minister Gordon Brown 25 DVDs to commemorate Britain's first state visit to the messiah, but it was his gift to Queen Elizabeth -- an iPod -- that had jaws dropping around the world.  I don't think either was a blunder.  Heads of democratic states get insults, leftist dictators get kisses where the sun never shines.

Unfortunately for Obama he is on the wrong side of history, and he knows it.  His rush to grab full control of the health care industry before the August congressional recess informs.  If Americans are allowed to know all the facts about what he proposes to do, they won't go along with him. 

It's a fundamental leftist truth.  The rise of leftist regimes depends upon fooling people into accepting "what's good for them."  Later on fooling them is not so important.  No need.  They won't have a choice in the matter. 

Americans are less easily fooled to begin with.  The explosion of information available on the internet makes it increasingly more difficult to do it.  That puts history is on the side of liberty. 

Those Incendiary Extremists

A Kausfiles reader gave a pretty concise explanation of what has been wrong with Obama's pitch for universal health care.

In an email not intended for publication, alert kausfiles reader J does a better job than kaus at summarizing what's (so far) gone wrong on health care:

Obama does indeed appear to have misjudged the issue.  The core of the issue was his statement that providing universal coverage and controlling long term costs were the same issue.[**]  This sounded phony, but he then let people think that he really believed that -- and of course he probably did, since why say it at that early stage if he did not believe it? Then he of course could not be specific about how he was going to achieve these immense long term savings, so that justified the suspicion about rationing, death panels, and so on.  (Emphasis in the original.)

Actually Obama did offer some thoughts on lowering costs back in April. He told a story about his grandmother, who after having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, fell and broke her hip. 

And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.

And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

So how do you — how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.  (My emphasis above.)

Well, now.  What exactly was Obama proposing?  He suggested there be an independent group of doctors, scientists, and ethicists.  Would calling it a "panel" be a stretch?  Presumably the group would offer "guidance" in dealing with the chronically ill and dying, who account for 80% of the total health care bill. 

But to conclude that Obama was considering some sort of "death panel," well, that would make you an incendiary extremist.  That 80% is a huge driver, though.  And a big reason we're having this health care debate is to avoid bankrupting ourselves.  At least, it used to be.