Reticulator

Real ID and health care

 Health care reform, Human rights  No Responses »
Feb 082008
 

The real problem with nationalized health care is not that it will decrease the quality of health care and raise costs, though it will do that, judging by how it has worked everywhere it has been tried. But some people are willing to accept that, in exchange for the benefits.

No, the real problem is the threat to civil liberties. Here is an example of how it makes a tempting kudgel for the government to use to keep people in line:

WHEN THE Department of Homeland Security came out with the final REAL ID regulations last month, a top official threw the department’s final Hail Mary, suggesting that REAL ID could be used to control access to cold medicine. That’s right: cold medicine. The lesson? Once a national ID system is in place, the federal government will use it for tighter and tighter control of every American.

This quote is from an article in The American Spectator by Jim Harper of the Cato Institute. Here’s another:

REAL ID isn’t about national security. It isn’t about illegal immigration. It isn’t about identity fraud, or even cold medicine. It’s about Washington politics. Federal bureaucrats want to coerce states like Virginia into building a multi-billion dollar system for identifying, tracking, and controlling law-abiding citizens.

And of course, one could make a very similar statement about nationalized health care.

Don’t think about Ezra Levant

 Bash the Messenger, First Amendment, Human rights  No Responses »
Feb 072008
 

An article by Lee Harris in The Weekly Standard got me to checking for the latest news on the Ezra Levant case in Canada.

Ezra Levant has a blog which he tells us is getting a lot of hits:

in the past month, I’ve had 152,000 “unique visitors” of whom 49,000 are “returning visitors”. According to Haloscan.com, I’ve had more than
1,500 comments. And then there’s the YouTube videos, 471,000 views amongst them.”

(That happens to be more hits than this blog gets.)

And a liberal MP (Keith Martin) has submitted a motion to remove the section of the Human Rights Code that allows the sort of inquisitions undergone by Levant and Mark Steyn. But it sounds as though his party has been pressuring him to withdraw it, though there are the usual denials, etc. News item about it here.

If you google for information about Ezra Levant, you will see that while this topic is getting a lot of attention in Canada, the U.S. news media are paying no attention to it. These would be the same news media types who attack Bush for his unilateralism and for ignoring world opinion. These would also be the same news media types who want us to look to Canada for lessons on how to handle health care.

I say it would be worth asking our presidential candidates about it. There are people clamoring for hate crime laws in the U.S. There are concerns about McCain’s attitude towards free speech. There are those who complained about Bush’s unilateralism, and those who threatened to move to Canada if Bush was re-elected in 2004. It would seem to be about as relevant an issue for discussion as you could find (and probably one a lot less boring than the usual gas about “change.”)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction: The U.S. media will continue to ignore it and will NOT ask our presidential candidates about it.

No Swift-boating allowed?

 Dissent  No Responses »
Feb 062008
 

From a news story in the Washington Post about the primary election results:

[Hillary Clinton] also presented herself as a candidate who “won’t let anyone Swift-boat this country’s future.”

What is that supposed to mean? She’s going to crack down on people who exercise their 1st Amendment rights to criticize politicians? She’s not going to allow dissent or criticism of her health care plans?

When I see things like that, the description of my life in the “About” section of this blog seems unfunnier than ever.

A package to stimulate the growth of government

 Limits on government power, Tax policy, Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Feb 062008
 

The WSJ editorializes on the “stimulus”.

President Bush and Congress are marching arm in arm to pass their economic “stimulus,” but it’s clear that at least one group of observers isn’t impressed: investors. They blew right through all the Beltway happy talk yesterday, selling off the major stock indexes by some 3% or so on an ugly day.

I suppose an alternative possibility is that investors are spooked by the prospect of a Clinton, Obama, or McCain becoming president and are bailing out while they can still cut their losses.

But more likely they’re spooked by the results of bipartisanship.

I’m guessing the reason the Congress and President are acting so quickly on this package is that they need to do it quickly before people learn that it won’t do any good.  The important point for them is to expand the size and scope of government  while they have a chance.

Yes, the rebates are mostly temporary, but the expansion of government will be permanent.  The new spending will have to be paid for, which will create pressure for higher taxes, which will create pressure for more spending.

Rosy assumptions

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Feb 062008
 

Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post writes:

I know what you’re thinking: “Please, not another federal budget story.” Who could blame you? It has become such a con game. The president sends Congress a budget that is immediately declared dead-on-arrival because of its rosy political and economic assumptions.

Um, no, that’s not why Congress declares these budgets dead-on-arrival.  Congresspersons may give that as a reason, but the same people are all full of rosy and political and economic assumptions for their own unrealistic ideas.  The president’s budget deserves to die for a number of reasons, but that’s no reason to believe what Bush’s opponents say.

Auditioning for a job in the new administration

 Clinton scandals  No Responses »
Feb 032008
 

The New York Times tells about a heist of historical documents from the New York State library. And somehow it managed to do it without even mentioning Sandy Berger, who is serving as an advisor to one of the candidates currently running for President.

Who knows, maybe the thief was auditioning for a job. There may be an opening if Hillary Clinton isn’t the one who gets elected.

Helpful to public discourse

 Leftwing fascism, Limits on government power  No Responses »
Feb 032008
 

I suppose I should have had something to say about Jonah Goldberg’s book by now, given that “leftwing fascism” is a blog category here and I and have been using that term for a decade or two. But I haven’t yet read Liberal Fascism. I’ve heard of it, but haven’t read it.

I haven’t used that category much, either. I suppose it’s because there are times when I’d rather make fun of leftwingism than slap a label on it, though I have nothing against either.

However, I do have a comment about Richard Bernstein’s review at the International Herald Tribune titled, Are American liberals “nice fascists”? It’s actually a pretty good review, but it ends like this:

And it might even be the case, as Goldberg contends, that Clinton, in her willingness to “insert the state deep into family life” in order to assure the well-being of children is “in perfect accord with similar efforts by totalitarians of the past.” But that doesn’t make Hillary a fascist or a totalitarian, or, for that matter, wrong.

I’m afraid Bernstein is wrong here. Such a willingness on the part of Hillary very much suggests a totalitarian fascist tendency. If “deep into family life” is not getting the state involved in pretty close to total control, I’m not sure what is.

And who has ever heard Hillary express any concern about keeping government’s control within prescribed limits?

In the end, Goldberg’s point that the fascist label has been used by some liberals to defame almost anything they don’t like is a valid one. So is his contention that American conservatism has no connection or similarity to European fascism – even if some American conservatives were not especially alarmed by Hitlerian racism or, for that matter, American Jim Crow.

But he should have stopped there.

To go on to label American liberals “nice fascists” isn’t exactly a smear, but it’s not exactly helpful to public discourse either. Then again, if Goldberg had stopped short of doing that, the chances are a book called “Liberal Fascism” wouldn’t have made it onto the best-seller list.

On the contrary, that label IS helpful to public discourse, and Bernstein’s review proved it. It gets us talking again about the idea of there being proper limits to government power.

I know nothing and I know it’s false

 Missing logic  No Responses »
Feb 012008
 

From The Hill:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a longtime friend of McCain’s, said yesterday, “I have never heard one word from John’s mouth to suggest he was going to leave the Republican Party. These are political-intrigue stories that have no basis in fact.”

Oh, yeah? And just how would Sen. Graham know that these stories have no basis in fact?

The Sacrament of Abortion

 Brave New World, Human rights  No Responses »
Feb 012008
 

Since at least as far back as 1999 I’ve been referring to abortion as the Holy Sacrament of the Left. (I got this idea from watching the Senate Judiciary Committee, among other things.) For the Clintons, as for the rest of their party, keeping abortion legal supersedes all else: The Bill of Rights, our national security, all considerations of honor and truth, the safety of our children — everything. Everything else is subordinated to the great and bloody sacrament of the left: killing fetuses.

I even predicated that there would soon be a religious test for office — or at least for any office that required confirmation by a Senate committee. Anyone who expected to gain high appointive office would have to appear before the committee wearing a bandolier full of abortion drugs, a scalpel between his teeth, ready to perform the sacrament in full view of the committee to prove his loyalty to the cause.

Some people thought I was overstating things.

Perhaps so, but I see from the latest issue of The Weekly Standard that I wasn’t as far off as some people claimed. In a short piece titled The Blessing of Abortion (for which you need to be a subscriber to read the whole thing) we have this:

The Albany Times Union reports on a unique ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The Planned Parenthood chapter in Schenectady invited several local members of the clergy to bless its new 18,000 square-foot “clinic.” According to the Times Union, the blessings included one from “Rev. Larry Phillips of Schenectady’s Emmanuel-Friedens Church [who] declared the ground ‘sacred and holy . . . where women’s voices and stories are welcomed, valued and affirmed; sacred ground where women are treated with dignity, supported in their role as moral decision-makers . . . sacred ground where the violent voices of hatred and oppression are quelled.’?”

No, we’re not making this up.

Hillary paperwork

 Limits on government power, Regulation, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Feb 012008
 

I’d mock it, too, if I heard Hillary say such a thing. If she really wants to do away with the horrendous paperwork of applying for college student-aid, she needs to get the government out of the business of subsidizing education loans. She can let the markets handle it and keep the paperwork simple, or she can have the government involved and the paperwork complicated. There really is no other method.

If you let the markets take care of it, lenders don’t need all the information that the government does. Yes, they do need to know some things about your finances, in order for you to convince them that they’ll get their money back. But they don’t need to know all the details that the government needs to know to keep cheaters from getting government money. In order for government to be fair and equitable in handing out money, it needs to know all sorts of things about us that are really none of its business.

From New York magazine:

Hillary believes, to the core of her political being, that what changes people’s lives are government programs. Her command of detail about these is prodigious, at times jaw-slackeningly so. And this often leads journalists to underestimate the effectiveness of her laundry-listy rhetorical métier. At her final speech in New Hampshire, I watched a well-known national columnist walk up to Doug Hattaway, one of her strategists, and mock a portion of her speech in which she promised that she’d do away with the horrendous paperwork involved in applying for college student aid. Hattaway simply shrugged and said, “She probably wouldn’t keep saying it if it didn’t get huge applause everywhere she goes.”

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