Here’s Lamar Alexander (R, TN):

By far nuclear energy is the least land-intensive; it requires only one square mile to produce one million megawatt-hours per year, enough electricity for about 90,000 homes. Geothermal energy, which taps the natural heat of the earth, requires three square miles. The most landscape-consuming are biofuels ethanol and biodiesel which require up to 500 square miles to produce the same amount of energy.

Coal, on the other hand, requires four square miles, mainly for mining and extraction. Solar thermal heating a fluid with large arrays of mirrors and using it to power a turbine takes six. Natural gas needs eight and petroleum needs 18. Wind farms require over 30 square miles.

This “sprawl” has been missing from our energy discussions. In my home state of Tennessee, we just celebrated the 75th Anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Yet there are serious proposals by energy developers to cover mountains all along the Appalachian chain, from Maine to Georgia, with 50-story wind turbines because the wind blows strongest across mountaintops.

Let’s put this into perspective: We could line 300 miles of mountaintops from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Bristol, Va., with wind turbines and still produce only one-quarter the electricity we get from one reactor on one square mile at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant.

“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” we were told by the opposition during the Bush administration. It seems that now that same opposition believes that “Dissent is the highest form of racism.” So get on board and join the program, or else you’re a racist.

So much for the unity president. From the Obama administration’s knee-jerk reaction to the perfectly legitimate arrest of Henry Louis Gates — said Obama: cops “acted stupidly” — to attending a church for decades whose pastor was clearly race baiting and antisemitic, the notion of Obama as a race unifier is a joke. (Note: Church is like a restaurant — you don’t go back unless you like what’s on the menu).

Fortunately, the race card always has a point of diminishing returns. A Rasmussen poll finds just 12% of Americans agree with the concept that the tea party protesters — whom Democrats continue to ridicule as “tea baggers” — are based in racism, not in opposition to massive tax increases or state-run health care.

What’s most outrageous of all this is the sheer hypocrisy. Jay Nordlinger explains:

But charges of racism are ever-present. Diane Watson, a congresswoman from Los Angeles, said, “They are spreading fear and they’re trying to see that the first president who looks like me fails.” Watson is black. Who are “they”? Obama’s health-care critics. Watson went on to heap kooky but common praise on Fidel Castro, and the old dictator himself got into the act. He wrote in his state media (the only media there are in Cuba), “The extreme Right hates [Obama] for being African-American and fights what the president does to improve the deteriorated image of [the United States]. I don’t have the slightest doubt that the racist Right will do everything possible to wear him down, blocking his program to get him out of the game one way or another, at the least political cost.” Holding forth in that way, Castro could easily be a columnist for, say, the Boston Globe.

At times, the health-care protests have been rowdy and obnoxious — like America. In an op-ed piece published in USA Today, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader, condemned an “ugly campaign” to “disrupt public meetings” and so on. They said, “Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American.” It is certainly undemocratic. But Pelosi, for one, once had very friendly words for rowdy, obnoxious, and disruptive protesters. On the Internet, Andrew Breitbart circulated a video from 2006, showing Pelosi at one of these town-hall meetings. The focus of the citizens’ ire was George W. Bush and the Iraq War. She said to this extremely angry bunch, “I thank all of you who have spoken out for your courage, your point of view — all of it. Your advocacy is very American and very important.” When the room got almost out of control, a man who appears to have been the moderator of this session — it’s unclear from the video — appealed for calm. Pelosi said, very sweetly and reasonably, “That’s okay, that’s okay.” When a woman shouted at her without cease, Pelosi said, “I understand your anger.” She could not have been more forbearing and patient — like a dear, tender aunt. She later said, “I’m a fan of disruptors, people who make change.” And she said, “Let’s not question each other’s patriotism when we’re having this very honest debate that our country expects and deserves.”

Words to live by.

Some protesters have been carted away from town-hall meetings on health care. A man from Londonderry, N.H. — a retired New York City patrolman — turned up at a meeting with his congresswoman, Carol Shea-Porter. He stood to ask a question, or make a statement, about unionists in the room: He thought that the congresswoman had stacked the hall with them, and wondered whether they even lived in New Hampshire. Shea-Porter had him removed: because he did not have a ticket to ask a question. She had earlier held a lottery, and only winners — those with tickets — could ask questions. She had also called critics of Obamacare “teabaggers,” following the practice established by CNN’s Cooper in the spring. And New Hampshirites noted an irony: Shea-Porter herself had once been a town-hall disruptor, an activist on the left.

The retired New York cop was a benign protester: or perhaps not even a protester at all, just someone seeking answers. But there have been protesters who have smelled of violence. One man showed up with a gun outside a town-hall meeting featuring Obama himself. (The gun was legal.) He had also brought a sign: about watering the tree of liberty. Another protester, outside a different meeting — not featuring the president — had a sign that was more direct: “Death to Obama.” He was duly handed over to the Secret Service.

Surveying the town-hall meetings across the nation — nasty ones and merely raucous ones — commentators have had a field day: warning against militias, new McVeighs, and “right-wing rage” in general. A notable left-wing writer is Rick Perlstein, who acts as kind of an anthropologist studying the Right. Like Malinowski among the Trobrianders, he examines conservative America, then reports back to amazed readers in civilization. He has recently published a piece in the Washington Post: “In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition: Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage.” (The term “birthers” refers to those with an unhealthy interest in President Obama’s birth certificate.)

Funny, but you never read about “left-wing rage.” Is that because “right-wing rage” is alliterative, and “left-wing rage” not? Orwell once remarked that you can never be a “rabid anti-Nazi” or a “rabid anti-fascist”: You can only be a “rabid anti-Communist.” If you are more than vaguely or discreetly anti-Communist, you are “rabid.”

Commentators of the Left seem not to accept conservative protest as legitimate at all. They seem practically offended at the very idea of conservative protest: because activism, energy, passion, and all that are supposed to come from the left. And grassroots are not supposed to figure in conservative soil. Indeed, when Pelosi was asked about health-care protesters, she called them “AstroTurf” — i.e., not real. And many have viewed the conservatives, not as an engaged citizenry, but as a mob. You will remember Peter Jennings, the late anchorman for ABC News. He epitomized left-liberal urbanity. And after the 1994 midterm elections, which were good for the Republicans and bad for the Democrats, he said that the voters had thrown “a two-year-old temper tantrum.” That is the mindset — the critical mindset — evident now.

President Obama himself seems a little miffed: He is the one used to doing the protesting, the community-organizing. And now that he is president — can’t everyone just fall in line, stay organized? Addressing the issue of health care, he said, “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them just to get out of the way . . .” Exactly.

In general, the Democratic party and the media class are “all wee-weed up,” to use an Obama phrase. They are appalled at the conservative protesters, shocked that such rough and noisy criticism could occur in America. “Hate” is filling the air, they say. And their assassination worries are mounting: What if someone took a shot at, not just the president, but the first black president? You perhaps remember the Bush years — the eight years of George W. Bush. They did not occur so long ago. Let’s do a little revisiting.

Howard Dean — not an unwashed citizen, but a man who was soon to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee — said, “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for.” Plus, “This,” meaning politics, “is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.” An editor of The New Republic wrote a piece called “The Case for Bush Hatred.” It began, “I hate President George W. Bush” — well, of course.

No one was more inflammatory or mendacious about Bush than Michael Moore, the filmmaker. He made a movie alleging, among other things, that Bush went to war in Afghanistan, not to rout the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but to benefit his business cronies. Almost the entire Democratic establishment turned out for this movie’s Washington premiere. Covering the event, Byron York asked Terry McAuliffe, who was chairman of the DNC (pre-Dean), whether he agreed with Moore on Afghanistan. He said yes. At the 2004 Democratic convention, Jimmy Carter asked Moore to sit with him in the presidential box. He told Moore that there was no one he would rather sit with. Later, the ex-president told Emory students that the movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, was his favorite of all time, along with Casablanca.

Some Democrats — Pelosi, Barney Frank — have been upset that town-hall protesters have brought up the Nazis, when talking about Obamacare and such. Do they remember the Bush years at all — when comparisons to the Nazis were ubiquitous and incessant? “Bushitler” became a routine term. Former senator John Glenn, objecting to Republican campaign rhetoric, said, “It’s the old Hitler business.” Al Gore said that the Bush administration was “unleash[ing] squadrons of digital brownshirts.” Julian Bond, as chairman of the NAACP, said of the Bushies, “Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side.” Rep. Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, compared 9/11 to the Reichstag fire. In a long list of epithets, Garrison Keillor, the National Public Radio favorite, called Republicans “brownshirts in pinstripes.” Etc., etc.

And I have merely cited political and intellectual leaders, not ordinary rabble, who were far worse.

And shall we talk about assassination? Even before Bush was elected president, the kill-Bush talk and imagery started. When Governor Bush was delivering his 2000 convention speech, Craig Kilborn, a CBS talk-show host, showed him on the screen with the words “SNIPERS WANTED.” Six years later, Bill Maher, the comedian-pundit, was having a conversation with John Kerry. He asked the senator what he had gotten his wife for her birthday. Kerry answered that he had taken her to Vermont. Maher said, “You could have went to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone.” (New Hampshire is an early primary state, of course.) Kerry said, “Or I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.” (This is the same Kerry who joked in 1988, “Somebody told me the other day that the Secret Service has orders that if George Bush is shot, they’re to shoot Quayle.”) Also in 2006, the New York comptroller, Alan Hevesi, spoke to graduating students at Queens College. He said that his fellow Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer, would “put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”

A columnist in Britain’s Guardian, Charlie Brooker, wrote, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?” Betty Williams, the Irishwoman who won the Nobel Peace Prize, said, “I have a very hard time with this word ‘non-violence,’ because I don’t believe that I am non-violent. . . . Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.” A novelist, Nicholson Baker, was so filled with rage at Bush, he wrote a novel mulling the question of assassinating him. In Britain, there was a TV movie — a “fictional documentary” — that was a kind of fantasy: on the assassination of Bush. (It was called Death of a President.) Etc., etc.

The anonymous photographer-blogger who maintains zombietime.com has done something remarkable: assembled a large collection of photos from anti-Bush and anti-Republican rallies — including Obama rallies. This makes for sickening viewing: all the signs calling for Bush’s death, all the severed Bush heads, the burning effigies, and so on. There is a delightful bumper sticker saying “SUPPORT BUSH” and showing a noose. All in all, this was a years-long orgy of, not just Bush-hatred, but murderous hatred toward that president. To paraphrase a onetime presidential candidate (Bob Dole), where was the outrage?

Nowhere — certainly not in establishment quarters. But there is outrage, or at least fierce indignation, at the relatively tame protesters who are giving Obama and his policies a hard time. You remember Cindy Sheehan, that media star, who had a son killed in Iraq and dedicated herself to hounding President Bush? Such media grandees as Charlie Gibson once danced attention on her. She is a forlorn figure in the Age of Obama. Before she went to Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama was vacationing, to continue her protests, Gibson was asked what he thought. He concluded, “Enough already.” And that can be said about anti-presidential protest in general: now that the un-Bush is in. Can you imagine the reaction if a CBS talk-show host showed a picture of Obama giving a speech and put up the words “SNIPERS WANTED”?

I must say, at a personal level, that it was sickening — almost literally sickening — to go through the materials assembled at zombietime.com. There is a depravity in that collection that you might not have thought possible in America, this basically easygoing, non-jacobinical country. I could never quite get used to the Bush-hatred, sustained as it was. I could tell you several anecdotes — here is one: At a dinner party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan one night, conversation turned to 9/11. I mentioned that the “Pennsylvania plane” — the one essentially brought down by extraordinarily brave passengers — had probably been destined for the Capitol or the White House. My hostess, a notably civilized and kind lady, said, “I wish George W. Bush had been killed that day.” I feel sure that she meant it — as did many other Americans.

And they are hardly positioned now to condemn the anti-Obama protesters. But all the smart people are consumed with worry about militiamen, brownshirts. On Meet the Press, host David Gregory asked a conservative senator whether he was troubled by threats of “violence against the government.” Well, that is a fine question to ask now. Did he notice the murderous displays against Bush? All of us have a little hypocrisy in us, probably. And to point out hypocrisy, as I have done in this article, is one of the easiest things in the world. But the current hypocrisy reeks so bad, it’s surprising that even the hypocrites don’t smell it.

South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s problem was mainly (1) an improper venue and, apparently, (2) the wording. I say “wording” because the ironic thing is that Obama had just basically called the GOP liars in his speech only seconds prior to Wilson’s outburst, stating, “There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false.”

That’s a nice way of saying “you lie.”

Wilson has since apologized (for the venue, not for the substance). I’ve seen the footage. The dude lost his cool. He’s fed up.

Besides, are you reaaally going to make me dig up on Google every rude heckling towards George W. Bush by a Democrat? (example) I’ll be up all night.

Now, is it true? The thing is that the Democrats specifically voted down GOP provisions to deny illegal aliens state-funded coverage (not treatment, mind you, but coverage). Via Katherine Ham at Weekly Standard, White House Press Sec. Gibbs twice avoided direct questioning by ABC News’ Jake Tapper as to whether illegals would be covered via wording that the bill didn’t specify one way or the other. But a month ago Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott found that it might:

Well, Mr. President, that idea must have been tucked under a stack of background briefing papers over there in the corner of the table because the Congressional Research Service (CRS) says this about H.R. 3200, the Obamacare bill approved just before the recess by the House Energy and Commerce Committee chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA:

“Under H.R. 3200, a ‘Health Insurance Exchange’ would begin operation in 2013 and would offer private plans alongside a public option…H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens—whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently—participating in the Exchange.”

CRS also notes that the bill has no provision for requiring those seeking coverage or services to provided proof of citizenship. So, absent some major amendments to the legislation and a credible, concrete enforcement effort in action, looks like the myth on this issue is the one being spread by Obama, Reid, Pelosi, et. al.

Regarding the overall Obama speech, it didn’t hurt him, but it didn’t help him either, at least not yet. For that zero sum rationale it’s a loser. His agenda was to convince enough on the fence, which so far he didn’t do. (Except via CNN polling, which used a sample of “427 adult Americans questioned by telephone” — did they call you? — and, here’s the best part, “45 percent Democratic and 18 percent Republican.”

This just in: 4 out of 5 socialists agree — more socialism!

In his Times op-ed, the president argues that the Democrats’ proposals “will finally bring skyrocketing health-care costs under control” by “cutting . . . waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies . . . .”

First, ask yourself whether the government that brought us such “waste and inefficiency” and “unwarranted subsidies” in the first place can be believed when it says that this time it will get things right. The nonpartistan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doesn’t think so: Its director, Douglas Elmendorf, told the Senate Budget Committee in July that “in the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount.”

– Sarah Palin from her WSJ editorial this week.

Here’s Jonah Goldberg on President Obama’s fifth prime-time address in just seven months:

Funny how the people who run the most sophisticated communication operation in the history of the presidency keep concluding that their difficulties stem from their inability to get their message out and never from what their message actually is.

And so, rather than change the substance of the message, they’re grabbing an even bigger megaphone: an address to a joint session of Congress. Three out of the last four presidents gave just one address to a joint session of Congress, and all but one of them reserved such occasions for major international events, like a war or, in Ronald Reagan’s case, a breakthrough with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Only Bill Clinton used such a venue for a domestic priority: health care reform.

That didn’t work out so well either.

There was a lot of debate a few weeks ago regarding the concept of “death panels” that stem from single-payer health care. When former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin spotlighted it, the defenders of the Obama camp attacked her as a fear monger. Maybe so, but then again…

Here’s Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre, explaining the perils of the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) attempt to promote humane premature death of patients considered terminal, a program termed the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP). According to the U.K. Telegraph, “300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England currently use the system.”

He [Dr. Hargreaves] added that some patients were being “wrongly” put on the pathway, which created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that they would die.

He said: “I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this “death pathway” that is coming in.

“It is supposed to let people die with dignity but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Patients who are allowed to become dehydrated and then become confused can be wrongly put on this pathway.”

He added: “What they are trying to do is stop people being overtreated as they are dying.

“It is a very laudable idea. But the concern is that it is tick box medicine that stops people thinking.”

He said that he had personally taken patients off the pathway who went on to live for “significant” amounts of time and warned that many doctors were not checking the progress of patients enough to notice improvement in their condition.

Prof Millard said that it was “worrying” that patients were being “terminally” sedated, using syringe drivers, which continually empty their contents into a patient over the course of 24 hours.

In 2007-08 16.5 per cent of deaths in Britain came about after continuous deep sedation, according to researchers at the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, twice as many as in Belgium and the Netherlands.

“If they are sedated it is much harder to see that a patient is getting better,” Prof Millard said.

What the good doctor above calls “laudable” — good intentions creating immorality or at least amorality — is a natural consequence of any health care system that seeks to replace the marketplace of choices with a single-payer system whose only cost control is the rationing of care.

This health care rationing does not just affect the terminally ill, but both the moderately to seriously ill and especially the elderly, who fall victim to bureaucrat’s distanced and cold spreadsheet-and-abacus methodology to determine who receives care.

Ophthalmologist Dr. Zane Pollard writes an extraordinary commentary in The American Thinker regarding the perils of health care rationing. It’s amazing. Read the whole thing.

I have been sitting quietly on the sidelines watching all of this national debate on healthcare. It is time for me to bring some clarity to the table by explaining many of the problems from the perspective of a doctor.

First off, the government has involved very few of us physicians in the healthcare debate. While the American Medical Association has come out in favor of the plan, it is vital to remember that the AMA only represents 17% of the American physician workforce.

I have taken care of Medicaid patients for 35 years while representing the only pediatric ophthalmology group left in Atlanta, Georgia that accepts Medicaid. For example, in the past 6 months I have cared for three young children on Medicaid who had corneal ulcers. This is a potentially blinding situation because if the cornea perforates from the infection, almost surely blindness will occur. In all three cases the antibiotic needed for the eradication of the infection was not on the approved Medicaid list.

Each time I was told to fax Medicaid for the approval forms, which I did. Within 48 hours the form came back to me which was sent in immediately via fax, and I was told that I would have my answer in 10 days. Of course by then each child would have been blind in the eye.

Each time the request came back denied. All three times I personally provided the antibiotic for each patient which was not on the Medicaid approved list. Get the point — rationing of care.

Over the past 35 years I have cared for over 1000 children born with congenital cataracts. In older children and in adults the vision is rehabilitated with an intraocular lens. In newborns we use contact lenses which are very expensive. It takes Medicaid over one year to approve a contact lens post cataract surgery. By that time a successful anatomical operation is wasted as the child will be close to blind from a lack of focusing for so long a period of time.

Again, extreme rationing. Solution: I have a foundation here in Atlanta supported 100% by private funds which supplies all of these contact lenses for my Medicaid and illegal immigrants children for free. Again, waiting for the government would be disastrous.

Last week I had a lady bring her child to me. They are Americans but live in Sweden, as the father has a job with a big corporation. The child had the onset of double vision 3 months ago and has been unable to function normally because of this. They are people of means but are waiting 8 months to see the ophthalmologist in Sweden. Then if the child needed surgery they would be put on a 6 month waiting list. She called me and I saw her that day. It turned out that the child had accommodative esotropia (crossing of the eyes treated with glasses that correct for farsightedness) and responded to glasses within 4 days, so no surgery was needed. Again, rationing of care.

Last month I operated on a 70 year old lady with double vision present for 3 years. She responded quite nicely to her surgery and now is symptom free. I also operated on a 69 year old judge with vertical double vision. His surgery went very well and now he is happy as a lark. I have been told — but of course there is no healthcare bill that has been passed yet — that these 2 people because of their age would have been denied surgery and just told to wear a patch over one eye to alleviate the symptoms of double vision. Obviously cheaper than surgery.

I spent two year in the US Navy during the Viet Nam war and was well treated by the military. There was tremendous rationing of care and we were told specifically what things the military personnel and their dependents could have and which things they could not have. While I was in Viet Nam, my wife Nancy got sick and got essentially no care at the Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. She went home and went to her family’s private internist in Beverly Hills. While it was expensive, she received an immediate work up. Again rationing of care.

For those of you who are over 65, this bill in its present form might be lethal for you. People in Britain face rationing of care in that there is an eight month wait for cataract surgery, 11 for hernia and the same for disc and total hip The government wants to mimic the British plan. For those of you younger, it will still mean restriction of the care that you and your children receive.

While 99% of physicians went into medicine because of the love of medicine and the challenge of helping our fellow man, economics are still important. My rent goes up 2% each year and the salaries of my employees go up 2% each year. Twenty years ago, ophthalmologists were paid $1800 for a cataract surgery and today $500. This is a 73% decrease in our fees. I do not know of many jobs in America that have seen this sort of lowering of fees.

But there is more to the story than just the lower fees. When I came to Atlanta, there was a well known ophthalmologist that charged $2500 for a cataract surgery as he felt the was the best. He had a terrific reputation and in fact I had my mother’s bilateral cataracts operated on by him with a wonderful result. She is now 94 and has 20/20 vision in both eyes. People would pay his $2500 fee.

However, then the government came in and said that any doctor that does Medicare work cannot accept more than the going rate ( now $500) or he or she would be severely fined. This put an end to his charging $2500. The government said it was illegal to accept more than the government-allowed rate. What I am driving at is that those of you well off will not be able to go to the head of the line under this new healthcare plan, just because you have money, as no physician will be willing to go against the law to treat you.

I am a pediatric ophthalmologist and trained for 10 years post-college to become a pediatric ophthalmologist (add two years of my service in the Navy and that comes to 12 years).A neurosurgeon spends 14 years post -college, and if he or she has to do the military that would be 16 years. I am not entitled to make what a neurosurgeon makes, but the new plan calls for all physicians to make the same amount of payment. I assure you that medical students will not go into neurosurgery and we will have a tremendous shortage of neurosurgeons. Already, the top neurosurgeon at my hospital who is in good health and only 52 years old has just quit because he can’t stand working with the government anymore. Forty-nine percent of children under the age of 16 in the state of Georgia are on Medicaid, so he felt he just could not stand working with the bureaucracy anymore.

We are being lied to about the uninsured. They are getting care. I operate at least 2 illegal immigrants each month who pay me nothing, and the children’s hospital at which I operate charges them nothing also.This is true not only on Atlanta, but of every community in America.

The bottom line is that I urge all of you to contact your congresswomen and congressmen and senators to defeat this bill. I promise you that you will not like rationing of your own health.

Furthermore, how can you trust a physician that works under these conditions knowing that he is controlled by the state. I certainly could not trust any doctor that would work under these draconian conditions.

One last thing: with this new healthcare plan there will be a tremendous shortage of physicians. It has been estimated that approximately 5% of the current physician work force will quit under this new system. Also it is estimated that another 5% shortage will occur because of the decreased number of men and women wanting to go into medicine. At the present time the US government has mandated gender equity in admissions to medical schools .That means that for the past 15 years that somewhere between 49 and 51% of each entering class are females. This is true of private schools also, because all private schools receive federal funding.

The average career of a woman in medicine now is only 8-10 years and the average work week for a female in medicine is only 3-4 days. I have now trained 35 fellows in pediatric ophthalmology. Hands down the best was a female that I trained 4 years ago — she was head and heels above all others I have trained. She now practices only 3 days a week.

46 million uninsured Americans? Not exactly, explains Karl Rove:

Of the 46 million uninsured, 9.7 million are not U.S. citizens; 17.6 million have annual incomes of more than $50,000; and 14 million already qualify for Medicaid or other programs. That leaves less than five million people truly uncovered out of a population of 307 million.

That 5 million figure also includes those in transitory status — that is, persons who lose and gain coverage throughout their life, as they change jobs. It’s similar to the sham behind class warfare, where the “rich” are vilified despite the fact that many of the rich are often, in various times of their lives, poor.

Finally, being uninsured doesn’t mean one doesn’t receive timely and excellent medical treatment. Indeed, one of the reasons the cost of treatment is so high is because the insured subsidize the treatment of those without insurance, who nonetheless are treated.