Month: June 2007

They’re out there. Here’s a gruesome flash site celebrating terrorists and suicide bombers. Noah Schachtman comments. Dancho Danchev has a directory.

The presidential scholars who confronted the president on his authorization of torture explain why they did what they did – from CNN. It gives you hope. They have more courage than most of the Congress, and almost all the Republican candidates. A reader adds:

Not only do these Presidential Scholars have more courage, they’re more articulate than most members of Congress and the Administration. I’m saving the link for the times I get depressed about the future of my country. The kids are an inspiration.

I long for the next generation to assume power – here and in Iran.

I guess some readers are a little shocked by this statement:

I see no problem with the wealthy having access to better care than the less wealthy.

It seems to me that this is equivalent to saying: I see no problem with living in a free society. Even if Michael Moore achieved his dream of corralling us all into a British-style healthcare system, private medicine would still endure in America. In fact, you’d have to make it illegal to prevent the wealthy having access to better care, newer drugs, faster service, better doctors. I know some leftists would gladly prevent the successful from getting better healthcare, but it won’t happen in a free country.

So the choice we have is simply whether it’s better for the government to provide a basic safety net and let the private sector do the rest, or whether government should manage almost the entire healthcare sector as a public good and let the wealthy opt out if they wish. Either way, the wealthy get a better deal. That’s what happens in Britain: you get taxed to pay for mediocre, rationed healthcare, and then you have to pay privately if you actually want, say, an operation on time, or a procedure not yet planned for in the bureaucrats’ latest five-year plan. As I said, I don’t see a huge threat to good healthcare from a Romney-style reform, that tries to bring in more people into the system. I’d like to find ways to help many more of the working poor to afford insurance. But there’s a creeping logic here. Once the government concedes it has an obligation not only to provide healthcare for the truly needy, but for everyone, and everyone equally, the floodgates open. When the market for something is infinite – and who doesn’t want better and better health in an era of technological advance? – rationing is essential. Either the market rations it, or government does. I know which one I trust more.

Edwards exploits the blonde bigot for funds. In this clip, she’s hoping Edwards will be killed by terrorists.  Defend that, Mickey. She’s your friend, isn’t she?

"If faith tends to infect even secular politics, then what separates Hitchens from his religious enemies?

The absence of ideology, he would doubtless claim, and the commitment to skepticism and humanism, "free thought" and above all Science. But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain, but then he seems to be perplexed as well…" – Ross Douthat on "God Is Not Great."

There’s some bitterness brewing:

"If [the immigration bill] is jammed through before, ironically, Independence Day, I think we will have been witnesses … to the end of the old conservative coalition," Laura Ingraham said on Monday. "I truly believe that it is over if this happens, and it’s time to rebuild and restart."

Finally, the tiger Rove has been riding develops an appetite.

In the way only government can, the Department of Transportation solves the traffic problem:

Tired Of Traffic? A New DOT Report Urges Drivers: ‘Honk’

I should have mentioned Rich Lowry in my link to Johann Hari’s hilarious account of the nutters and neocons on a recent National Review Cruise. Here’s a very brief moment of reality for the NR crowd:

Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, announces, "The American public isn’t concluding we’re losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They’re looking at the cold, hard facts." The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, "I wish it was true that, because we’re a superpower, we can’t lose. But it’s not."

No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like their editor. The aging historian Bernard Lewis declares, "The election in the U.S. is being seen by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next." This is why the guests paid up to $6,000. This is what they came for. They give him a wheezing, stooping ovation and break for coffee.

Wolcott laments NR’s abandonment of Buckley conservatism here.

Post-circumcision diapers! To prevent infection and blood stains.

A reader writes:

Thanks for your comments on the NHS. They apply equally to the Canadian system. We actually have an organization which attempts to determine "standard maximum waiting times which correspond to patient urgency". Can you imagine a standard maximum waiting time for treatment that you would be satisfied with if you had, say, cancer?

Another comments:

I moved back to Canada together with my (same-sex) spouse last year after living in NY (state and city) for the last 19 years. While in NY, I have enjoyed my company-paid health insurance for much of that time, sometimes paying a few hundred dollars a month, sometimes nothing at all. During that time, I visited the emergency rooms in NYC several times, and I never have to wait. The care has been excellent both by my doctors or from the hospitals. Moving back to Canada, I visited the ER once with a profusely bleeding hand, and though the nurse immediately stopped the bleeding, the doctor didn’t arrive for a proper stitching till 2 or 3 hours later.

Based on these experiences, you would expect me to lavish praise on the American system, no? Wrong. One reason I moved back to Canada is that I wanted to start my own business, and I can’t afford to pay health insurance in the US for myself and my employees. The lack of free universal health care in the US is bad for entrepreneurship and bad for business, as Detroit and other big businesses have finally figured out. Please stop rooting for a broken system.

Portability or a Romney-style reform could help a lot. But we really shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.