Michael D. Tanner lists some of the reasons we need to defeat the democrat Health Care Bill: staggering costs resulting in higher taxes and insurance premiums for which working Americans will get lower quality and rationed services.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, Sen. Harry Reid has given us a giant turkey of a health-care bill. At 2,074 pages and more than 370,000 words, it’s officially “scored” as costing $849 billion over 10 years—$400 million per page, or $2.3 million per word.

But that doesn’t come close to measuring its true cost. The bill uses various accounting gimmicks to hide its true cost. For example the bill doesn’t include more than $200 billion needed to prevent a 21 percent cut in Medicare next year. [The CBO “score” actually assumes Reid cuts Medicare 23 percent—Ed.] That cost has been spun off into a separate bill, even though the Senate voted down that approach last month.

Moreover (as Jeffrey H. Anderson notes), much of the spending is back-loaded. The bill doesn’t start spending until 2014, and only costs $9 billion that year. But by 2019, the annual cost hits $196 billion. The minority staff of the Senate Budget Committee reports that, if you factor out all the budget gimmicks and look at the 10 years of actual implementation, the cost is closer to $2.5 trillion. ...

much of the cost has simply been shifted from the federal budget onto the backs of workers, businesses and state governments. Judging by previous reforms, as much as 60 percent of the cost won’t show up in government accounting.

To pay for all the new spending, Reid would enact at least 15 new or increased taxes totaling more than $493 billion.

But the cost alone doesn’t begin to describe how intrusive this bill would be for the average American. For instance, it would require everyone to buy a government-designed insurance plan, even if it was more expensive than their current policy. Failure to comply brings a penalty of up to $6,750 for a family of four.

Another provision would mandate that employers provide insurance to their workers. If they fail to do so, and if even a single worker qualified for federal subsidies, the employer could be fined up to $750 per employee. The CBO estimates that those penalties will amount to more than $28 billion.

Unemployment is now 10.2 percent, and the Senate bill will make it more costly to hire workers. And because the penalty only applies in the case of subsidy-eligible workers, it is low-wage and unskilled workers that will suffer the most.

Of course, the plan contains the government-run “public option” that many experts believe will ultimately crowd out private insurers. And don’t be misled by Reid’s “opt-out” provision: It comes with so many restrictions that it will be nearly impossible for a state to actually opt out.

Besides, there won’t be any opting out of the taxes that will ultimately be necessary to pay for it.

Finally, the bill sets the stage for government-imposed rationing. If you think the recent controversy over mammograms is something, just wait until the dozens of new boards, commissions and agencies created by this bill get to work. The “reform” also gives the secretary of Health and Human Services broad new powers to determine “quality,” “efficiency” and “appropriate utilization.”

At first, these restrictions would only apply to government programs like Medicare, but they’d create the framework for eventual extension to private insurance.

If Reid gets the 60 votes he needs to pass this, US taxpayers, businesses and patients can expect to pay a high price for this congressional feast.

Hold on to your hats. Sarah Palin’s book has actually garnered a positive review from San Francisco liberal democrat Sandra Tsing Loh, and in Salon no less. Tsing Loh concedes that Palin’s opus has “surprising charms.”

Now hold your horses, you snarky, lefty, NPR-listening, New York Times-subscribing readers of Salon. I haven’t jumped ship to declare Sarah Palin herself “great.” I’m from California, after all; I am not a creationist, I am not pro-life, I have never shot a moose. Nor is my culinary specialty an Alaskan dish called “moose chili.” Here on the Left Coast, along with our hummus, we prefer “turkey chili,” which is perhaps less gamey and lower in fat but in the end, I ask you, is it really more humane? (Who killed the turkey? Was it a person or a corporation? This Trader Joe’s we speak of—is he union? Is his name actually “Joe”? And what is his relation to Big Oil’s manipulation of the rising price of Bristol Bay canned fishery salmon to 27 cents a pound?) These are the complexities one ponders at night while falling asleep under the gristly if at times oddly tasty caribou stew that is Sarah Palin’s new 400-plus-page memoir….

(W)hat’s refreshing is that Palin seems unafraid to express herself, warts and all—informal campaign motto: “Heels on! Gloves off!”—and the book just goes where it goes. Much has already been made of her freewheeling critiques, not just of Democrats but also of Republican Party insiders and McCain 2008 campaign managers, particularly in the gloomy waning days of the run. (“Schmidt leveled his eyes at me. ‘We don’t have the money Obama does and the numbers don’t look good. We’ve got to change things up.’ I AGREE. I was eager to hear a new strategy. ‘So,’ he continued, ‘headquarters is flying in a nutritionist.’” Ba-dump-bump!) She is forthcoming enough about her personal failings. Belying her shellacked outer shell, more reminiscent to me of Anita Bryant than Tina Fey, Palin confesses a not-ready-for-prime-time horror at Trig’s Down syndrome diagnosis and relates at least one fairly satisfying campaign trail fight with husband Todd. As opposed to Bush’s post-Yale reinvention of himself as a Texas cowboy, Palin doesn’t seem to be making this folksy stuff up. And really, who would want to? While courting Palin as a teen, Todd gave her “gold nugget earrings”; with only one phone line in the house, she and Todd yapped at night on their back porches on fishing boat radios, until they realized every commercial trucker trundling through town could hear them; the wedding rings were each $35, the post-nuptial dinner was at Wendy’s. All this in the town of Wasilla, which, due to stratospheric sales of this particular product, Wal-Mart has deemed “the Duct Tape capital of the world.”

In Palin’s “Little House on the Tundra” (her own coinage), the very state of Alaska seems to have its own sound, its own language, its own quaint patois. There are so many more colorful sayings than that “pit bull with lipstick” quip! Things grow “faster than fireweed in July”; bench warming during sports games is known as “riding the pine.”

There is the truly startling tale of their neighbor Doc. A private bush pilot, he was electrocuted and fell off a ladder while hand-draping fluorescent flagging over power lines so he could more safely land his Citabria at home. Never one to give up, after the accident Doc “retrained himself to be a left-handed, one-armed dentist”! Writes Palin of her huntin’ dad (who is known for palming balmy, just-removed moose eyeballs and warming fish eggs in his mouth), “So a lot of what Alaskans ate, we raised or hunted: moose, caribou, ptarmigan, and ducks. Dad and his friends became their own small-game taxidermists. Even today, my parents’ living room looks like a natural history museum. And when an earthquake hits, Dad can tell the magnitude by how fast the tail wags on the stuffed cougar.” As Frontier literature, I believe “Going Rogue” compares favorably to the Natty Bumpo stories of James Fenimore Cooper. And who wants to argue with me?

Indeed, by the end of this book, I thought, Never mind the hundreds of thousands of reasons the fiery Republican femme fatale is hated in, for instance, my oh-so-blue state of California. Honestly, a fair amount of what makes Sarah Palin weird is the very same stuff that makes Alaska weird.

Read the whole thing.

I can think of one prominent blogger who is going to have a cow when he reads this.

Don Troiani, Bunker Hill

From Gateway Pundit:

Senate Democrats will only deliberate 10 hours on Saturday before they vote to nationalize one-sixth of the US economy.

The bill will nationalize the nation’s health care industry, increase costs, ration care, tax cosmetic surgery, cut Medicare, charge a monthly abortion fee, and take away your freedom.

Please take time tomorrow and Saturday to call your US Senator.

HERE IS THE PHONE LIST.

Don’t let the democrats destroy our health care system.

Support for this disastrous bill is down to 40% with 52% opposing.

Heaven knows, Andrew Sullivan is a prolific and occasionally intelligent blogger. Andrew combines a rather wide ranging curiosity with a penchant for enthusiastic argument. But… Andrew has turned into a textbook case demonstrating how sexual deviants, though often extraordinarily talented, are too frequently irrational, irresponsible, and abusive of positions of authority and trust.

A number of prominent bloggers marveled back in 2005 and 2006 as Andrew Sullivan magically transformed himself from a fervent supporter of the invasion of Iraq into a constant complainer about detainee treatment and enhanced interrogations. Frankly, it was impossible to fail to notice that Andrew Sullivan’s emotionalism on the subject of harsh treatment of jihadist detainees had the intensely subjective character of a hysterical sissy mentally projecting a grotesquely exaggerated version of detainee sufferings upon himself and then protesting accordingly. I believe it was Micky Kaus, around that time, who dubbed him “Excitable Andrew.”

Unfortunately, the psychosexual perversity just keeps happening.

Beyond the big salty tears that pour down Andrew’s hirsute cheeks over the sufferings of those poor little Jihadi terrorists, his next major insanity focuses on Sarah Palin, and Andrew’s behavior in relation to Palin is not a pretty sight.

It’s not easy to understand exactly why, but it is clear that an attractive, charismatic woman with conservative views has an enormous emotional impact on Andrew Sullivan. He has been blogging about crazed theories of his own about her family and publishing an endless series of attacks and accusations directed at Sarah Palin ever since she first appeared on the national political stage last year. The appearance of Sarah Palin’s book recently drove Andrew right around the bend. He published a lengthy list of alleged inaccuracies, and had to take a day off from blogging in order to obsess over how much he hates Sarah Palin.

It is more than a little unseemly for a major magazine like the Atlantic to offer a platform for Andrew Sullivan to use to throw the homosexual tantrums in which he lashes out so viciously and unrelentingly at Sarah Palin. The reader becomes uncomfortable, reluctantly recognizing in Sullivan’s rants the bitter jealousy of the pansy for the beauty and sexual attractiveness of the real woman, the obsessive hatred of the inverted and the sexually diseased for someone so conspicuously normal and healthy.

When you come right down to it, we Americans do not need the political advice of a non-citizen British subject, endless lectures on morality from a sexual pervert, or disquisitions of the proper limits of violence from a sissy. We also do not need Sullivan’s exhibitions of sexual hostility toward Sarah Palin.

He was recently arrested for drug law violations in Massachusetts. He is HIV positive, and consequently ineligible for naturalization. He has apparently admitted that accusations of attempts on his part to expose US residents to potentially fatal sexually transmitted disease are true.

Robert Stacy McCain is perfectly correct in his suggestion that the US should DEPORT ANDREW SULLIVAN! Do it.

Barack Obama received a lectureship in Law at the University of Chicago without ever publishing any legal articles or monographs. He won election to the Illinois State Senate (in a solid democrat district) without opposition by disqualifying his primary opponents. He won a seat in the United States Senate effectively unopposed (Alan Keyes ran a token candidacy) because the real Republican candidate withdrew after a democrat judge disgraced and humiliated him by releasing his scandal-fodder divorce papers. Then, Obama was elected President of the United States, having done nothing as a Senator except run for president, with a record completely void of meaningful political accomplishment of any kind. He recently followed up all that by being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for absolutely nothing.

On his current trip to Asia, Obama managed to add yet another meritless achievement to his already lengthy list. President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea, who himself is a practioner of Tae Kwon Do (the Korean version of Karate, noted for lots of kicking) presented Obama with a black belt. Needless to say, the new TKD black belt has never practiced, never tested, never so much as thrown a kick.

Obama could easily identify with the Duke of Wellington who, when asked which of his numerous honors and titles he most esteemed, identified the Order of the Garter because it had “none of this damned nonsense about merit in it.”

LA Times

Lindsey Graham must have decided that he wants to keep his job. Yesterday he left Eric Holder baffled during Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings, simply by asking him: Can you give me a case in United States history where a enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?

This dialogue then followed:

GRAHAM: If bin Laden were caught tomorrow, would it be the position of this administration that he would be brought to justice?

HOLDER: He would certainly be brought to justice, absolutely.

GRAHAM: Where would you try him?

HOLDER: Well, we’d go through our protocol. And we’d make the determination about where he should appropriately be tried. [...]

GRAHAM: If we captured bin Laden tomorrow, would he be entitled to Miranda warnings at the moment of capture?

HOLDER: Again I’m not—that all depends. I mean, the notion that we—
GRAHAM: Well, it does not depend. If you’re going to prosecute anybody in civilian court, our law is clear that the moment custodial interrogation occurs the defendant, the criminal defendant, is entitled to a lawyer and to be informed of their right to remain silent.

The big problem I have is that you’re criminalizing the war, that if we caught bin Laden tomorrow, we’d have mixed theories and we couldn’t turn him over—to the CIA, the FBI or military intelligence—for an interrogation on the battlefield, because now we’re saying that he is subject to criminal court in the United States. And you’re confusing the people fighting this war.

NYM made the same point as Mr. Graham last week.

4:40 video

Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for giving mankind scientific advice about the earth’s climate, but how good a scientific authority is he really?

Here he is a few days ago talking with Conan O’Brian about geothermal energy.

1:24 video

Quote the Goracle:

“two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ‘cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees”
————————————————
John Derbyshire (who majored in mathematics at University College, London) corrects the Nobel laureate.

The geothermal gradient is usually quoted as 25–50 degrees Celsius per mile of depth in normal terrain (not, e.g., in the crater of Kilauea). Two kilometers down, therefore, (that’s a mile and a quarter if you’re not as science-y as Al) you’ll have an average gain of 30–60 degrees — exploitable for things like home heating, though not hot enough to make a nice pot of tea. The temperature at the earth’s core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius, though these guys claim it’s much less, while some contrarian geophysicists have posted claims up to 9,000 degrees. The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on bigtime, things get up over 10 million degrees.

If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was “several million degrees,” we’d be a star.

————————————————
Of course, there is no real reason for surprise. The Washington Post once looked up Albert Gore’s Harvard record, and reported:

For all of Gore’s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 (Man’s Place in Nature) and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year. The self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet avoided all courses in mathematics and logic throughout college, despite his outstanding score on the math portion of the SAT (730). As was the case with many of his classmates, his high school math grades had dropped from A’s to C’s as he advanced from trigonometry to calculus in his senior year.

When John C. Davis, a retired teacher and assistant headmaster at St. Albans, was recently shown his illustrious former pupil’s college board achievement test scores, he inspected them closely with a magnifier and shook his head, chuckling quietly at the science results.

“Four eighty-eight! Terrible” Davis declared upon inspecting the future vice president’s 488 score (out of a possible 800) in physics.

“Hmmmm. Chemistry. Five-nineteen. He didn’t do too well in chemistry.”

An hospitable Leopard Seal (Hydrurga leptonyx) makes every effort to feed National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen, but is frustrated by the strange incompetence of the clueless biped at the simple feat of eating penguin.

1:48 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Megan McArdle reads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) report on ObamaCare and finds that the prognosis is bad. Democrats can’t simply legislate more health care loaves and fishes miraculously into existence.

(T)he most worrying item is tucked into the CMS’s “caveats and limitations of estimates” section, which is well worth reading. They point out that they, like most other agencies, are assuming a sort of frictionless universe in which 34 million new people demanding more health services increases the supply of health services in order to meet that demand. That is not, notes the CMS, a very realistic assumption:

In estimating the financial impacts of H.R. 3962, we assumed that the increased demand for health care services could be met without market disruptions. In practice, supply constraints might interfere with providing the services desired by the additional 34 million insured persons. Price reactions—that is, providers successfully negotiating higher fees in response to the greater demand—could result in higher total expenditures or in some of this demand being unsatisfied. Alternatively, providers might tend to accept more patients who have private insurance (with relatively attractive payment rates) and fewer Medicaid patients, exacerbating existing access problems for the latter group. Either outcome (or a combination of both) should be considered plausible and even probable.

The latter possibility is especially likely in the case of the higher volume of Medicaid services. Despite a provision to increase payment rates for primary care to Medicare levels, most Medicaid payments would still be well below average. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that a significant portion of the increased demand for Medicaid would not be realized.

We have not attempted to model that impact or other plausible supply and price effects, such as supplier entry and exit or cost-shifting towards private payers. A specific estimate of these potential outcomes is impracticable at this time, given the uncertainty associated with both the magnitude of these effects and the interrelationships among these market dynamics. We may incorporate such factors in future estimates, should we determine that they can be estimated with a reasonable degree of confidence. For now, we believe that consideration should be given to the potential consequences of a significant increase in demand for health care meeting a relatively fixed supply of health care providers and services.

In other words, while we are nominally increasing the number of “the insured”, it’s not clear we’re increasing their access to health care very much. The supply of health care services is actually pretty inelastic, because it depends on relatively scarce labor. There’s already a nursing shortage, and doctors already don’t want to become GPs because the pay is mediocre, the work is routine, and the hours aren’t particularly compelling. To some extent they can be replaced by nurse practitioners—but they are neither particularly cheap, nor in endless supply. And there’s a limit to how much of our health care costs we can fix by replacing current workers with less skilled labor.

When you increase the demand for something without increasing the supply, you either get price increases, or shortages. Neither is what the authors are promising for their bills.

(Yes, yes, I know what you’re about to say . . . end the AMA cartel’s artificial restrictions on entry into the medical profession! That’s a different post, but here’s the short version: the constraint on the supply of doctors isn’t the medical school slots, but the residency slots. And we’re already importing a substantial number of doctors to fill our family practice slots, because about a third of them go unfilled during the “match”. This does not suggest that there are hordes of eager potential doctors clamoring for a crack at family practice. There’s a lot of demand for specialist slots. But creating more cardiac surgeons will not put much downward pressure on health care costs.)

But this is not an indictment of the bill’s ability to control costs, as of the ability of any bill to control costs. Controlling costs means consuming less health care. There is no magic pot of money waiting to be painlessly seized from some undeserving wretch, preferably one that voters already hate. The only way we are going to cut costs is by cutting someone’s benefits.

THE ECONOMY IS SO BAD, that . . .

I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.

CEO’s are now playing miniature golf.

I ordered a burger at McDonalds and the kid behind the counter asked, “Can you afford fries with that?”

If the bank returns your check marked “Insufficient Funds,” you call them and ask if they meant you or them.

Parents in Beverly Hills fired their nannies and learned their children’s names.

A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico .

Motel Six won’t leave the light on anymore.

The Mafia is laying off judges.

Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.

Congress says they are looking into this Bernard Madoff scandal. (Oh Great!! The guy who made $50 Billion disappear is being investigated by the people who made $1.5 Trillion disappear.)

Hat tip to Bill Laffer.

Rightwingliberal is extremely impressed with the success of the democrat’s stimulus package. The government’s own web-site (Recovery.gov) demonstrates that Washington has managed to figure out a way to spend money, and save jobs, in Congressional districts that don’t exist.

I really, really wanted to believe this was an Onion move; then I actually feared some clever lefty had laid a trap for over-eager center-right bloggers.

It is neither. The Stimulus tracking site really does tout – and proudly, money that goes to phantom Congressional Districts.

Bill McMorris (Watchdog.org) has the details on North Dakota.

On a whim, I took a look at Virginia.

Among other things . . .

Over $2.26 million was spent in the “12th Congressional District,” which only exists in the fevered recesses of Tom Davis’ ambition.

Another $2M- plus went to the “00 Congressional District” (creating or saving exactly 2.5 jobs in the process)

More than $2M went to such venerable Virginia Districts as the 36th and 26th (neither seen since the 19th Century), plus the 79th (which can only mean Obama has created a new and more perfect dimension to spend the money)

Hat tip to Adam Bitely.

There was a time when American leaders did not bow to foreign princes.

Wesley Pruden delivers some well-deserved criticism of Barack Obama’s mistakes in presidential protocol.

So far it’s a memorable trip. He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did. No president before him so abused custom, traditions, protocol (and the country he represents). Several Internet sites published a rogue’s gallery showing how other national leaders – the prime ministers of Israel, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Russia and Dick Cheney among them – have greeted Emperor Akihito with a friendly handshake and an ever-so-slight but respectful nod (and sometimes not even that).

Now we know why Mr. Obama stunned everyone with an earlier similar bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, only the bow to the Japanese emperor was far more flamboyant, a sign of a really deep sense of inferiority. He was only practicing his bow in Riyadh. Sometimes rituals are learned with difficulty. It took Bill Clinton months to learn how to return a military salute worthy of a commander in chief; like any draft dodger, he kept poking a thumb in his eye until he finally got it. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, seems right at home now giving a wow of a bow. ...

Some of the president’s critics are giving him a hard time, and it’s true that this president seems never to have studied much American history. Not bowing to foreign potentates was what 1776 was all about. His predecessors learned with no difficulty that the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye. Can anyone imagine George Washington, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson making a similar gesture of servile submission? Or Harry Truman? Or FDR, who famously served the lowly hot dog, with ballpark mustard, to the king and queen of England? John F. Kennedy, on the eve of a trip to London, sharply warned Jackie not to curtsy to the queen.

Douglas MacArthur, who ranked above mere heads of state in his own mind, once invented his own protocol on greeting Emperor Hirohito. The emperor, the father of Akihito, wanted to meet MacArthur soon after he arrived to become the military regent of Japan in 1945, perhaps to thank him for saving the throne at the end of World War II. When the emperor invited MacArthur to call on him, the general sent word that the emperor should call on him – speaking of breaches of custom – and the two men were photographed together, astonishing the Japanese. The emperor arrived in full formal dress, cutaway coat and all, and MacArthur received him in summer khakis, sans tie, with his hands stuffed casually in his back pockets. Further astonishing the Japanese, he towered over the diminutive emperor.

Read the whole thing.

Andrew Malcolm, at the LA Times, sits on the sidelines, marveling at the enormous avalanche of leftwing abuse prompted by the publisher’s release of Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue.

Wow, for somebody who’s supposed to be such a political joke, an Arctic ditz and eminently dismissable as a serious anything except maybe a stay-at-home hockey mom, Sarah Palin is sure drawing an awful lot of attention from Democrats and eager critics.

The launch of her “Going Rogue” interviews Monday on “Oprah,” of her book today, of her on-air chat today with Rush Limbaugh at 10 a.m. Pacific and of her mid-America bus book tour Wednesday ignited a surprisingly large blizzard of derogatory Democrat dis-missives.

Every few minutes another note from Democratic National Committee operatives and others dropped into electronic mailboxes across the media-verse, helpfully passing on even the tiniest tidbit of negative news about Palin.

You know how sometimes a friend tells you how much he/she doesn’t really care about….

...someone else. Really doesn’t! And repeats it a sufficient number of times that you become convinced of precisely the opposite?

So maybe she does matter after all.

photo:Vaclav Silha

London Times:

Czech photographer Vaclav Silha shooting on the banks of the Grumeti River in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania happened to be in the right place at the right time to record a crocodile’s untimely end.

(An) incautious croc (Crocodylus niloticus) got too close to a female (Hippopotamus amphibius) who had calves and the whole group gathered into a defensive circle.

“The crocodile suddenly raced across the backs of the hippos. It might have panicked and thought it was an escape route. It was the worst choice the reptile could ever have made. And it was definitely its last.

“The island of hippos erupted with teeth and all I could see was the crocodile being repeatedly crushed in their huge mouths. His body slipped below the water and I didn’t see him again.”

Oregon democrat Earl Blumenauer made liberals happy with a New York Times editorial calling conservative critics of democrat Health Care Reform “liars” and ridiculing the very idea that what Sarah Palin referred to on Facebook as “death panels” could possibly be found in the bill passed by the House of Representatives.

The most bizarre moment came on Aug. 7 when Sarah Palin used the term “death panels” on her Facebook page. She wrote: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

There is, of course, nothing even remotely like this in the bill.

——————————————————-

The Wall Street Journal, in its lead editorial today, demonstrates rather effectively the falsity of Congressman Blumenauer’s self-proclaimed injured innocence. The editorial is specifically about those “death panels,” and explains exactly what they are, what they would do, and why they are a terrible idea.

Like most of Europe, the various health bills stipulate that Congress will arbitrarily decide how much to spend on health care for seniors every year—and then invest an unelected board with extraordinary powers to dictate what is covered and how it will be paid for. White House budget director Peter Orszag calls this Medicare commission “critical to our fiscal future” and “one of the most potent reforms.”

On that last score, he’s right. Prominent health economist Alain Enthoven has likened a global budget to “bombing from 35,000 feet, where you don’t see the faces of the people you kill.”

As envisioned by the Senate Finance Committee, the commission—all 15 members appointed by the President—would have to meet certain budget targets each year. Starting in 2015, Medicare could not grow more rapidly on a per capita basis than by a measure of inflation. After 2019, it could only grow at the same rate as GDP, plus one percentage point.

The theory is to let technocrats set Medicare payments free from political pressure, as with the military base closing commissions. But that process presented recommendations to Congress for an up-or-down vote. Here, the commission’s decisions would go into effect automatically if Congress couldn’t agree within six months on different cuts that met the same target. The board’s decisions would not be subject to ordinary notice-and-comment rule-making, or even judicial review.

Yet if the goal really is political insulation, then the Medicare Commission is off to a bad start. To avoid a senior revolt, Finance Chairman Max Baucus decided to bar his creation from reducing benefits or raising the eligibility age, which meant that it could only cut costs by tightening Medicare price controls on doctors and hospitals. Doctors and hospitals, naturally, were furious.

So the Montana Democrat bowed and carved out exemptions for such providers, along with hospices and suppliers of medical equipment. Until 2019 the commission will thus only be allowed to attack Medicare Advantage, the program that gives 10 million seniors private insurance choices, and to raise premiums for Medicare prescription drug coverage, which is run by private contractors. Notice a political pattern?

But a decade from now, such limits are off—which also happens to be roughly the time when ObamaCare’s spending explodes. The hard budget cap means there is only so much money to be divvied up for care, with no account for demographic changes, such as longer life spans, or for the increasing incidence of diabetes, heart disease and other chronic conditions.

Worse, it makes little room for medical innovations. The commission is mandated to go after “sources of excess cost growth,” meaning treatments that are too expensive or whose coverage will boost spending. If researchers find a pricey treatment for Alzheimer’s in 2020, that might be banned because it would add new costs and bust the global budget. Or it might decide that “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller,” as President Obama put it in June.

In other words, the Medicare commission would come to function much like the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which rations care in England. Or a similar Washington state board created in 2003 to control costs. Its handiwork isn’t pretty.

Read the whole thing.
——————————————————-

We already addressed the “no death panels in our bill” claim long ago, when the first wave of liberal denial crested, in this August 16th posting, which quotes this perfectly accurate analysis by Cornell Law Professor William Jacobsen.

Democrats don’t like it being called a “death panel,” but the idea all along has been that their version of health care reform would avoid public debate by passing the responsibility of meeting budgetary limitations to an unelected commission which would be empowered to ration services. Many of its decisions will inevitably deny medicines, treatments, and procedures whose absence will be the equivalent of a death sentence. Americans will die because government has foreclosed their medical options. The body making such decisions and condemning Americans to deaths which might have been prevented on monetary grounds will not be a “death panel?”

Only if you are a democrat, won’t it be.

Barack Obama once promised that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed would receive “a full military trial.” What happens to KSM is now up to him, and he has clearly changed his mind. How embarrassing that this video has turned up!

1:17 video

Are you a genetically a dandelion or an orchid? Both have their place in the evolutionary scheme of things according to a recent article in the Atlantic by David Dobbs.

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Courtesy of our elite law schools, Shearman & Sterling, and a liberal Supreme Court majority, some news agency reports that federal judges are busy right now turning captured jihadis loose.

Complying with a Supreme Court ruling last year, 15 federal judges in the U.S. courthouse (In Washington, D.C.) are giving detainees their day in court after years behind bars half a world away from their homelands.

The judges have found the government’s evidence against 30 detainees wanting and ordered their release. That number could rise significantly because the judges are on track to hear challenges from dozens more prisoners. ...

Bush administration Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once promised Guantanamo held “the worst of the worst.” The judges here have rejected pleas for release from eight detainees, but they have concluded the government doesn’t even have enough evidence to keep 30 other detainees behind bars.

“There is absolutely no reason for this court to presume that the facts contained in the government’s exhibits are accurate,” District Judge Gladys Kessler wrote in ordering the release of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed. He was repatriated to Yemen after a seven-year stay at Guantanamo, where he was brought as a teenager.

“Much of the factual material contained in those exhibits is hotly contested for a host of different reasons ranging from the fact that it contains second- and third-hand hearsay to allegations that it was obtained by torture to the fact that no statement purports to be a verbatim account of what was said,” Kessler said. She ruled the government failed to prove the detainee was part of or substantially supported Taliban or al-Qaida forces.

Vladimir Putin doesn’t bow

HotAirPundit demonstrates that he-men heads of state don’t bow to Akihito.

OTOH, Kathy Kattenburg thinks caring about these kinds of issues (Republic vs. Monarchy, Government by Consent vs. Divine Right) makes you a “yokel.” For her, politically correct guilt over Harry Truman dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki trumps these formal considerations. We bombed Akihito’s country and defeated it. Obviously, the poor soul cries himself to sleep every night over what my father’s generation did to his countrymen. The least Obama can do is grovel to him in compensation.

The Politico channels the explanation:

A senior administration official said President Barack Obama was simply observing protocol when he bowed to Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko upon arriving at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo on Saturday.

“I think that those who try to politicize those things are just way, way, way off base,” the official said. “He observes protocol. But I don’t think anybody who was in Japan – who saw his speech and the reaction to it, certainly those who witnesses his bilateral meetings there – would say anything other than that he enhanced both the position and the status of the U.S., relative to Japan. It was a good, positive visit at an important time, because there’s a lot going on in Japan.”

Gilbert and Sullivan put it better:

If you want to know who we are,
We are gentlemen of Japan:
On many a vase and jar—On many a screen and fan,
We figure in lively paint:
Our attitude’s queer and quaint—You’re wrong if you think it ain’t, oh!

If you think we are worked by strings,
Like a Japanese marionette,
You don’t understand these things:
It is simply Court etiquette.

89-Year-Old Huntsman Melvin Poe leads the Bath County Hounds out on a beautiful November morning (click on image for larger picture)

The Bath County Hounds are a private pack, founded in 1992, after Melvin Poe’s retirement as huntsman of Orange County, by George L. Ohrstrom to hunt his 3000-acre Fassifern Farm at Warm Springs, Bath County, Virginia.

The rolling countryside of the foothills of the Blue Ridge near Poe’s home in Fauquier County, where the Bath County Hounds hunt in the intervals between trips to Warm Springs, was hunted in the decades before WWII by the Cobbler Hunt, whose master in the early 1930s was (then) Major George S. Patton, Jr.
——————————
Who wouldn’t want to look like that and ride like that at 89?

The President of the United States bows before the Emperor of Japan

The LA Times reports that the Chosen One bent low again, this time to Akihito, 125th Emperor of Japan.

Obama’s bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia last April produced widespread criticism as a violation of American Republican principle and protocol. Many Americans believe it is profoundly inappropriate for the President of the United States to render honors acknowledging the superiority of any monarch since the American Republic by its Declaration of Independence rejected monarchy and the claim of unelected rulers to reign on the basis of divine authority.

Oddly enough, Obama reserves, it seems, his gestures of supreme respect for Worthy Oriental Gentlemens. He merely nodded to Queen Elizabeth. In the case of Queen Elizabeth, Michelle Obama made gestures in quite the opposite direction, hugging the Queen and later even patting her affectionately on the back.

Last April’s obeisance to the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”

How can a case against a foreign enemy apprehended by another government possibly be prosecuted within the rules of domestic criminal procedure? Khalid Shaikh Mohammed obviously was never Mirandized. What can Eric Holder and Barack Obama possibly be thinking? Are these people hopelessly naive?

Andrew McCarthy doesn’t think so. He thinks they know exactly what they’re doing.

We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Read the whole thing.

Cropped and enlarged “Boa” photo

Despite the “internet sensation” claim, Ananova is really the only news source on this one.

A photograph purporting to show a 55ft snake found in a forest in China has become an internet sensation.

It was originally posted in a thread on the website of the People’s Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper in China.

The thread claimed the snake was one of two enormous boas found by workers clearing forest for a new road outside Guping city, Jiangxi province.

They apparently woke up the sleeping snakes during attempts to bulldoze a huge mound of earth.

“On the third dig, the operator found there was blood amongst the soil, and with a further dig, a dying snake appeared,” said the post.

“At the same time, another gold coloured giant boa appeared with its mouth wide open. The driver was paralysed with fear, while the other workers ran for their lives.

“By the time the workers came back, the wounded boa had died, while the other snake had disappeared. The bulldozer operator was so sick that he couldn’t even stand up.”

The post claimed that the digger driver was so traumatised that he suffered a heart attack on his way to hospital and later died.

The dead snake was 55ft (16.7m) long, weighed 300kg and was estimated to be 140 years old, according to the post.

However, local government officials in Guiping say the story and photograph are almost certainly a hoax as giant boas are not native to the area.

Anannova seems to have gotten the story from QuirkyChina, which claims to be quoting the People’s Daily for November 11th, but no such story turn up in a search of the English language edition of the paper’s web-site.

The use of the term “boa” is obviously inaccurate. Boa constrictors are native to the New World. The visible markings on the snake’s back, I think, identify it clearly enough as a reticulated python. And Chinese English news reports do clearly routinely refer to pythons (native to Asia) as “boas.”

This 40 k. (88 lbs.), 4 m. (13’) long reticulated python found by Yunnan villagers in this October 22, 2006 story is referred to as a “giant boa.”

There is a problem with range. Guping is a bit north of the generally described range of Python reticulatus.

Wikipedia estimated range of Reticulated Python (Python reticulatus)

Jiangxi Province, China

And there is a problem with the size. The photograph is obviously calculated to mislead. The snake is hanging from the bucket in the extreme foreground in an effort to induce viewers to take the people and cab behind as an indication of scale. If someone could identify the model of the backhoe, and could determine the actual size of the digging bucket, it would be pretty easy to come up with a more accurate estimate of the actual size of the snake.

Estimates of how large reticulated pythons can grow vary. Wikipedia says “more than 28 feet (8.7 m),” quoting Murphy/Henderson (1997). Wall (1926) proposes 30’ (9.14 m.). Oliver (1958) goes all the way up to 33’ (10.06 m.).

Yet, there is a news agency account, dated January 8, 2004, describing the capture in Indonesia of a nearly 49 foot (14.9 m.), 990 pound (450 k.) monster reticulated python, complete with 0:33 video.

We were buried in the clouds associated with Tropical Storm Ida today, causing satellite Internet connectivity to grind to a halt. Sorry, it just was not working, so I read a book instead.

This photo is making the rounds via viral email.

Hat tip to Rich Duff.

These Japanese tried charging into the teeth of determined American resistance.

Even Time magazine recognizes that democrat efforts to impose socialized health care on an unwilling nation are looking more anjd more like the hopeless and futile Banzai attacks made by suicidal Japanese units on well-prepared Marine positions on South Pacific islands during WWII.

Getting hopped up on left wing ideology instead of rice wine, waving 2000 page pieces of legislation instead of samurai swords, and shouting slogans of Envy instead of Banzai! is not going to make the outcome different.

Smart Democrats are thinking we’ve seen this movie before: Suicide by health care. Last week was the trifecta that may have sealed health care’s fate: 1) GOP wins Virginia and New Jersey (!) governor’s races. 2) Business comes out swinging. 3) Unemployment over 10.

“To make matters worse, they force Blue Dogs and front-liners to walk the plank on the Pelosi Plan that exceeds the symbolically important $1 trillion mark, includes the public plan and a big tax increase on small business—all of which are dead-on-arrival in the Senate. BTU2. The attack ads make themselves.

“Now Gallup finds a sudden and massive shift among Indies. And let’s be honest, it’s not that Indies have fallen in love with the GOP agenda, whatever that is. Far from it. They want to put a hard brake on the spending and the borrowing, and they don’t want Washington messing with their health care at a time of intense economic anxiety.

“Meanwhile, the abortion sideshow is the last thing that the White House needed. Gets activists on both sides to man the battle stations and makes the vote a no-win proposition for any Dem in Reddish territory. Worst of all, your typical middle-of-the-road swing voter watches politicians in Washington fighting over abortion and says: ‘I thought we were having a health care debate. I don’t want any part of this. I think I’ll change the channel.’ Oh, and next up: immigration. Which is sure to be a unifying discussion.

“And, at long last, the debate is now squarely focused on health care costs, the soft underbelly of this whole enterprise, the place they never wanted this to go because it’s the issue on which they have no answer. Most voters now believe the bill will raise their personal costs—not a good thing for a politician to be doing in the midst of a deep recession. And when the establishment (CBO, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mark Warner, Susan Collins) all agree that the bills don’t contain costs, it’s hard to dismiss as a baseless attack.

Caroline Glick admires the classy, non-political gesture.

A couple of days ago I heard the news that George and Laura Bush paid a private visit to the wounded soldiers at Fort Hood. They specifically requested that the base commander not inform the media of their visit. They came. They comforted the wounded soldiers and the Fort Hood community for a couple of hours. And then they left. And they never had their pictures taken saluting the troops or holding their hands.

When I heard the news, I felt this pain that hasn’t gone away. It’s a pain that I have been feeling fairly often since last November. ...

For all that he disappointed me, I miss George W. Bush. I really do.

In his Fort Hood speech (the one that gave Marc Ambinder goosebumps), Barack Obama graciously complimented the slain American soldiers, but he did it implicitly at everyone else’s expense.

“In an age of selfishness, they embody responsibility. In an era of division, they call upon us to come together. In a time of cynicism, they remind us of who we are as Americans.”

The president is implying that the rest of us, who fail to be serving in the US military at the present time, scamps that we are, have managed somehow to make our current age, era, and time: selfish, irresponsible, divisive, and cynical.

Quin Hillyer thinks the Chosen One has a lot of nerve throwing around these accusations.

What era does Obama live in? The America I know, that we all know, in 2009, is not an America that is suffering from an age of selfishness, an era of division, a time of cynicism. Mr. Obama can speak for himself. This is not a land nor an epoch of selfishness and cynicism, and the divisiveness is not extraordinary or even terribly bad—and it often comes from Obama himself. But somebody should look the president in the eye and say “WHo are you calling selfish and cynical, Kemosabe?” I look around me and see idealism, love of country, generosity. I see the incredible outpouring of church groups and other citizens in aiding the victims of Katrina. I see people volunteering hither and yon for all sorts of good causes. And yes, I even see TEA partiers who are out there of their own free will, at their own expense, trying to defend the freedoms they love for the sake of their children, for the sake of posterity.

It is way past time for this president to stop telling us that the general state of affairs is cynical, selfish, angry, and benighted (and, tacitly, that he and his circle are the only light that offers hope amidst the darkness he describes). Enough is enough. Mark Hyman today on our main site writes that this president despises America (except for the America he would remake in his own image). Perhaps so. He certainly apologizes for our flaws far more often than he actually specifies our strengths and the things that make us admirable. Either way, though, Mr. Obama’s act as moral judge of the supposed cynicism and selfishness of others, indeed of society in general, is an act that is well beyond tired. It is a tired act, an unpleasant act, an unnecessary act. And it just isn’t true.

Physician, heal thyself.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Humans… They’re what’s for dinner.

One of the participants on a bamboo fly rod list forwarded the link to this 2007 YouTube video of a mountain lion looking into the window of a Colorado home in very much the manner of a house cat sitting patiently outside a mouse hole.

The lady doing most of the filming seems a bit overconfident in the ability of window glass to serve as an impenetrable barrier to wildlife. One can see the lion giving some serious consideration to having a try. Fortunately he decides in favor of prudence, or I expect we’d have never seen this video.

Apparently, the lion had been seen hanging around the vicinity of these people’s house before the video was made. The sensible thing to do would have been to shoot this particular lion.

Bird Dog asks: If the ObamaCare proposal is so good, why do you have to imprison people who don’t want to participate?

Dick Morris identifies the relevant portions of the Bill.

The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation reported that the House version of the healthcare bill specifies that those who don’t buy health insurance and do not pay the fine of about 2.5 percent of their income for failing to do so can face a penalty of up to five years in prison!

The bill describes the penalties as follows:

Section 7203 — misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

Section 7201 — felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]

That anyone should face prison for not buying health insurance is simply incredible.

And how much will the stay-out-of-jail insurance cost? The Joint Committee noted that “according to a recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, the lowest-cost family non-group plan under HR 3862 [the Pelosi bill] would cost $15,000 by 2016.”

—this post is repeated annually—

WWI came to an end by an armistice arranged to occur at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The date and time, selected at a point in history when mens’ memories ran much longer, represented a compliment to St. Martin, patron saint of soldiers, and thus a tribute to the fighting men of both sides. The feast day of St. Martin, the Martinmas, had been for centuries a major landmark in the European calendar, a date on which leases expired, rents came due; and represented, in Northern Europe, a seasonal turning point after which cold weather and snow might be normally expected.

It fell about the Martinmas-time, when the snow lay on the borders…
—-Old Song.

From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:

St. Martin, the son of a Roman military tribune, was born at Sabaria, in Hungary, about 316. From his earliest infancy, he was remarkable for mildness of disposition; yet he was obliged to become a soldier, a profession most uncongenial to his natural character. After several years’ service, he retired into solitude, from whence he was withdrawn, by being elected bishop of Tours, in the year 374.

The zeal and piety he displayed in this office were most exemplary. He converted the whole of his diocese to Christianity, overthrowing the ancient pagan temples, and erecting churches in their stead. From the great success of his pious endeavours, Martin has been styled the Apostle of the Gauls; and, being the first confessor to whom the Latin Church offered public prayers, he is distinguished as the father of that church. In remembrance of his original profession, he is also frequently denominated the Soldier Saint.

The principal legend, connected with St. Martin, forms the subject of our illustration, which represents the saint, when a soldier, dividing his cloak with a poor naked beggar, whom he found perishing with cold at the gate of Amiens. This cloak, being most miraculously preserved, long formed one of the holiest and most valued relics of France; when war was declared, it was carried before the French monarchs, as a sacred banner, and never failed to assure a certain victory. The oratory in which this cloak or cape—in French, chape—was preserved, acquired, in consequence, the name of chapelle, the person intrusted with its care being termed chapelain: and thus, according to Collin de Plancy, our English words chapel and chaplain are derived.

The canons of St. Martin of Tours and St. Gratian had a lawsuit, for sixty years, about a sleeve of this cloak, each claiming it as their property. The Count Larochefoucalt, at last, put an end to the proceedings, by sacrilegiously committing the contested relic to the flames. ...

The festival of St. Martin, happening at that season when the new wines of the year are drawn from the lees and tasted, when cattle are killed for winter food, and fat geese are in their prime, is held as a feast-day over most parts of Christendom. On the ancient clog almanacs, the day is marked by the figure of a goose; our bird of Michaelmas being, on the continent, sacrificed at Martinmas. In Scotland and the north of England, a fat ox is called a mart, clearly from Martinmas, the usual time when beeves are killed for winter use. In ‘Tusser’s Husbandry, we read:

When Easter comes, who knows not then,
That veal and bacon is the man?
And Martilmass beef doth bear good tack,
When country folic do dainties lack.’

Barnaby Googe’s translation of Neogeorgus, shews us how Martinmas was kept in Germany, towards the latter part of the fifteenth century

‘To belly chear, yet once again,
Doth Martin more incline,
Whom all the people worshippeth With roasted geese and wine.
Both all the day long, and the night, Now each man open makes
His vessels all, and of the must, Oft times, the last he takes,
Which holy Martin afterwards Alloweth to be wine,
Therefore they him, unto the skies, Extol with praise divine.’

A genial saint, like Martin, might naturally be expected to become popular in England; and there are no less than seven churches in London and Westminster, alone, dedicated to him. There is certainly more than a resemblance between the Vinalia of the Romans, and the Martinalia of the medieval period.

Indeed, an old ecclesiastical calendar, quoted by Brand, expressly states under 11th November: ‘The Vinalia, a feast of the ancients, removed to this day. Bacchus in the figure of Martin.’ And thus, probably, it happened, that the beggars were taken from St. Martin, and placed under the protection of St. Giles; while the former became the patron saint of publicans, tavern-keepers, and other ‘dispensers of good eating and drinking. In the hall of the Vintners’ Company of London, paintings and statues of St. Martin and Bacchus reign amicably together side by side.

On the inauguration, as lord mayor, of Sir Samuel Dashwood, an honoured vintner, in 1702, the company had a grand processional pageant, the most conspicuous figure in which was their patron saint, Martin, arrayed, cap-à-pie, in a magnificent suit of polished armour; wearing a costly scarlet cloak, and mounted on a richly plumed and caparisoned white charger: two esquires, in rich liveries, walking at each side. Twenty satyrs danced before him, beating tambours, and preceded by ten halberdiers, with rural music. Ten Roman lictors, wearing silver helmets, and carrying axes and fasces, gave an air of classical dignity to the procession, and, with the satyrs, sustained the bacchanalian idea of the affair.

A multitude of beggars, ‘howling most lamentably,’ followed the warlike saint, till the procession stopped in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Then Martin, or his representative at least, drawing his sword, cut his rich scarlet cloak in many pieces, which he distributed among the beggars. This ceremony being duly and gravely performed, the lamentable howlings ceased, and the procession resumed its course to Guildhall, where Queen Anne graciously condescended to dine with the new lord mayor.

Michel Felice Corne, The Constitution and the Guerriere

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar; —
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee; —
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1830

The Boston Herald reports that the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in all the world’s navies, is under attack again.

Her haute bourgeois neighbors are unmoved by the martial glory the renowned frigate won almost two hundred years, earning the nickname “Old Ironsides” as British cannon shot bounced off her double-built oaken hull when she humbled the pride of Nelson’s Navy.

They don’t like listening to the National Anthem every morning when the Constitution’s colors are raised, and her war-like cannon salutes are spoiling the digestion of their brie.

Old Ironsides’ upscale Charlestown neighbors are trying to pull off what British, French and Barbary pirate guns failed to accomplish in more than two centuries – silencing the cannons of the nation’s oldest commissioned naval vessel.

Miffed residents of a posh condo complex have invited the commanding officer of the USS Constitution over for a glass of wine so he can hear for himself that the frigate’s twice-daily cannon blasts – a tradition dating to 1798 – are “more disruptive to the neighborhood than you might have imagined.”

Commanding Officer Timothy Cooper received the most recent complaint two weeks ago from neighbors suggesting naval officers assigned to the historic vessel eliminate the morning and evening blasts on weekends, reduce the size of the gunpowder charge and turn down the volume of the national anthem recording played during the daily flag raising and lowering ceremonies.

“The residential population and congestion of this area has (sic) grown significantly and, it seems to us, that the cannon charge/noise is excessive,” the unidentified resident first wrote in an Aug. 26, 2009, letter obtained by the Herald.

High-end condominium developments have sprung up across from the Charlestown Navy Yard over the past decade, transforming the once hardscrabble waterfront into a toney enclave.

“Over the summer, we have entertained several times, and we have had guests sit up in shock when the cannon goes off,” the resident wrote. “It has also awakened them at 8 a.m. while they are vacationing and then blasted them again at sunset.”

David Brooks is enough of a liberal himself that he dutifully identifies Islamicism as a fringe feature of the Muslim world. That fringe tends to do awfully well whenever opinion polls of Muslims get taken.

But even Brooks thinks the epidemic of political correctness following the Fort Hood massacre got out of hand.

(A) malevolent narrative has emerged… on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don’t see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.

This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere. With their suicide bombings and terrorist acts, adherents to this narrative have made themselves central to global politics. They are the ones who go into crowded rooms, shout “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” and then start murdering.

When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan did that in Fort Hood, Tex., last week, many Americans had an understandable and, in some ways, admirable reaction. They didn’t want the horror to become a pretext for anti-Muslim bigotry.

So immediately the coverage took on a certain cast. The possibility of Islamic extremism was immediately played down. This was an isolated personal breakdown, not an ideological assault, many people emphasized.

Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people’s stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan — before the real evidence was in — of his responsibility. He didn’t have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

Marc Ambinder thought Obama’s Fort Hood Speech was his best since the Inauguration, possibly his best ever. It was so wonderful that Ambinder admits that he experienced a classic Obamagasm.

I guarantee: they’ll be teaching this one in rhetoric classes. It was that good. My gloss won’t do it justice. Yes, I’m having a Chris Matthews-chill-running-up-my-leg moment, but sometimes, the man, the moment and the words come together.

———————————————————-

Dry Valleys, an English commenter on a posting by the Anchoress, was sympathetic to the One’s efforts, but detected a note of personal unease.

I think Obama is a bit like me, he feels uncomfortable around the sort of hard, assertive, no-nonsense types you find in the military. We are neither of us very “manly” in that regard, so he might feel a bit uneasy, suspect that they are better men than him, he couldn’t do that, etc.

That would explain a bit of awkwardness.

———————————————————-

Not everyone found the president’s remarks above criticism. Andrew McCarthy has a serious problem with Obama’s failure to recognize the reality of the character of Islam.

President Obama at Fort Hood today: “It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know — no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor.”

Really?

McCarthy then quotes Andrew Bostom’s survey of Islamic theological opinion, which starts with Nidal Malik Hasan himself, who back in June of 2007 delivered to Army doctors, not a medical lecture which had been scheduled, but instead a lecture on Islam and the religious perspective of Muslims serving in the US Military.

Nidal Hasan’s June 2007 presentation concludes, in full accord with classical (and unrepentant, let alone unreformed) Islamic doctrine regarding jihad war, (slide 49):

“Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please Allah, even by force is condoned by (sic) Islam.”

Our immediate, urgent task is to understand the extent to which Nidal Hasan’s orthodox vision of Islam is a shared vision—and by which Muslims, in particular.

The seat of Sunni orthodoxy Al Azhar University—which functions as a de facto Vatican of Sunni Islam, repeats in “Reliance of the Traveller” its widely distributed manual of Islamic Law, which “conforms to the practice and faith of the Sunni orthodoxy,” circa 1991,

“ Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and, is etymologically derived from the word, mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion [of Islam]…The scriptural basis for jihad is such Koranic verses as ‘Fighting is prescribed for you’ (Koran 2:216); ‘Slay them wherever you find them’ (Koran 4:89); ‘Fight the idolators utterly’ (Koran 9:36); and such hadiths as the one related by (Sahih) Bukhari and (Sahih) Muslim [NOTE: cited in slide 43 of Hasan’s 6/7/07 presentation] that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: ‘I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them. And the final reckoning is with Allah’; and the hadith by (Sahih) Muslim, ‘To go forth in the morning or evening to fight in the path of Allah is better than the whole world and everything in it.’ ”

Even more concrete evidence that this classical formulation of jihad is very much a living doctrine today is apparent in the openly espoused views, and sound Islamic arguments which conclude the contemporary work “Islam and Modernism,” written by a respected modern Muslim scholar Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani. Mr Usmani, aged 66, sat for 20 years as a Shari’a judge in Pakistan’s Supreme Court (His father was the Grand Mufti of Pakistan). Currently Usmani is deputy of the Islamic Fiqh (Jurisprudence) Council of the Organization of the Islamic Conference—the major international body of Islamic nations in the world, and serves as an adviser to several global Sharia-based Islamic financial institutions. Thus he is a leading contemporary figure in the world of mainstream Islamic jurisprudence. Mr. Usmani is also a regular visitor to Britain. During a recent visit there, he was interviewed by the Times of London, which published extracts from Usmani’s writings on jihad, Saturday, September 8, 2007. The concluding chapter of Usmani’s “Islam and Modernism” was cited, and it rebuts those who believe that only defensive jihad (i.e., fighting to defend a Muslim land deemed under attack or occupation) is permissible in Islam. He also refutes the suggestion that jihad is unlawful against a non-Muslim state that freely permits the preaching of Islam (which, not surprisingly, was of some concern to The Times!).

For Mr Usmani, “the question is whether aggressive battle is by itself commendable or not.” “If it is, why should the Muslims stop simply because territorial expansion in these days is regarded as bad? And if it is not commendable, but deplorable, why did Islam not stop it in the past?” He answers his own question as follows: “Even in those days . . . aggressive jihads were waged . . . because it was truly commendable for establishing the grandeur of the religion of Allah.” Usmani argues that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practice Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle.

Liberals insist that violence, intolerance, attacks on unbelievers, and aggression are not characteristic of mainstream Islam in defiance of reality precisely because of liberalism’s own internal theology.

From the viewpoint of liberalism, the only possible sort of evil that can exist is the evil of the rejection of liberalism, racist rejection of liberal egalitarianism, fundamentalist rejection of liberal secularism, reactionary rejection of liberal social welfarism. Muslims are typically persons of color, a protected class which cannot be criticized or disliked. Additionally, Muslims are typically citizens of Third World nations and consequently additionally privileged and protected as victims, victims of economic underdevelopment and victims of Western Colonialism.

A protected class like Muslims cannot possibly be the enemy of the liberal, so the liberal will perform any amount of conceptual gymnastics necessary to “prove” that violence and terrorist acts are only representative of a small atypical minority, and were probably provoked by something we did.

Founded November 10, 1775.
———————————————
Maj. Gen. John A. Lejeune’s Birthday Message

RPS ORDERS
No. 47 (Series 1921)
HEADQUARTERS U.S. MARINE CORPS
Washington, November 1, 1921

759. The following will be read to the command on the 10th of November, 1921, and hereafter on the 10th of November of every year. Should the order not be received by the 10th of November, 1921, it will be read upon receipt.

(1) On November 10, 1775, a Corps of Marines was created by a resolution of Continental Congress. Since that date many thousand men have borne the name “Marine”. In memory of them it is fitting that we who are Marines should commemorate the birthday of our corps by calling to mind the glories of its long and illustrious history.

(2) The record of our corps is one which will bear comparison with that of the most famous military organizations in the world’s history. During 90 of the 146 years of its existence the Marine Corps has been in action against the Nation’s foes. From the Battle of Trenton to the Argonne, Marines have won foremost honors in war, and is the long eras of tranquility at home, generation after generation of Marines have grown gray in war in both hemispheres and in every corner of the seven seas, that our country and its citizens might enjoy peace and security.

(3) In every battle and skirmish since the birth of our corps, Marines have acquitted themselves with the greatest distinction, winning new honors on each occasion until the term “Marine” has come to signify all that is highest in military efficiency and soldierly virtue.

(4) This high name of distinction and soldierly repute we who are Marines today have received from those who preceded us in the corps. With it we have also received from them the eternal spirit which has animated our corps from generation to generation and has been the distinguishing mark of the Marines in every age. So long as that spirit continues to flourish Marines will be found equal to every emergency in the future as they have been in the past, and the men of our Nation will regard us as worthy successors to the long line of illustrious men who have served as “Soldiers of the Sea” since the founding of the Corps.

JOHN A. LEJEUNE,
Major General Commandant
——————————————————-

The Magic of “a Few Good Men”
——————————————————-
The Old Corps

Tun Tavern, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 10th 1775

Captains Nicholas and Mullens, having been tasked by the 2nd Continental Congress to form 2 battalions of Marines, set up the Corps’ first recruiting station in the tavern.

The first likely prospect was, in typical recruiters fashion, promised a “life of high adventure in service to Country and Corps”. And, as an extra bonus: If he enlisted now he would receive a free tankard of ale….

The recruit gladly accepted the challenge and, receiving the free tankard of ale, was told to wait at the corner table for orders.

The first Marine sat quietly at the table sipping the ale when he was joined by another young man, who had two tankards of ale.

The first Marine looked at the lad and asked where he had gotten the two tankards of ale?

The lad replied that he had just joined this new outfit called the Continental Marines, and as an enlistment bonus was given two tankards of ale.

The first Marine took a long hard look at the second Marine and said, ” It wasn’t like that in the old Corps.”

An annual post.

Asiatic black bear (Selenarctos thibetanus)

Strategy Page reports that a formidable new ally, a powerful fighter particularly skilled in mountain warfare, recently joined the Western Anti-Jihadist Coalition.

In Indian Kashmir, an Islamic terrorist leader, and one of his followers was killed by a black bear. Two other terrorists were wounded, but were able to flee to a nearby village. Although the terrorists were armed with assault rifles, the bear attacked quickly, and at night, and the men were unable to use their weapons in the restricted confines of the cave. Apparently the bear was going to use the cave to hibernate in, and was upset to find that the terrorists had moved in. The four terrorists thought the cave was abandoned, and a good place to hide out in.

The Asiatic Black Bear is related to the American black bear, but is larger (up to 400 pounds for an older male), and is much more aggressive towards humans. The Asiatic bear has a more powerful jaw, and bigger claws.

Tim Blair describes the mental acrobatics performed by the MSM worldwide in order to avoid identifying Islamic fanaticism as the motive behind Nidal Malik Hasan’s deadly attack.

The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)’s first significant report on the atrocity, presented at midday on Friday by Washington correspondent Lisa Millar, avoided any mention of the killer’s faith beyond references to his “family background”.

Somehow, Millar kept this up for nearly eight minutes. With those dodging skills, you’d back her to emerge bone dry after walking the entire length of a car wash.

By this stage, we already knew, via US television interviews with the killer’s cousin, that Hasan was “a pious lifelong Muslim”.

This minor point was quickly shoved aside by force of media consensus, which quickly settled on another, apparently more obvious, cause of Hasan’s deadly rage.

“A link to PTSD?” asked the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “Thursday’s deadly rampage raises a red flag over the issue of combat stress.

“The most common disorder linked to combat stress is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can develop after exposure to one or more traumatic events that threatened or caused great physical harm.”

Media worldwide grabbed hold of this helpful non-Islamic excuse with the same gasping desperation as a chain- smoking asthmatic reaching for his Ventolin inhaler.

One small problem: Major Hasan hadn’t spent a single millisecond in combat. Instead, he’d been based for his whole military career in the US, where lately he counselled troops returning from combat. He had no traumatic stress to be post of.

This technicality was dismissed by London’s Guardian newspaper, which invented a malady: post-traumatic stress disorder by proxy.

“Someone listening day after day to troops describing the tension and carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan could end up as damaged as those facing combat at first hand,” the Guardian claimed.

This is an interesting theory, especially considering Hasan had been in that role only since July.

Agence France-Presse signed on to it, too, reporting that Fort Hood was rife with speculation “as to whether the alleged shooter had snapped under the pressure of his job counselling thousands of war-weary troops”.

I don’t buy that for one minute, unless the report refers to certain journalists gathered at Fort Hood. Soldiers tend to be more sensible.

All of this served to minimise, for whatever timid purpose, the possible role of Hasan’s religion. Sadly for trauma theorists, his history of agitated Islamism soon began to seep through the media filter.

According to various accounts, Hasan had been cautioned for promoting Islam while dealing with patients when stationed at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center , some time before he’d begun duties at Fort Hood. A classmate during a public health course in 2007 recalled Hasan’s claim to being “a Muslim first and an American second”.

He complained about being harassed over his religion. He wrote on the internet of his admiration for Islamic suicide bombers. He was upset when someone scratched the “Allah” bumper sticker off his Honda Civic.

Hasan described the war on terror as a war on Islam. He was under investigation for six months following jihad-themed ravings. Last week, he gave his landlord a Spanish-language copy of the Koran.

On the morning of the murders, he fronted up at the local 7-Eleven in full Islamic gear.

Then he yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as he slaughtered 13 people (including pregnant 21-year-old Francheska Velez) and shot dozens of others (including teenager Amber Bahr).

By late Sunday, the media were cautiously exploring the possibility Hasan’s faith may have played a role.

They’d have been speedier about it if the case involved a suspected Christian shooting up an abortion clinic, of course, but all religious motivations aren’t considered equal.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) celebrates the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall with this 5:06 video.

I was watching this video which mentions that 200 people were killed trying to get over the wall after the East German government issued orders to fire upon defectors, and I could not help recognizing the identity of philosophic outlook with the recent House-passed Health Care Bill which proposes to fine people who fail to purchase health insurance. Punishing someone with a fine for failing to contribute to a collective insurance scheme differs only in scale from shooting someone for trying to withhold his work and taxes by escaping from the state entirely. The same view of the right of the collective to demand what it wishes of the individual is fundamental to both.

Back in 1969, when Richard Nixon was trying to conscript me, part of the process accompanying physical examinations and aptitude testing was a lengthy background form.

The US Military was extremely conservative, since in 1969 it was still seeking assurances that prospective draftees were not members or associates of such examples of pre-WWII history as the German American Bund and the Black Dragon Society.

I was in a cranky mood that day, and being tickled at encountering such historical references in a contemporary document, I affirmed my own membership in the Kokuryūkai (Black Dragon Society).

I was perfectly confident that, if I got into any kind of trouble over this, I could easily prove that the society in question no longer existed and actually had not existed during my own lifetime, and I even gleefully scrawled some patriotic Japanese slogan like Hakkō ichiu (All the world under one roof!) or Tenno Heika Banzai (Serve the Emperor for Ten Thousand Years!) sarcastically in the form’s margin.

I was a trifle disappointed that no one noticed or ever mentioned my alleged sinister Oriental associations.

Presumably today, the contemporary version of the same form asks if you belong to, or subscribe to publications by, or sympathize with the goals of unsavory Islamic groups like al Qaeda and the Order of Assassins.

And clearly, today, just like back in 1969, the US Army does not look terribly closely into the sinister associations of potential inductees.

Take Nidal Malik Hasan, for example.

It turns out that he attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, presided over by none other than Anwar al-Awlaki, author of 44 Ways to Support Jihad and spiritual advisor to 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

Anwar al-Awlaki, currently a resident of Yemen, has since endorsed his former congregant’s actions in a posting titled Nidal Hasan Did the Right Thing.
————————————————
The army was even warned about Hasan’s views by fellow doctors.

ABC:

A fellow Army doctor who studied with Hasan, Val Finell, told ABC News, “We would frequently say he was a Muslim first and an American second. And that came out in just about everything he did at the University.

Finell said he and other Army doctors complained to superiors about Hasan’s statements.

“And we questioned how somebody could take an oath of office…be an officer in the military and swear allegiance to the constitution and to defend America against all enemies, foreign and domestic and have that type of conflict,” Finell told ABC News.

————————————————
US Intelligence services were monitoring Hasan’s attempts to communicate with al Qaeda.

ABC:

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan tried to make contact with people linked to al Qaeda.

It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said.

————————————————
During WWII, the issue of potential conflicting loyalties on the part of Japanese-Americans was taken very seriously. Japanese served in segregated units and were deliberately deployed only in the European theater. Today, the principal focus of concern is completely different.

Army Chief of Staff General George Casey has ordered his officers to be on the lookout to prevent “a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.” “It would be a shame,” the general said, “As great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano is working to prevent “a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment.”

Twenty years ago, the Soviet Empire was beginning to collapse.

In the Telegraph, Charles S. Maier recalls the suddenness of the end.

As late as the summer of 1989, the protesting groups seemed small and fragmented, but then, encouraged by the sense of change that their own activity helped to generate, many more joined the prayer meetings in the large urban churches of Leipzig and Berlin, marched with their candles for a relaxation of press restrictions and, emboldened by those who were heading West, shouted, “We are staying here,” and by September, “We are the people!”

Repeated Monday-night demonstrations in Leipzig swelled to 70,000 by mid-October, a week after the GDR celebrated its 40th anniversary.

The regime could no longer control its frontiers, and chose not to contest the streets. A divided politburo ousted its old-guard members, including party chief Erich Honecker, and after massive demonstrations in Berlin, it decided to relax travel restrictions, leading to the joyous confusion of November 9.

Was such a peaceful revolution inevitable? Three months earlier, Chinese authorities had opted to use force and crushed the pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing. Could the East Germans have wagered on a Chinese solution?

Politburo elders, including Honecker and minister of state security Erich Mielke, who were out of touch with the profound dissent growing across their little republic, might have believed that they could.

But we know from transcribed conversations that younger heirs to the state were despairing. Revolutions usually begin when a ruling group fragments, and the GDR leadership was deeply divided by late summer.

For all the loyalty it might muster, the GDR’s existence, moreover, depended on the presence of several hundred thousand Soviet troops garrisoned originally as occupation forces and, since 1955, as Warsaw Pact allies.

Their tanks had suppressed the protests of striking East Berlin workers in June 1953, when local Soviet commanders understood that their fragile satellite might dissolve into the West.

Until 1989, the Red Army’s presence remained a deterrent, deployed against Hungary’s impetuous revolutionaries in 1956 and Czechoslovak reformers in August 1968. If there were violent clashes in the autumn of 1989, might Soviet troops be used again?

In public, Gorbachev helped Honecker, whom he found tiresome and didactic, to celebrate the GDR’s 40th anniversary in early October.

In private, he was reported to have said that history punishes those who come too late. Discreetly, and through his embassy, he signalled that his Berlin wards were on their own. Russian troops would stay in their barracks.

Local East German officials understood that a crackdown could lead to violence beyond their capacity to control it.

The demonstrators enforced their own discipline and called mostly for dialogue. Their radicalism was limited: no one knew how much would change as the Wall was opened on November 9. Few leaders of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (the SED) and few of the demonstrators’ ad hoc “civic movements” expected their republic to be swept away within a few months.

However, Chancellor Kohl soon concluded that he must outbid the East German reformers’ vision of existing side by side with the West German state by manipulating economic and national longings.

Simultaneously, he persuaded Western leaders (Mrs Thatcher excepted) that the Germans would remain good Europeans and Gorbachev that German self-determination was no threat to Moscow.

The Russian leader, himself intoxicated by the momentum of change, did not expect that his own Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet federation would dissolve within two years, either. But he earned his Nobel for not resisting the dissolution by force.

Germany is celebrating the anniversary, as the New York Times reports. But Barack Obama is not attending the observances of so unhappy an occasion from his perspective. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is standing in for him representing the United States.

It’s only too obvious why Barack Obama, who dashed off to Copenhagen at the drop of a hat to lobby for Chicago’s Olympic bid, is unwilling to attend. But Reuters is asking out loud “Should Obama Be in Berlin?” and is even conducting a poll on the subject. I vote No. I think he ought to be in Havana or Caracas or Pyongyang, crying over a beer with other leaders reduced to despondence by such a defeat for their side.

The BBC took a poll intended to demonstrate that Barack Obama is far from alone in lacking enthusiasm. Only 11% of responders thought capitalism was working well at the present time, and in many countries there was significant doubt that the fall of Communism was actually a good thing.

“to thunderous applause.” Two video clips via the BlogProf.

Rep. Paul Ryan ( R—1 WI), in his 2 minute House speech captured in this 1:53 video, correctly observes that the democrat’s health care bill is not about reforming the system or lowering costs. It’s about ideology.

What side of history do democrats want to be on? Not the side of Washington and Jefferson.

John Cassidy, in the New Yorker, identifies whose side they are on.

In extending our health-care system, all we are doing is catching up with Otto Von Bismarck’s Germany, which recognized a hundred and twenty-five years ago that universal health and disability coverage, along with old age pensions and a system of public education, were essential elements of a modern society.

Otto von Bismarck

Der Staatssozialismus paukt sich durch. (State Socialism will forcibly move forward.)—Otto von Bismark.

Democrats want to replace the Liberal American ideals of limited government, personal freedom, and individual responsibility with Mitteleuropean statism, socialism, and collectivism. Their “modern society” is, just like Bismark’s, centralized, bureaucratized, and dirigiste.

Socialism, statism, collectivism are all actually terribly old-fashioned ideas, representing nothing other than a variety of negative responses to the Liberal Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty and the restraint of state power in favor of voluntary and organic order. The would-be rulers of mankind simply ceased appealing to claims of Divine Right and hereditary superiority and began attempting to gain power by flattering and bribing the masses, while arousing their passions with fraudulent claims of injury and entitlement.

Human appetite for power is unlimited and the possession of power is always addictive. The Central European monarchies, Germany, Austria, Russia, which pioneered centralizing statism with unprecedentedly expansive regimes of taxation, regulation, and conscription, inevitably turned their power against one another, and destroyed themselves with the war they launched in 1914.

From its grand dynastic monarchies, the tradition of Continental European collectivism passed in 1917 to populist rule by cafe intellectuals, bringing within a generation an even greater war and murderous barbarism producing atrocities and deaths on a scale unprecedented in European civilization.

European exhaustion and the demoralization of the traditional leadership classes, after WWII, produced generally more benign socialist rule, but the European welfare state politics American liberals yearn to share produced nothing but European stagnation and decline. Britain was still rationing food as it had in wartime in 1954.

America surged dramatically ahead of Europe, economically and culturally, and (until the late 1960s) enjoyed decidedly less divisive and destructive politics.

Europe only began catching up to the United States in material prosperity, after many long years, when deference to market considerations on the basis of the American example significantly began to influence European economic policies.

Yet, despite the manifest superiority of the American political tradition and the American ideals of Liberty and Individualism, our domestic community of fashion continues to yearn to replace those with European-style statism. They seem to feel instinctively that, because French cheese, German cars, and Scandinavian design are such effective markers of class superiority that Europeans must also possess a more chic and desirable kind of politics. They are dead wrong.

Our liberals are like the Bourbons, and the Fall of Communism (whose anniversary, with respect to the opening of the Berlin Wall, we begin to celebrate tomorrow) is like the French Revolution, a historical watershed producing some definitive judgments on the Past. Like the Bourbons, American liberals have learned nothing about economics. And like the Bourbons, they refuse to relinquish their illusions and their ancient animosities.

Like housebreakers waiting until Saturday night when American adults would be out for the evening, Nancy Pelosi and the House democrats, joined among Republicans only by former Representative William (“office cooler full of cash”) Jefferson’s replacement Joseph Cao (“R”—2 LA), narrowly passed the labrynthine multi-trillion dollar bill proposing to nationalize health care in America 220-215.

The New York Times called it “their defining social policy achievement.”

I think it defines them alright, as socialists, collectivists, liars, frauds, and thieves.

Stephen Green speaks bitterly for the rest of us:

How do you cure high unemployment and sluggish growth?

Proven methods include reducing regulation and lowering taxes.

So it comes as no surprise that the House has just approved one of (if not the) biggest increases in taxes and regulation after virtually zero debate and in the middle of a weekend night when almost no one is paying attention.

They’re cowards. Shrewd cowards, but cowards still. ...

Which is the greater number: Pages in the bill the House just passed, or the minutes spent debating it?

The most epic World of Warcraft duel is not going to be fought inside the game, reports the New York Times. Nor will broadswords, enchanted armor, and magic spells be producing the decision. DPS will be inflicted by interagency memoranda, and the Communist Party rather than the program algorithm will select the winner.

My guess is the Ministry of Culture is going to pwn those N00bs from the Administration of Press and Publication.

It could almost be a World of Warcraft game session — two competing titans, plotting against each other, swapping blows, embarked on a quest for a single prize that only the stronger of them will claim.

The virtual World of Warfare game is the subject of a regulatory dispute in China, where such games are big business.

But this is not virtual reality. The titans are two agencies of the Chinese government. And their quest, during which they have traded a few blows in the past week, is for a potentially rich prize: the power to regulate the real World of Warcraft, among the most popular online games in China.

The background: On Monday, the Chinese General Administration of Press and Publication ordered the Shanghai-based operator of World of Warcraft, NetEase, to shut down its servers for World of Warcraft. The agency said that it had rejected the company’s application to become the new host of the game’s four million Chinese players.

But by Wednesday, the Ministry of Culture had struck back.

“In regards to the World of Warcraft incident, the General Administration of Press and Publication has clearly overstepped its authority,” a ministry official, Li Xiong, was quoted as saying in the Economic Information Daily, a newspaper in Beijing. “They do not have the authority to penalize online gaming.”

The ministry said it had that authority. And it said NetEase was perfectly free to offer the game on computers in China. The matter now appears destined for settlement by the State Council, the Chinese government’s cabinet.

Such bureaucratic hair-pulling might seem petty, were so much not at stake. Why the authority to regulate video games should trigger such a fracas is not altogether clear. But on its face, the defining aspect of the dispute involves money.

The online gaming industry in China is already huge, and growing fast. About 50 million people crowd the Internet cafes of China on a regular basis to play. Revenues in 2008 rose about 50 percent to at least $2.9 billion, according to Alicia Yap, a Hong Kong analyst for Citi Investment Research and Analysis. That is 10 times the revenue of just five years ago. IDC, a research company, has predicted that annual revenue will reach $6 billion by 2013.

In that context, the question of who decides what games go online — and how they decide — looms large.

Rich Lowry makes the same point, observing that the democrats are operating on the basis of a mandate for radical change that they never had.

On November 3, the fairy tale died. The election results in Virginia and New Jersey dismantled the self-satisfied, just-so story that Democrats have been telling themselves about last year’s election.

The story goes like this: In 2008, Americans voted for change not just in the nation’s leadership, but in its fundamental political orientation. They wanted a shift to the left not seen since 1932. The nation’s political map had been utterly transformed. Barack Obama owned the suburbs and independents, and laid claim to formerly secure Republican states. An outdated GOP had been reduced to a rejectionist husk clinging to rural areas and the South.

A more modest rival interpretation explained it differently: A charming young man running against a Republican party debilitated by its association with an unpopular war and a politically toxic incumbent won a solid 7-point victory nationally. He sounded reasonable and moderate, and won for his party something important, if not necessarily epoch-making: a chance to govern after the other side had blown it.

The Republican sweep of the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey is flatly incompatible with the first, heroic interpretation of 2008. If things changed so fundamentally, they wouldn’t have snapped back so quickly.

Read the whole thing.

David Brooks, too, observes that the willingness of democrats to try for radical change at the risk of the economy is costing them the support of the non-ideological center.

Independents turned on the Republican Party because the MSM persuaded them that it was George W. Bush’s intransigent extremism which had poisoned American political life and produced bitter factionalism, and that it was Bush’s war spending and Republican banking deregulation that produced the economic crisis. They put democrats in charge, and our politics has not become bipartisan, the Middle East is not at peace, and the economy has not recovered. On the other hand, the deficit has quadrupled, the government owns General Motors, and Congress is trying to nationalize another one sixth of the economy while adding another trillion dollar entitlement, just before it proceeds to start working on carbon taxes.

Right now, independent voters are astonishingly volatile. Democrats did poorly in elections on Tuesday partly because of disappointed liberals who think that President Obama is moving too slowly, but mostly because of anxious suburban independents who think he is moving too fast. In Pennsylvania, there was an eight-point swing away from the Democrats among independents from a year ago. In New Jersey, there was a 12-point swing. In Virginia, there was a 13-point swing.

The most telling races this year were the suburban rebellions across the country. For example, in Westchester and Nassau counties in New York, Republican candidates came from nowhere to defeat entrenched Democratic county officials. In blue Pennsylvania, the G.O.P. won six out of seven statewide offices.

Middle-class suburban voters who have been trending Democratic for a decade suddenly lurched out of the Democratic camp — and are now in play.

Why? What do these voters want?

The first thing to say is that this recession has hit the new suburbs hardest, exactly where independents are likely to live. According to a survey by the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, 76 percent of suburbanites say they or someone they know have lost a job in the past year.

The second thing to say is that in this time of need, these voters are not turning to government for support. Trust in government is at its lowest level in recent memory. Over the past year, there has been a shift to the right on issue after issue. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who believe that there is too much government regulation rose from 38 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in 2009. The percentage of Americans who want unions to have less influence rose from 32 percent to a record 42 percent.

Americans have moved to the right on abortion, immigration and global warming. Over the past seven months, the number of people who say government is doing too many things better left to business has jumped from 40 percent to 48 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

According to that same survey, only 31 percent of Americans believe that the president and Congress “should worry more about boosting the economy even though it may mean larger budget deficits.” Sixty-two percent, twice as many, believe the president and Congress “should worry more about keeping the deficit down, even though it may mean it will take longer for the economy to recover.”

These shifts have not occurred because conservatives and liberals have changed their minds. They haven’t. The shift is among independents.

According to Gallup, the share of independents who describe their views as conservative has moved from 29 percent last year to 35 percent today. The share of independents who believe there is too much government regulation of business has jumped from 38 percent to 50 percent. Independents are in the position of a person who is feeling gravely ill at the same time he has lost faith in his doctor. ...

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order, within which they can lead their lives. They can’t always articulate what they want, but they withdraw from any party that threatens turmoil and risk. As always, they’re looking for a safe pair of hands.

Sergeant Kimberly Munley

The commanding officer of Fort Hood, Lt. Gen. Bob Cone, reported today that a civilian police officer was responsible for ending the massacre at the Army base.

Fort Hood police Sgt. Kimberly Munley and her partner arrived in under three minutes after receiving reports of gunfire on Thursday afternoon. According to General Cone, Sgt. Munley shot Nidal Malik Hasan four times and brought him down, despite being wounded by him twice during their exchange of fire.

Munley is hospitalized and in stable condition.

General Cone described Munley’s gunfight with the killer as “an amazing and an aggressive performance.”

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.
—Winston Churchill, The River War, 1899.

As the commentariat sharpens its pencils and waits for further information on the motives of the Army doctor responsible for the Fort Hood massacre to emerge, it seems safe to predict that the liberals will not identify Islam’s propensity to inculcate fanaticism, xenophobia, and murderous violence as the key factor.

Most likely, they will blame guns and, following several leading liberal social scientists, insufficient American domestication and statism. If Americans just bowed to Socialism and accepted the complete universal authority, supervision, and direction of the paternalist state along with Max Weber’s Gewaltmonopol des Staates, and gave up retarditaire habits of owning weapons and relying in extreme situations on self defense, then we would be civilized like Europeans.

Jill Lepore quotes some leading authorities in the New Yorker:

The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany. Why? Historians haven’t often asked this question. Even historians who like to try to solve cold cases usually cede to sociologists and other social scientists the study of what makes murder rates rise and fall, or what might account for why one country is more murderous than another. Only in the nineteen-seventies did historians begin studying homicide in any systematic way. In the United States, that effort was led by Eric Monkkonen, who died in 2005, his promising work unfinished. Monkkonen’s research has been taken up by Randolph Roth, whose book “American Homicide” (Harvard; $45) offers a vast investigation of murder, in the aggregate, and over time. Roth’s argument is profoundly unsettling. There is and always has been, he claims, an American way of murder. It is the price of our politics. ...

Pieter Spierenburg, a professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, sifts through the evidence in “A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present” (Polity; $24.95). In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. Spierenburg attributes this long decline to what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” (shorthand for a whole class of behaviors requiring physical restraint and self-control, right down to using a fork instead of eating with your hands or stabbing at your food with a knife), and to the growing power of the centralizing state to disarm civilians, control violence, enforce law and order, and, broadly, to hold a monopoly on the use of force. (Anthropologists sometimes talk about a related process, the replacement of a culture of honor with a culture of dignity.) In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century.

The American homicide rate has been higher than Europe’s from the start, and higher at just about every stage since. It has also fluctuated, sometimes wildly. During the Colonial period, the homicide rate fell, but in the nineteenth century, while Europe’s kept sinking, the U.S. rate went up and up. In the twentieth century, the rate in the United States dropped to about five during the years following the Second World War, but then rose, reaching about eleven in 1991. It has since fallen once again, to just above five, a rate that is, nevertheless, twice that of any other affluent democracy.

What accounts for this remarkable difference? Guns leap to mind: in 2008, firearms were involved in two-thirds of all murders in the United States. Yet Roth, who supports gun control, insists that the prevalence of guns in America, and our lax gun laws, can’t account for the whole spread, and a few scholars have argued that laws allowing concealed weapons actually lower the murder rate, by deterring assaults. Some Europeans suspect that Americans haven’t undergone the same “civilizing process,” as if, unmoored from Europe, Colonial Americans went murderously adrift. Spierenburg speculates that democracy came too soon to the United States. By the time European states became democracies, the populace had accepted the authority of the state. But the American Revolution happened before Americans had got used to the idea of a state monopoly on force. Americans therefore preserved for themselves not only the right to bear arms—rather than yielding that right to a strong central government—but also medieval manners: impulsiveness, crudeness, and fidelity to a culture of honor. We’re backward, in other words, because we became free before we learned how to control ourselves.

Myself, I agree with Fred Boynton in Barcelona (1994):

0:25 into the 1:50 trailer

It’s not that Americans are more violent than Europeans. It’s just that we’re better shots.

Nidal Malik Hasan

The Roanoke Times offers background on the Army psychiatrist who ran amok yesterday at Fort Hood, killing 13 and wounding 30 others.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of shooting 12 people to death and wounding 31 others at Fort Hood, Texas, on Thursday, was the son of Roanoke merchants and restaurateurs, lived in Vinton and graduated from Virginia Tech.

Hasan was born in Arlington to Palestinian immigrants from near Jerusalem who later settled in Vinton.

Neighbors on Vinton’s Ramada Road remembered him as a “studious” boy who went by “Michael.” ...

Hasan’s father, Malik Awadallah Hasan, immigrated from Palestine to Virginia in 1962, when he was 16, stories in the Times’ archives show. He moved to Roanoke in 1985, with his wife, Hanan Ismail “Nora” Hasan, following in 1986. Neighbors on Ramada Road said they moved to the Vinton neighborhood in the early 1990s.

The Hasans ran the infamous Capitol Restaurant on the Roanoke City Market from 1987 to 1995. It was a dive beer hall and diner with a bad reputation and a lot of down-and-out regulars. The Hasans closed the Capitol to open the short-lived, Mediterranean-themed Mount Olive on Jefferson Street.

The Hasans also owned the Community Grocery Store on Elm Avenue in Roanoke. ...

Hasan’s father died in 1998. Neighbors on Ramada Road said he died of a heart attack in the house. Hasan’s mother died three years later. Neighbors said she had kidney disease.

The Garlicks said Nidal Hasan went to Virginia Western, and The Roanoke Times archives show he graduated from Virginia Tech in 1995.

He went on to the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences’ F. Edward Hebert School of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., where he finished in 2003. He did his residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., through 2007.

He was also a fellow at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Bethesda military medical school, where he was a fellow in disaster and preventive psychiatry.

The Associated Press reported he commissioned in the Army as a captain and was promoted to major in May. ....

“He would tell us the military was his life,” Hasan’s aunt, Noel Hasan of Falls Church, told the Post. He “did not make many friends.”

He was unmarried and had no children. Colleagues at Walter Reed reported he shied away from contact with women.

He remained a devout Muslim, praying daily at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Md., sometimes arriving in his Army fatigues.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the aunt said, he had been harassed about his Muslim faith and sought to be discharged from the military.

He went as far as retaining a lawyer to see if he could get out of the Army before his contract was up, The Associated Press reported.

While an intern at Walter Reed, Hasan had some “difficulties” that required counseling and extra supervision, said Dr. Thomas Grieger, who was the training director at the time. ...

Others reported Hasan was plain-spoken about his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He told a former Army colleague, Col. Terry Lee, “Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor,” Lee told Fox News.

Hasan was also deeply distressed by his impending deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, family members said.

While he worked to aid people scarred by war, that work in turn scarred Hasan.

“He must have snapped,” Noel Hasan said. “They ignored him. It was not hard to know when he was upset. He was not a fighter, even as a child and young man. But when he became upset, his face turns red. You can read him in his face.”

Photo slideshow from the scene.

CNN 10:40 video of Major Nidal Malik Hasan buying breakfast at the local Fort Hood 7-11 convenience store yesterday morning around 6:20 AM.