Libertarian Leanings

In the Ideological Battle of the Decade Mainstream Media Won Big

The following post was originally published on Pajamas Media.  I thought it relevant to republish it at his time in light of the apparent intentions of President Obama and congressional Democrats to proceed with a national takeover of the health care industry.

It was the advent of low cost, high speed internet access that did it. The shift from dial-up to cable started taking off at just about the start of this past decade, and the unforeseen result was that for the first time major newspapers and TV networks were in a serious fight to defend their turf.  Encroachment by internet news providers and pundits was pushing the mainstream media (MSM) into a battle over who gets to shape public opinion.

The mainstream media had won their control over the news because they owned the means of reaching vast numbers of people.  Suddenly, advances in internet software and network technologies made it possible for just about anybody to publish to a worldwide audience.  Grassroots journalism was born.  With the rise of the internet as a resource for news and information, skepticism over the accuracy and reliability of mainstream reporting grew, and by the middle of the decade bloggers and internet news websites had cut significantly into MSM's influence.  But from the perspective of January 2010 it’s clear. At the end of the decade MSM had won out, successfully imposing its political will on the country.

Two huge stories signaled the that internet had arrived as an alternative to the print and broadcast media.  On January 17, 1998 a news aggregation website, the Drudge Report, published a blockbuster story. It was a story that Newsweek Magazine had tried to kill.

Web Posted: 01/17/98 23:32:47 PST -- NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN

BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT

**World Exclusive**
**Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**

At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!

The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication.

This was huge. In an earlier day when the press made a story disappear it was gone. But now suddenly a major news magazine spiked a story, and it didn't go away. And that wasn’t the end of the bad news for MSM.

In September of 2004 an icon of broadcast news took a direct hit, compliments of the internet.  CBS News anchor Dan Rather had aired a 60 Minutes story alleging that the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, had been guilty of insubordination and AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. According to Rather, family influence had kept him out of trouble over it, and he claimed he had the documents to prove it.  CBS put them on their website everybody could get a close look at them. Bad move. Scrutiny began almost immediately. Within hours this comment appeared on Free Republic, setting off a series of events that brought Dan Rather's broadcast career to an early finish.

To: Howlin
Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.

In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts.

I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.

This should be pursued aggressively.

47 posted on Wednesday, September 08, 2004 11:59:43 PM by Buckhead

In those two stories, two MSM strategies for “shaping” public opinion had been effectively hamstrung. In the first instance, the story on Drudge, a major news magazine was caught trying to kill a story. In the second, a network news anchor had been caught fabricating a story.  In each case media partisanship had been starkly revealed. Cover up the dirt for a Democrat. Make up some dirt about a Republican. 

But getting caught didn't turn the media from what they still believed their mission to be – to promote a progressive agenda.  It meant they had to be more careful.  They could no longer bury a story and expect it to stay gone, and they had more careful with their facts. Old formulas weren’t working the way they used to, but the mainstream media still had the loudest voices around, and they were still as partisan as ever.

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. In conflict tactics there are certain rules that [should be regarded] as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and 'frozen.”

- Saul Alinsky

From the start his 2000 campaign for the presidency George W. Bush was a target. He was Republican when the press was overwhelmingly Democrat – a forgivable sin if he lost, but he didn't. That made him the target.  He refused to cave in when Al Gore played the race card, charging that racially motivated voter intimidation suppressed the African-American vote at Florida polls during the 2000 election. When Gore demanded selective recounts in heavily Democratic Florida counties, Bush fought back. In a case that went all the way to the US Supreme Court Bush won. Immediately liberal pundits declared Gore the should-have-been winner and Bush the illegitimate president.

The media even conducted its own recount, and found that except with the most liberal interpretation of voter intent, Bush still won. He was still the illegitimate president. A year later after all the recount dust had settled, Dan Keating and Dan Balz of the Washington Post reported:

Had Bush not been party to short-circuiting those recounts, he might have escaped criticism that his victory hinged on legal maneuvering rather than on counting the votes.

Then came 9/11. For a rare, brief moment the country stood united behind President George W. Bush. He inspired us all when he stood with his arm across the shoulders of a tired fire fighter in the rubble of what once was the World Trade Center.

"I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

The Bush presidency was transformed. His new mission was the defense of the United States and the American people.  The War on Terror was under way.

Ridding Afghanistan of the Taliban was the no-brainer.  What to do after that presented the more difficult question, but Iraq was in almost everybody's mind.  In years leading up to 9/11 prominent Democrats had gone on record: Saddam Hussein posed a threat that had to be stopped. Regime change in Iraq was US policy.  As late as eight months prior to 9/11, a Washington Post editorial warned of the danger posed by editors Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

[O]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous – or more urgent – than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction…

A week after the World Trade Center towers collapsed in New York the Bush administration began to consider taking steps against Saddam Hussein.

On Sept. 19 and 20, the Defense Policy Board, a prestigious bipartisan board of national security experts that advises the Pentagon, met for 19 hours to discuss the ramifications of the attacks of Sept. 11. The members of the group agreed on the need to turn to Iraq as soon as the initial phase of the war against Afghanistan and Mr. bin Laden and his organization is over, people familiar with the meetings said. Both Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz took part in the meetings for part of both days.

But while the group agreed on the goal of ousting Mr. Hussein, they presented a range of views, including a discussion of the many political and diplomatic obstacles to military action.

''If we don't use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster,'' Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a member of the group, said in an interview.

Members of the bi-partisan Defense Policy Board included Harold Brown, President Jimmy Carter's defense secretary; former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger; R. James Woolsey, director of central intelligence in the Clinton administration; Adm. David E. Jeremiah, the former deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; former Vice President Dan Quayle; and James R. Schlesinger a former defense and energy secretary.

This letter to the editor of the New York Times was fairly typical of the climate. 

Published: September 25, 2001

To the Editor:

Re ''U.S. to Publish Terror Evidence on bin Laden'' (front page, Sept. 24):

War on terrorism must go well beyond Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. While I am prepared to be patient and to give our president as much latitude as he needs to proceed, I will consider this war a failure if one year from now Muammar el-Qaddafi still runs Libya and Saddam Hussein still runs Iraq.

Decisive military action against Libya and Iraq will defang world terrorism much more effectively than killing bandits in Afghanistan.

SERGE LURYI

Setauket, N.Y., Sept. 24, 2001

A country at war had rallied behind its president from Texas, and the mainstream media were temporarily unable to attack their prime target.  There was no choice but to rally along and wait for an opportunity.  It would come a year and a half later.

"An organizer… does not have a fixed truth -- truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing”

- Saul Alinsky

By March of 2003 Bush had made his case. Congress voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. But then a remarkable turnaround occurred. It seems once regime change in Iraq was no longer hypothetical, it was no longer Saddam Hussein who had to be stopped.  Opponents were seeking ways that George W. Bush could be stopped. They found an opening in sixteen words from the 2003 State of the Union address.

“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

A year and a half after traveling to the African nation of Niger on behalf of the CIA's counter-proliferation experts, Joseph C. Wilson 4th, former ambassador to Iraq wrote an editorial column for the New York Times.  He accused the Bush administration of ignoring his findings and twisting intelligence in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. 

The British government published a "white paper" asserting that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an immediate danger. As evidence, the report cited Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium from an African country.

Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.

The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them.

[...]

The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.

Media luminaries picked up the story.  Tim Russert in an appearance on Imus in the Morning spoke in grave tones about the seriousness of such a thing — that a president might falsify intelligence to make a case for war. The media herd followed.

But the verbal report that Wilson had given to the CIA on his return from Africa bore little resemblance to the editorial he wrote for the Times.  If anything, the ambassadors report corroborated Bush's charge.  A July 11, 2003 statement by Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet said,

He reported back to us that one of the former Nigerien officials he met stated that he was unaware of any contract being signed between Niger and rogue states for the sale of uranium during his tenure in office. The same former official also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.

Ultimately the media had to admit that Wilson had not “debunked” the sixteen words from the 2003 State of the Union. A Senate intelligence committee report and the British Butler Report concluded that accusations of Iraqi efforts to get uranium from Africa were “well founded.”  But once the Wilson column was published Democrats and their allies in the media began an all out campaign to expose Bush duplicity.  Bush tricked us into invaded Iraq for the wrong reasons. Bush lied. Soldiers died. The intelligence had been twisted.

“The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people...”

- Saul Alinsky

In January of 2004 the US Army informed the media that allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were the subject of a criminal investigation that had been under way since late 2003. In February the military announced that 17 soldiers had been suspended, and in March that charges had been filed against six. That investigation resulted in eleven criminal convictions of soldiers involved in the abuse.

In addition to the criminal investigation the Army opened an Article 15-6 inquiry into the conduct of the 800th Military Police Brigade, the unit in charge of Abu Ghraib.  The results of that inquiry were made public in May of 2004 in a report by Major General Antonio Taguba.  Between January and March the media showed little interest in the reports.

In April 2004, 60 Minutes II made it the subject of a broadcast and a feeding frenzy was on. The New Yorker published an article by Seymour Hersh, Torture at Abu Ghraib, that asked “How far up does responsibility go?” Between late April and early June, the New York Times ran a front page story about the abuse at Abu Ghraib on 34 out of 37 days.

Leading Democrats piled on. Senator Ted Kennedy had an answer for Hersh. "Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. Management." By implication the abuse was systemic and authorized at the highest levels of the administration.

During the summer of 2005 the media and Democrats were bent on proving systemic abuse. Speaking of American soldiers stationed at Guantanamo, Senator Dick Durbin compared them to Nazis. Stories of abuse reached worldwide audiences. Michael Isikoff published an item in Newsweek claiming that interrogators had desecrated the Koran by flushing it down a toilet. Somehow it never occurred to Isikoff that a book might not fit down a toilet. Newsweek formally retracted the story, but not before at least sixteen people were killed in rioting throughout the Middle East.

But the passions were inflamed against George Bush. He was al Qaeda's best recruiter, they said.

By 2006 the media had turned their attentions to secret programs that had been implemented to fight the war on terror. In late 2005 the Washington Post reported on the existence of secret CIA detention facilities, also known as “black sites”. A month or so later, the New York Times reported the existence of the NSA surveillance program in which international telephone traffic was monitored. It became commonly referred to as the, “warrantless wiretap” or the “domestic” surveillance program since one side of the phone call could be in the US. In 2006 the New York Time, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post all published stories revealing the existence of terrorist finance tracking program.

While all of this was getting play in the media as more threatening to American civil liberties than protective against terror, the insurgency in Iraq was on the rise. Democrats and their media allies behaved as if the insurgents were deaf and blind. An insurgency prevails by the perception that its violence can't be stopped. The media focused their efforts on the 2006 midterm elections, unconcerned that they were no longer neutral observers. Here is a sampling of headlines – by no means complete –all from the Washington Post and all from the first weeks of October.

• Facing Reality in Iraq
  
• Blind Into Baghdad; Like scenes out of "Desperate Housewives," the war room machinations of the White House.
• Bob Woodward and 'State of Denial'
  
• How to Lose a War; The Bush administration's mismanagement of Iraq has been chronicled in shocking detail.

By late 2006 it was clear that the surge in insurgent violence in Iraq had to be countered by a surge in US forces in Iraq. The troop surge was accompanied by a change in strategy from force protection to counterinsurgency. Leading Democrats deemed it a failure even before any troops were in place. In April 2007 Harry Reid said the troop surge was not working and the war was lost.

"I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and — you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows — (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday," said Reid.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not cut off funding for the troops even while declaring the war a blunder.

Democrats will never cut off funding for our troops when they are in harm's way, but we will hold the president accountable. He has to answer for his war. He has dug a hole so deep he can't even see the light on this. It's a tragedy. It's a stark blunder.

But the surge did not fail. The surge troops were finally in place by mid 2007, and a steady decline in the level of violence in Iraq began.

By the end of the 2008 presidential primary season, the war in Iraq was largely over. Presidential candidate Barack Obama, when put on the spot by Bill O’Reilly, was forced to admit that it “succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated.” But General David Petraeus, architect of the surge, anticipated it. And George Bush, who put General Petraeus in command, anticipated it.

But the media campaign had done the job of shaping public opinion. What began seven years earlier amid bi-partisan agreement, that Saddam Hussein represented a threat to the United States that could no longer be ignored, turned into an extraordinarily successful campaign to poison the Republican brand and George W. Bush.  The saddest part was how media coverage had turned a victory of epic proportions into a tragedy, a blunder, a war undertaken for the wrong reasons.  But the fact remains.  Against the odds a true parliamentary democracy has been established in Iraq.

And so the media stopped bringing it up.  The 2008 presidential campaign was heating up and new targets were on the horizon.  Sarah Palin found herself in the cross hairs. The disparity in treatment by the press between Palin and Barack Obama was almost laughable. Hoards of reporters dashed off to Alaska in search of anything with which to smear Palin and her family. Nothing illustrates the contempt of media elites towards Palin (and Republicans) as the joke David Letterman made at the expense of fourteen year old Willow Palin.

"One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game," Letterman said, "during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez."

Contrast Palin coverage to the obsequiousness accorded Obama. The New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny asked President Obama at a press conference,

“During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office? Enchanted you the most from serving in this office? Humbled you the most? And troubled you the most?”

The absurdity of the media coverage would be something to laugh about until you look at where it has gotten us.  In 2000 George W. Bush promoted the concept of the ownership society.  His domestic programs were aimed at empowering the individual, and to do that he planned to lower taxes, reduce regulation, improve the education system, and reform government programs that encouraged dependence.  The War on Terror took the Bush presidency in a different direction, but it was the media campaign against it that did the country the most harm.

It wasn't enough to oppose policies in good faith.  Bush was attacked on his integrity.  By cutting marginal tax rates Bush was accused of giving away tax revenue to his rich friends.  The failure of US intelligence to accurately determine the state of Iraq's weapons programs was the media's evidence that George Bush lied and exaggerated to make his case for war.  The war itself was said to be personal, since Saddam Hussein had launched an assassination attempt at Bush the elder.  Saddam Hussein, once considered such a threat that US policy supported regime change in Iraq, had become the victim to Bush. 

The campaign had been so successful that anything Bush had ever proposed or supported was tainted by association.  The Republican brand was in ruins.  When the financial crisis struck, naturally it was blamed on Bush.  It was the lax regulation of Wall Street firms not the fraud and lax lending standards promoted by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that caused it all. 

The backlash has been furious.  The super majority that voters gave Democrats out of exhaustion from everything Bush has led the country to a precipice.  Bank bailouts have been used as leverage for government control of executive compensation.  The auto industry bailout has given the federal government and the United Auto Workers union ownership of auto companies.  Barack Obama even demanded regime change at GM, forcing Rick Waggoner to step down as CEO.  Worst of all the government is about to embark upon a takeover of the health care industry.  And all of it opposed by a majority of voters.

Although the left leaning media have driven the country further left than it has ever been, the chances of it remaining there are pretty slim.  Those who would once have been called "the silent majority" are now "the tea party" and they are not so silent.  No where has their impact been more pronounced than in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states.  The special election for the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy was expected to go to Democrat Martha Coakley in a cakewalk.  She lost to Republican Scott Brown.  But the battle is far from over.

At this moment small-L libertarians and conservatives are resurgent, but there is an awfully long way to go to get the country re-focused on promoting individual liberty, responsibility and empowerment, instead of greater government control and entitlements.  And that's because, at this moment, at the end of this first decade in the new millennium, the mainstream media are the victors in their ideological fight against conservatism.

Voter Disapproval of Obama at Its Worst

Voter reaction to the Obama's vaunted health care summit is driving the Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index into the dirt.  It now matches the lowest it has ever been at -21.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows that 22% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-three percent (43%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -21. That matches the lowest Approval Index rating yet recorded for President Obama.

The only other time the Approval Index was this low came in late December as the U.S. Senate prepared to approve its version of health care reform (see trends). Most voters continue to oppose the proposed health care plan.

The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve.

Driving The Left Into a Ditch?

My latest article is up on Pajamas Media.

The Clintons' legendary penchant for triangulations takes a Machiavellian turn as the midterms approach.

Read more...

Americans Can Speak for Themselves

So says Froma Harrop.  But apparently Harrop is as deaf as a post, because she can't hear what we're saying.

Have you voted on any of the Democratic health care reform plans? Me neither.

No such vote was ever taken. But with coordination that the Rockettes would envy, Republicans insist that "the American people have spoken" on the matter, and they want the proposals killed.

House Republican Leader John Boehner: "The American people have spoken, loudly and clearly: They do not want Washington Democrats' government takeover of health care."

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell: "The American people do not want this bill to pass."

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele: "The American people have spoken. The White House hasn't heard their message."

Quite a coincidence, these guys saying the same thing on the same day. No matter. What they're saying is nonsense.

Actually, Ms. Harrop, I did vote, and I voted against all of the Democrats' health care plans.  I did it by contributing to the Scott Brown for Senate campaign. 

ObamaCare Health Care Summit - Kickoff and Reaction

Congressman Paul Ryan from Wisconsin was the Republican leadoff hitter at Obama's health care summit yesterday.  Ryan argued very effectively that ObamaCare would "bend the cost curve" up instead of down.

Over the course of the entire 6-hour summit, neither Obama nor any of the the rest of the Democrats were able to respond to Ryan's argument with any kind of credibility.  You can see it in the next clip of Frank Luntz and his healthcare focus group, which appeared last night on Hannity.

The first clip comes via Hot Air. The second clip comes via Logistics Monster.

Rubio's "Incendiary" Message

Writing in The New Republic senior editor John B. Judis warns about the "threat" posed by Marco Rubio.

But using his own life story, he framed the choice facing Americans in a way that evoked the contrast between his Horatio Alger capitalism and Obama’s or Nancy Pelosi’s socialism. America, he said, “is the only country in the world where today’s employee is tomorrow’s employer. And yet, there are still people in American politics who, for some reason, cling to this belief that America is better off adopting the economic policies of nations whose people immigrate here from there.”  

Rubio wasn’t referring to immigrants from the capitalist Philippines or Costa Rica, but those, like his own family, who came from socialist Cuba. “Do I want my children to grow up in the country that I grew up in or do I want them to grow up in a country like the one my parents grew up in?” he asked. The audience knew immediately what he was saying—and the choice he was posing—but his incendiary message was implicit and softened by the insertion of his biography.

What absurd lefty hysteria, to imagine the concept of employees eventually becoming employers, an "incendiary message." 

Questions That Don't Occur to Lefties

In light of the current liberal mindset which blames Wall Street greed and predatory lenders for the current sad state of our economy, Thomas Sowell presents a couple of questions.

Take Wall Street "greed." Is there any evidence that people in Wall Street were any less interested in making money during all the decades and generations when investments in housing were among the safest investments around? If their greed did not bring on an economic disaster before, why would it bring it on now?

As for lenders, how could they have expected to satisfy their greed by lending to people who were not likely to repay them?

Since our leftist congressional majorities can't think of anything but more government regulation to remedy this depressed economic state of affairs, we should expect it to drag on for years.

A Liberal Almost Gets It

Susan Estrich is beginning to face up to what's really the matter with Democrats and what's really the matter with Obama's grand plan for health care reform.

The White House is trying to treat the problem with its health care proposal as a communications problem.

It's not that people don't want the plan; they just don't know how great it is. Our fault, says the president, for not communicating more effectively.

Not so fast.

[...]

I'm all for letting people with pre-existing conditions buy affordable insurance. But letting a slew of older, sicker people into any pool will dramatically increase premiums for everyone in that pool. (What did they say about letting everyone into the pool with federal workers?) So you have to make the young, healthy people join, too, or the costs will be exorbitant.

So, hypothetically, now everyone has insurance — either they pay for it, or we do. Then what happens? Everybody gets more health care. Just exactly how does that save us money? Just exactly how do we pay for it?

Cost controls? In order to get refills for my arthritis medicine every month, I have to get pre-approval each time from the insurance company, which this week has taken most of the week. I always get the approval, of course, because this is medicine you don't stop taking after a month or two. If the insurance company saves money, it's only because making the pharmacist jump through more hoops sometimes means I miss a dose or two. This cannot be what they mean by cost control.

Get rid of unnecessary tests? I'm not really into unnecessary tests. It's getting the necessary tests approved that causes so much trouble.

Paying doctors and hospitals less to give us more? That's bound to work…

Ms. Estrich is giving her fellow Democrats credit way beyond their due.  It's her unspoken assumption that Democrats are simply mistaken.  Somehow Democrats don't quite understand that the current health care takeover plan can't possibly do what they tell us it will do.  But they understand.  You can tell. 

You can tell from the two different stories.  Progressives have one narrative for public consumption: nobody will ever need to worry about their health care, ever again.  But the other discussion, the one that occurs when progressives speak with each other, is all about political strategy.  In that discussion progressives are quite candid about who are primary beneficiaries of health care reform.

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.

But we, the stupid people, are gumming up the works by asking questions.  How will this plan reduce costs?  Will it lower costs enough to pay for all this expanded coverage?  Where is the money coming from if it doesn't?  What about the side effects?  Are there other ways we could accomplish the same thing? 

I suppose it's gratifying to find at least one Democrat, Susan Estrich, who's pondered those questions.  But the Democrats in Washington don't have any answers because the questions have nothing whatever to do with the health care legislation they're trying to pass.  It's a political strategy, stupid.  Progressives hope to create dependency on a scale to feed an enduring progressive majority for the next 30 or 40 years.

That's the part that Ms. Estrich needs to get.

George Will at CPAC 2010

George Will spoke at CPAC 2010. The video is below. You'll want to turn up the volume on your computer to hear it, but it's well worth the listen.Get ready for an entertaining thirty minutes.

The Constitution and Freedom

Fox contributor Judge Andrew Napolitano created a five part series on the U.S. Constitution that can be found at Freedom Watch On Fox. Here is the first in that series.

I ran across the video at The Tea Party Patriots' Contract from America.  Follow the link and vote your own top ten Tea Party priorities for America.