According to the State Department, terrorists in Guantanamo are “refugees,” and the Empire State Building will be lit up in red and yellow to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Communist China. As Michael Goldfarb notes, “Hey, the Red Chinese only killed 50 or 60 million of their own people, why not celebrate that achievement with a special lighting scheme.”

Maybe in another 51 years we can light the Empire State Building to celebrate some of the Guantanamo “refugees” destruction of the WTC..?

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

I’d love to see a poll showing if the same people who think Gore Vidal is a genius also think Roman Polanski’s drugging and raping of a 13-year-old girl is no big deal (or what Whoopie Goldberg said “wasn’t rape-rape.“) The argument seems to be, “a lot of time has passed, the victim doesn’t want to be drug into a media circus, and besides Polanski is such a talented director.” Um, er, okaaaay.

Fine, he’s no Charles Manson, but can you imagine the Hollywood crowd downplaying child rape if it were say Glenn Beck accused?

Before you answer that make sure you read Kate Harding’s Salon.com article “Reminder: Roman Polanski raped a child.” It hammers some of the facts from the case down pretty tight.

Gore Vidal is so washed up and irrelevant it’s kind of a waste of time to further comment on his angry contradictory ramblings. But I’m posting this because to me it’s a typical attitude of the Sixties hard-core leftist to project their shortcomings onto others — in this case, that America will decline into a “military dictatorship” even as Vidal recommends President Obama rely on just that to pass his health care agenda because the American public is too stupid to know what educated Leftists know: that socialist medicine is what’s best for you dumb lemmings.

[Vidal:] Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.”

You got that? “The country wanted it.” Just ignore those latest polls showing by 56% to 41% Americans oppose Obama’s federal option. Those 56% are just the Republicans, I suppose, or what Vidal terms “Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred.” Continue reading the article. The only one professing hatred is Vidal himself. In this case, Vidal seems to be suggesting that the way to solve healthcare is for Obama to use the same brute force that Abraham Lincoln found necessary to exercise during the American Civil War. Because, you know, Americans who oppose state-run health care is the same thing as 11 states seceding from the Union.

Vidal continues:

Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.

Is that what Franklin said? Really? And was this a country founded on “holding things together”? Funny, but I thought it was a country founded on the notion of individual liberty — the right to choose a health care plan on the open market, for example. Oh, never you mind. Don’t attempt to understand the ramblings of the enlightened Sixties radical.

Here’s a little more projection from Vidal, and it sure is a educating paragraph:

Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims.

Yeah, what was it Obama’s buddy Bill Ayers said: ”I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Birds of a feather, all.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman draws a comparison to the political climate today to that which led to the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Friedman bases this on, among other things, a recent Facebook poll that asks if President Obama should be killed because his health care proposal (which is already DOA in Senate committees).

Indeed, go no further than Hollywood’s 2006 movie titled Death of a President. The synopsis, according to Internet Movie DataBase is as follows: “Years after the assassination of President George W. Bush in Chicago, an investigative documentary examines that as-yet-unsolved crime.”

Perhaps Friedman’s concern regarding the lack of civility is noble, but the funny thing is I don’t recall Friedman or other columnists on the left writing that vitriol from Bush’s opponents might lead to his assassination, even as they produced that pipedream as “art.”

Here’s Michael Leavitt, Al Hubbard and Keith Hennessey on how the Obama health care plan would actually cause the young to not bother getting insured until it’s too late.

Insurance protects against the risk of something bad happening. When your house is on fire you no longer need protection against risk. You need a fireman and cash to rebuild your home. But suppose the government requires insurers to sell you fire “insurance” while your house is on fire and says you can pay the same premium as people whose houses are not on fire. The result would be that few homeowners would buy insurance until their houses were on fire.

The same could happen under health insurance reform. Here’s how: President Obama proposes to require insurers to sell policies to everyone no matter what their health status. By itself this requirement, called “guaranteed issue,” would just mean that insurers would charge predictably sick people the extremely high insurance premiums that reflect their future expected costs. But if Congress adds another requirement, called “community rating,” insurers’ ability to charge higher premiums for higher risks will be sharply limited.

Thus a healthy 25-year-old and a 55-year-old with cancer would pay nearly the same premium for a health policy. Mr. Obama and his allies emphasize the benefits for the 55-year old. But the 25-year-old, who may also have a lower income, would pay significantly more than needed to cover his expected costs.

Like the homeowner who waits until his house is on fire to buy insurance, younger, poorer, healthier workers will rationally choose to avoid paying high premiums now to subsidize insurance for someone else. After all, they can always get a policy if they get sick.

Bruce Riedel and Michael O’Hanlon explain in USA Today why the strategy of “offshoring” operations in Afghanistan, championed by many on the Left and some on the right, most recently George Will, will not work. The Offshoring is essentially counterterrorism, a strategy more reactionary based where the U.S. relies on technology and human assets not physically in Afghanistan. Riedel and O’Hanlon argue that counterinsurgency — boots on the ground interacting with the local population — is the only strategy for success, or at least a chance for success, in Afghanistan.

Here’s why:

The fundamental reason that a counterterrorism-focused strategy fails is that it cannot generate good intelligence. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban know not to use their cellphones and satellite phones today, so our spy satellites are of little use in finding extremists. We need information from unmanned low-altitude aircraft and, even more, from people on the ground who speak the language and know the comings and goings of locals. But our Afghan friends who might be inclined to help us with such information would be intimidated by insurgent and terrorist forces into silence — or killed if they cooperated — because we would lack the ability to protect them under a counterterrorism approach.

Afghan forces simply do not have the capacity to do the protecting themselves at this point and, given the challenges of building up new institutions in Afghanistan after decades of war, will not have the ability until at least 2012. Even that distant date will be postponed further if we do not deploy enough forces to mentor and partner with Afghans as they build up an army and police force largely from scratch. This adds up to a prescription for a drying up of intelligence.

The second reason a counterterrorism-oriented strategy would fail is that, if we tried it, we would likely lose our ability to operate unmanned aircraft where the Taliban and al-Qaeda prefer to hide. Why? If we pulled out, the Afghan government would likely collapse. The secure bases near the mountains of the Afghan-Pakistan border, and thus our ability to operate aircraft from them, would be lost. Our ability to go after Afghan resistance fighters would deteriorate. And the recent momentum we have established in going after Pakistani extremists would be lost.

For those who have forgotten the realities of the 1990s — when we tried to go after Osama bin Laden without access to nearby bases by using ships based in the Indian Ocean — the two- to four-hour flight times of drones and cruise missiles operating off such ships made prompt action to real-time intelligence impractical.

Third, we would likely lose our allies with this approach. A limited mission offers nothing to the Afghans, whose country is essentially abandoned to the Taliban, or to the Pakistanis, who would similarly see this as the first step toward cut and run. The NATO allies would also smell in a “reduced” mission the beginning of withdrawal; some if not most might try to beat us to the exit.

Once the Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda will not be far behind. Our top nemesis will be able to salvage a victory in the very place from which it launched the 9/11 attacks eight years ago. Al-Qaeda will have its favorite bases and sanctuaries back, as well as a major propaganda win.

Here’s Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist:

Imagine for a moment that the fantasists win the day and that at the climate conference in Copenhagen in December every nation commits to reductions even larger than Japan’s, designed to keep temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius. The result will be a global price tag of $46 trillion in 2100, to avoid expected climate damage costing just $1.1 trillion, according to climate economist Richard Tol, a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change whose cost findings were commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Center and are to be published by Cambridge University Press next year. That phenomenal cost, calculated by all the main economic models, assumes that politicians across the globe will make the most effective, efficient choices. In the real world, where policies have many other objectives and legislation is easily filled with pork and payoffs, the deal easily gets worse.

Yet the real tragedy is that, by exaggerating the threat of global warming, we have awoken the beast of protectionism. There are always forces in society that demand that politicians create more barriers to trade because they cannot compete on an even, fair playing field. Global warming has given them a much stronger voice.

Already, politicians are responding — and using the fear of global warming to create “green fences” against free trade. The U.S. House has passed the Waxman-Markey climate change bill with clear provisions to impose new trade tariffs on countries that don’t agree to emission reductions. Eyes are on the Senate, where John Kerry sees these as “sanctions” against “renegade countries.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has repeatedly called for a Europe-wide tax on imports from nations whose global warming efforts do not measure up to Europe’s. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently backed the idea.

There is a real and growing prospect of an all-out trade war being waged in the name of climate change.

The struggle to generate international agreement on a carbon deal has created a desire to punish “free riders” who do not sign on to stringent carbon emission reduction targets. But the greater goals seem to be to barricade imports from China and India, to tax companies that outsource, and to go for short-term political benefits, destroying free trade.

This is a massive mistake. Economic models show that the global benefits of even slightly freer trade are in the order of $50 trillion — 50 times more than we could achieve, in the best of circumstances, with carbon cuts. If trade becomes less free, we could easily lose $50 trillion — or much more if we really bungle things. Poor nations — the very countries that will experience the worst of climate damage — would suffer most.

In other words: In our eagerness to avoid about $1 trillion worth of climate damage, we are being asked to spend at least 50 times as much — and, if we hinder free trade, we are likely to heap at least an additional $50 trillion loss on the global economy.

President Obama is taking the Al Gore approach to climate change — that is, “shut up, he explained.”

It’s a big problem, time is running out, be very afraid, just do what I say and don’t try to debate, or use facts, or logic, or reason, or anything other than slanted and predetermined computer models created by a minority of “consensus scientists” who rely on grant money from the very government that would ” fix the problem” for the low price of X trillion dollars or no money back! Well, in response to the president’s declaration — like Ramses waive of the hand, so it is written, so it shall be done — that global warming is an “irreversible catastrophe” please take the time to read the Heartland Institute’s top myths about the subject.

The National Aeronautic and Space Agency (NASA) has determined Mars, Pluto, Jupiter, and the largest moon of Neptune warmed at the same time the Earth recently warmed.

Two hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the Earth, the average carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was 1800 ppm, five times higher than today.

All four major global temperature-tracking outlets (Hadley UK, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, University of Alabama-Huntsville, and Remote Sensing Systems Santa Rosa) have released updated information showing in 2007 global cooling ranged from 0.65 degrees C to 0.75 degrees C, a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. This occurred in a single year.

NASA satellites measuring global temperatures found 2008 to be the coldest year since 2000 and the 14th coldest of the past 30 years.

Surface Stations Inaccurate

U.S. climate monitoring stations on the planet’s surface show less cooling, but most of the 1,221 temperature stations are located near human sources of heat (exhaust fans, air conditioning units, hot rooftops, asphalt parking lots, and so forth). The land-based temperature record is unreliable.

Although we hear much about one or another melting glacier, a recent study of 246 glaciers around the world between 1946 and 1995 indicated an overall balance between those that are losing ice, gaining ice, and remaining in equilibrium.

On May 1, 2007 National Geographic magazine reported the snows on Mt. Kilimanjaro were shrinking as a result of lower precipitation, not a warming trend.

The overall polar bear population has increased from about 5,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 today, and the only two subpopulations in decline are in areas where it has been getting colder over the past 50 years. Polar bears have survived long periods of time when the Arctic was much warmer than today. Yet alarmists say the bears cannot survive this present warming without help from government regulators.

Here’s former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg:

Research by climate economist Professor Richard Tol shows that carbon cuts big enough to keep temperature rises lower than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)–a target that the G-8 and many others argue is necessary–could cost a staggering 12.9% of global GDP in 2100. That is the equivalent of $40 trillion a year. Available estimates show that the welfare loss induced by global warming will be just $3 trillion per year by 2100. For each dollar spent on global carbon cuts, we buy two cents worth of avoided climate damage. The solution is far more costly than the problem.

Yes, but the world’s bureaucrats aren’t interested in “solving” climate change (even if it were a problem), rather they’re interested in a new form of global taxation.

Here’s Newt Gingrich:

A 3-year-old boy was recently diagnosed with a rare, aggressive, soft-tissue cancer in his bladder. Radiation treatment would have stunted the growth of his pelvic bones, hips and bladder and left him disabled. Radical surgery could remove his bladder, prostate and portions of his rectum. That would have left him impotent, using a colostomy bag, and urinating through another bag in his abdomen.

His parents chose a third option—a new “unproven” therapy where a proton beam precisely targeted the radiation dose so that it didn’t cripple their son for life. The boy is now cancer-free and his body functions normally.

This story would seem to be an example of our health-care system at its best. But it is incompatible with the left’s vision for overhauling the health-care industry.

Despite all the well-documented problems with our health-care system, the United States is still the world’s leading source of medical innovation. Since 1960, the U.S. age-adjusted death rate for heart disease has declined by 54% due to advancing technology and new drugs. Pacemakers have been transformed. They once required a user to wear a backpack to monitor the device’s short battery life. Today, pacemaker batteries last more than seven years and are small enough to install in the rib-cage muscle wall.

Premature babies survive in America to live full lives more often than anywhere else in the world. New drugs now arriving on the market cure once-lethal leukemia. On the horizon there are vaccines to prevent other types of cancer. Modern science and technology offer even more exciting treatments in the future for diseases like AIDS, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Standing in opposition to this world of hope is the vision of reform advanced by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats. That vision would destroy the economic incentives that drive health-care innovation because it starts with a fundamental conceit: that government planners can spend health-care dollars better than patients and doctors in the marketplace. This planning is the foundation for the arbitrary insistence that spending 17% of our GDP on health care is “too much.”

The new bureaucracies that would be set up to reduce health-care spending by slashing payments to doctors, hospitals, surgeons, specialists, drug companies, high-tech equipment makers and others will kill the innovation that has served us so well. The essential incentives for the huge capital investment necessary to develop breakthrough treatments will be gone. And so too will high-paying jobs that these investments create.

Indeed, the plan released by Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) last week would impose new taxes on medical device manufacturers of $40 billion over 10 years. That’s more than industry venture capital investment.