The latest House proposal for nationalizing health care via a “federal option” is almost a whopping 2,000 pages long. They plan to vote as early as next week. Do you reaaally think our representatives are going to bother to read this monstrosity? Rep. John Boehner justifiably called it “1,900 pages of bureaucracy.” So, the complications they’ve created from our tax code they wish to further extend to our healthcare.

For a moment, put aside the notion that your government will for the first time ever legislatively force its citizens to purchase something (health care) regardless of individual choice, liberty or freedom (through the oft-abused interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, which is further subject to interpretation via the whims of nine unelected judges).

Consider other recent government ‘well-intended’ programs that simply robbed Peter to pay Paul. Today it was reported that the CARS program, also called Cash-For-Clunkers, cost the taxpayer a whopping $24,000 per vehicle. Whether aimed at “reforming” health care or another sector of the economy, such logic is simply a revision of genius economist Frédéric Bastiat famous essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” in which he retorts that era’s misguided logic that somehow a child who breaks the shopkeepers window is good for the economy. Bastiat did not have a high confidence or impression of “progressives.”

[Bastiat 1:116] The socialists who have invented these follies, and who in days of distress plant them in the minds of the masses, generously confer on themselves the title of “forward-looking” men, and there is a real danger that usage, that tyrant of language, will ratify both the word and the judgment it implies. “Forward-looking” assumes that these gentlemen can see ahead much further than ordinary people; that their only fault is to be too much in advance of their century; and that, if the time has not yet arrived when certain private services, allegedly parasitical, can be eliminated, the fault is with the public, which is far behind socialism. To my mind and knowledge, it is the contrary that is true, and I do not know to what barbaric century we should have to return to find on this point a level of understanding comparable to that of the socialists.

The modern socialist factions ceaselessly oppose free association in present-day society. They do not realize that a free society is a true association much superior to any of those that they concoct out of their fertile imaginations.

In short, these elitist Capital Hill bureaucrats and soon to be health care panel experts think they know better than the mass of we public citizens. Just shut up and swallow your medicine, they know what’s best for you.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of free-market reforms worth at least attempting prior to the foolish nationalization of such a massive chunk of our economy:

1) Eliminate wasteful lawsuits via tort reform or loser pay rules.
2) Equalize the tax code by allowing individuals to deduct the cost of health insurance as businesses can today.
3) Provide incentives and tax breaks through wellness programs.
4) Allow health insurance companies to compete across state lines.

Imagine that. And it didn’t take 1,900 pages from Congress.

Do yourself a favor and contact your Congressional reps with such demands.

This is a great commentary from Jonah Goldberg in their subscription version of National Review. The question he asks is, “Whatever happened to liberal idealism?” He notes a long history of liberal idealists, such as Harry Truman. And even more modern Democrat leaders who have had their own “American apology tours,” a la Bill Clinton apologizing for slavery or Rwanda, at least promoted the concept of American exceptionalism. Not so with with this most current crop of liberals in our White House and on Capital Hill. They instead promote the hamstringing of American exceptionalism.

Hence the New Liberal idealists’ top priority is for the American Gulliver to fall into line with the ranks of Lilliputians. And this is pretty thin gruel as far as idealism goes. The actions of the U.N. are, on a global level, the equivalent of seeing a little girl fall down a well and saying in response: “Let’s form a committee.” Actually, they are worse than that, because some of the committees at the U.N. are notorious for throwing little girls down wells. That’s why the excitement among liberal commentators over Obama’s decision to join the U.N. Human Rights Council — a den of villainy if ever there was one — was so depressing, and why Obama’s touting this decision as one of the noblest accomplishments of his administration is nothing short of perverse.

To see the enervating effects of this new idealism, consider Darfur. The genocide there was so bad it distracted George Clooney from supermodels. But what, exactly, does George Clooney want America to do? If you visit the website of “Not On Our Watch” — an organization founded by Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and other very concerned attractive people — you’ll be hard pressed to find an answer. “Not On Our Watch is committed to robust international advocacy and humanitarian assistance. . . . We encourage governing bodies to take meaningful, immediate action to protect the vulnerable, marginalized, and displaced.” Let’s form a committee!

Darfur activists implore Obama to “find” a “resolution” to the Darfur problem, as if such a resolution were like a lost cufflink. Just find it! In the meantime, what can you do? Well, Not On Our Watch says you can “stay informed” and tell your representative that you are concerned. You can give money to relief groups. You can “take a stand.” But once you get beyond the high-school-oral-report rhetoric, you’ll discover that taking a stand means asking the U.N. to adopt a binding resolution to form an ad hoc committee on stand-taking. The U.S. government — run entirely by the group’s fellow liberals — isn’t to be part of the solution at all. Last year, at the U.N. ceremony for Clooney’s anointment as a “Messenger of Peace with a special focus on peacekeeping,” Clooney recounted his most recent visit to Darfur. The people there “see these bright blue hats and they feel a new energy in the air. They feel for the first time that this is the moment that the rest of the world, all the nations united, are stepping in to help them. There is only one chance to get this right. They believe you when you tell them that hope is coming. They know that only the United Nations can help on this scale. They know it, and you know it.”

Of course, whether Clooney knows it or not, this is laughable jackassery. The U.N.’s record of stopping ethnic cleansing and genocide is on par with its record of supporting winning NASCAR teams. That’s why Clinton “illegally” ignored the U.N. to intervene in Kosovo. In 1994, genuinely heroic U.N. blue helmets from Belgium were asked to maintain stability in Rwanda. Ten of them were captured by Hutu soldiers (some reports say they voluntarily handed over their weapons per U.N. guidelines). The Belgian paratroopers were mutilated and tortured to death. After this atrocity, the Belgian blue helmets quickly left Rwanda and the genocide commenced. U.N. failures — of either resolve or ability — can also be catalogued in East Timor and Iraq.

Likewise, there will never be an effective multinational U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur, not least because the Russians and the Chinese represent two Sudanese vetoes on the Security Council. Indeed, as Mark Steyn noted in 2004, at precisely the moment the Sudanese Janjaweed intensified their slaughter at home, the Sudanese cookie-pushers at Turtle Bay were accepting a three-year stint on the Human Rights Commission (that was before it became a “Council,” by the way — and who among us doubts that the name change will make all the difference in the world?). The first task for the Sudanese “human-rights commissioners”? Denouncing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Israel, Israel, Israel.

The feckless asininity and moral bankruptcy of the U.N. are the best illustration of how confused both the so-called liberal realists and the so-called liberal idealists are. If something is truly morally compelling, if our conscience forces us to take action, who cares whether the U.N. approves? Obviously it’d be nice to get some help, but how is it a moral failing on our part to shoulder more of the burden? A similar argument holds for the realists. The notion that the “international community” has America’s best interests at heart is palpably absurd. According to the Nobel Committee, President Obama won the Peace Prize because “his diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.” For someone who believes that “citizen of the world” is a serious and legitimate concept, that makes sense. But if you believe that the United States of America is a sovereign entity whose sovereignty rests in its people, and that its leaders have an obligation to be jealous guardians of the American people’s interests, then conducting a foreign policy according to a global opinion poll is nonsense on stilts.

Obama has now said twice — in his two most important foreign-policy speeches, the one in Cairo and the one at the U.N. — that no country “can” or “should” dominate, or impose a system of government on, another. No statement better encapsulates how unidealistic and unrealistic the New Liberalism is. Men should not murder other men, but they most certainly can. The story of international relations has been the story of domination and imposition, often for ill, occasionally for good. Any foreign policy that doesn’t recognize this cannot be called realistic. And, in an important respect, any foreign policy that thinks America has neither the power nor the moral authority to impose its will when our conscience moves us cannot be called usefully idealistic either.

So, again, what use is liberalism on questions of foreign policy, beyond the rah-rah-for-multilateralism stuff? The Taliban throws acid in the faces of little girls trying to learn to read. If conservatives have to be the ones to point that out, what are liberals good for?

Here’s Charles Krauthammer:

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led (by) and following Fox.”

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration — from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health-care legislation — the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry — finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.

At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House “pool” news organizations — except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.

This was an important defeat because there’s a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they’re engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.

Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand “the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties.” They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other — and an otherwise imperious government.

Factions should compete, but also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize, and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.

But didn’t Teddy Roosevelt try to destroy the trusts? Of course, but what he took down was monopoly power that was extinguishing smaller independent competing interests. Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical — and that doesn’t even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.

Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN — which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a Saturday Night Live skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?

Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high-school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

Let’s be honest here… The Nobel Peace Prize became useless, meaningless, feckless and silly on the day that they awarded it to Yassir Arafat for Pete’s sake. So, I don’t really see what the hubbub is all about.

In just the past 72 or so hours President Barack Obama has both become the first president to ever refuse to meet the Dalai Lama, and denied funding to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. Both are policies based in appeasement, and the president’s track record on that is quite disturbing.

Beyond the historic snub, it’s naive to think that China will bend to Obama’s will just because he won’t take the moral high ground on Tibet. Denying funding to an Iranian human rights group on the basis that Iran might become more transparent and cooperate on nuclear proliferation isn’t just naive, but dangerously incompetent. (It’s insulting too, considering just days ago the U.S. government extended $400,000 to a human rights group run by Saif and Aisha Qaddafi, son and daughter of Mouamar Qaddafi, — despite bipartisan disapproval on Capital Hill — just after Libya gave a heroes welcome to the Lockerbie bomber.)

Also recently, the Obama administration threw its full support behind deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, despite the fact that a Law Library of Congress’s Directorate of Legal Research review found the removal legal under the Honduran constitution, and, reminds columnist Jonah Goldberg, “even though Zelaya was never supposed to be on the ballot in the first place and the only way he could be on it would be through unconstitutional election fraud.” (Note, Zelaya’s actual deportation was not).

I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise. Members of the hard Left have a long history of an attitude of liberty for me, but not for thee. Obama’s actions were best summarized by Charles Krauthammer: “When France chides you for appeasement, you know you’re scraping bottom.“

ObamaCare would essentially be one massive Medicare program. If this occurs, opines the Wall Street Journal, the same rationed care principles causing Canadians, et. al., to come to America for quicker specialty care will become the case for Americans — except, unfortunately, we’ll have no border to cross to find that quick MRI, CT, etc.

The way Medicare works is that Congress decides each year how much it wants to spend on doctors, period. If one area of medicine receives a larger slice of this pie, another must accept a smaller one. The portion sizes are determined using a formula known as Relative Value Units, or RVUs. Medicare assigns an RVU to each of 7,500 billable services—in 2008, a colonoscopy earned 5.64 of these units, a hip replacement 37.66. Then it multiplies a doctor’s total RVUs by some dollar factor, currently about $36, and cuts a check.

The chunks Team Obama took out of cardiology RVUs are especially drastic. The basic tools of heart specialists—echocardiograms (stress tests) and catheterizations—are slashed by 42% and 24%, respectively. Jack Lewin, who heads the American College of Cardiology, said in an interview that the crackdown will cause “a horrible disruption” that will force many community and independent practices to close their doors, lay off staff or make senior patients wait days or weeks for tests and services.

Cancer doctors get hit because the Administration believes specialists order too many MRIs and CT scans. Certain kinds of diagnostic imaging lose 24% under new assumptions that machines are in use 90% of the time, up from 50%. There isn’t a radiologist in America running an MRI 10.8 hours out of 12, unless he’s lining up patients on a conveyor belt. But claiming scanners are used far more often than they really are lets the Administration “score” spending cuts.

And this change is applied to all expensive equipment, not just MRIs and CTs, so payments for antitumor radiation therapy will fall by up to 44%. The American Society for Radiation Oncology says it “will have a devastating effect on cancer patients’ access to care.”

…Markets are supposed to determine the composition of the workforce, not a command medical economy run out of Washington. It is perfectly insane to support one type of doctor by punishing others on a flawed theory about cost-control. The press passes all this off as routine when it bothers to notice, but we suspect our media colleagues would show more interest if Messrs. Obama and Baucus were deciding how much journalists should be paid and what they should cover.

If Democrats are going to stomp on specialists, they should at least be open about it. Then again, all Americans might take a different view of health-care “reform” if they understood that it means snuffing out the best medicine.

In a matter of about three weeks, the Left’s view of Afghanistan has gone from “the good war” to “the next Vietnam.” This turnabout — in effect, the Left is dumping the war now that it has stopped being politically useful — deserves an honored place in the annals of bad faith. Meantime, our troops in the field are still fighting.

In an unsparing 66-page assessment, commanding general Stanley McChrystal warns of failure unless he gets more troops quickly for a counterinsurgency campaign to protect the population and to thwart the enemy’s momentum. McChrystal is President Obama’s hand-picked general, selected to carry out the “comprehensive” counterinsurgency strategy that Obama announced in March. But the White House now acts as if it barely knew its own four-star and had not heard of his strategy.

It is understandable that Obama wants to be deliberate in committing perhaps tens of thousands more troops to the field, but his change of tune, away from his formerly approved strategy and the stalwart rhetoric (“the necessary war”) of a few months ago, indicates fecklessness or political calculation or both.

If we want to keep al-Qaeda from reestablishing a base in parts of Afghanistan and militants from regaining the initiative in neighboring Pakistan, there is no alternative to defeating the Taliban and associated insurgencies in Afghanistan, and that will require manpower. Obama’s political advisers hate the war, and Vice President Biden is selling a characteristically unrealistic plan to fight it from afar. Obama should resist the urge to flinch.

– National Review’s: The Week.($)

[Washington Post] For up to four hours a day, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, can sit outside in the Caribbean sun and chat through a chain-link fence with the detainee in the neighboring exercise yard at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Mohammed can also use that time to visit a media room to watch movies of his choice, read newspapers and books, or play handheld electronic games. He and other detainees have access to elliptical machines and stationary bikes.

At Guantanamo, such recreational activities interrupt an otherwise bleak existence, according to a Pentagon report of conditions at Camp 7, which houses 16 high-value detainees. But even those privileges may soon vanish.

The Justice Department has begun to hint in court filings that at least some of the defendants in the Sept. 11, 2001, case, as well as other prominent suspects, will be transferred to federal custody in the United States. While lawmakers and activist groups have been consumed with a debate over such a move, little attention has been paid to the conditions that Mohammed and other high-value detainees would face in the United States.

And those conditions, it turns out, would be vastly more draconian than they are at Guantanamo Bay. … Based on what is known about restrictions in the country’s highest-security federal prisons, Mohammed and other terrorism suspects would face profound isolation in the United States.

If sent to a facility such as the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., they would be sealed off for 23 hours a day in cells with four-inch-wide windows and concrete furniture. If they behave, and are allowed an hour’s exercise each day in a tiny yard, they will do so alone. They will have little or no human contact except with prison officials. And the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outside group with access to Camp 7, will no longer have contact with them.

“Confinement for life,” as one is quoted in the article, or better yet, sentences of death, is admittedly quite appealing for these animals who bomb our cities and turn our planes into missiles. Nonetheless, the sense of justice served might be instead be an enabler for more terrorism.

Critics of Guantanamo Bay have often confused the point of the detainee camp: it’s never been about convictions or justice, but about gathering intelligence necessary to prevent future attacks. That’s the primary rationale for Guantanamo, and why so few of the detainees — albeit all of them deserving such a fate — have been tried and sentenced, whether in civilian court or by military tribunal. And that’s just a defense for starters: it’s not including such unintended and adverse consequences of introducing militant religious fanatics to a population of hardened and angry imprisoned civilians (many of whom will be released one day) with whom to proselytize and convert into the next generation of suicide bombers.

Similarly, critics of the USA Patriot Act have often confused both its intent and its application. That act, most recently defended by former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, simply expanded surveillance abilities, from roving wiretaps to public record searches (i.e., the public library red herring) already in existence for narcotics investigations and organized crime to terrorism. It seems silly to say that Feds should have those powers for local drug dealers or Mafia lords but not for Osama bin Laden. And it seems incompetent to argue their dissolution altogether.

“Mr. [New York-Dallas-Denver bomb suspect Najibullah] Zazi’s arrest is only the most recent case in which intelligence apparently has averted disaster. Cells have been broken up and individual defendants convicted in New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas and Ohio,” wrote Mukasey.

And yet still liberal Democrats attempt to sunset Patriot Act provisions. The intelligence used to capture Zazi may have well originated from interrogations with Guantanamo Bay detainees, and yet still liberal Democrats attempt to close that facility.

And to what end? Even for those with the best intentions, their sake of justice may undercut the ability to prevent the next 9-11.