Dan Henninger on Big Government

Daniel Henninger, the deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing in 1987 and 1996, and shared in the Journal's Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper's coverage of the attacks on September 11. He won the Eric Breindel Journalism Award for his "Wonder Land" column, in 2004.

His column today is entitled, "Would the Founders Love ObamaCare?" You can read it by clicking here.



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In Defense of Benedict XVI

A lot has been written lately, especially in the New York Times (imagine that), about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Maybe it's just coincidence, but this is the holiest week of the year for Catholics; that's why it's called Holy Week. Somehow, I can't imagine the Times doing a hit piece on Ali Khamenei during Ramadan, but the same newspaper, just days before Holy Week, seemed intent on placing blame on Pope Benedict XVI for not doing enough to halt the abuse years ago, when he was serving as Archbishop of Munich and then Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Fortunately, the Pope has a host of defenders; two of them: George Weigel and Nicholas DiMarzio, Bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York, have spoken out.

Here is the piece by George Weigel that appeared on National Review Online, on March 22, 2010.

The End of Euphemism - George Weigel - National Review Online

The text of remarks made by Bishop DiMarzio during his homily this past Sunday were posted on the Deacon's Bench, the Blog of Deacon Greg Kendra, yesterday. You can read those remarks here.




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Shelby Steel Dissects Obama

Shelby Steele, the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote an insightful piece on President Obama in today's Wall Street Journal.

Here are some clips:

Of the two great societal goals—freedom and "the good"—freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today's liberalism is focused on "the good" more than on freedom. And ideas of "the good" are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence—if not superiority—on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.

Mr. Obama's success has always been ephemeral because it was based on an illusion: that if we Americans could transcend race enough to elect a black president, we could transcend all manner of human banalities and be on our way to human perfectibility. A black president would put us in a higher human territory. And yet the poor man we elected to play out this fantasy is now torturing us with his need to reflect our grandiosity back to us.

You can read the entire piece here.



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If You Like Your Doctor, Sorry.

Remember the line: "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?" Well, not exactly - not if your doctor decides to become a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker because he's had it with the government interfering with his business.

Remember Nancy Pelosi saying: "We have to pass the Bill so that you can find out what is in it?" The Verum Serum Blog has been "finding out what is in it" and writing about some of the unintended consequences of the Bill the Democrats were so ecstatic about passing.

Yesterday, Verum Serum posted a piece about the unintended consequence of a doctor shortage. You can read that here.

On Sunday, they posted a piece about the (maybe) unintended consequence of the severe economic impact of the Bill on some of our biggest job creating corporations. You can read that one here.

Philosophers, economists, social scientists, and historians have been warning us about the Law of Unintended Consequences for centuries. Adam Smith (1723–1790), whose work has probably not been read by anyone in the current administration, was especially wary of the unintended consequences of government action. ObamaCare is about to make a lot of people in Congress painfully aware of what Adam Smith understood (and preached against) more than 250 years ago.



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Sundays are for Beauty: Derek Paravicini

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This video is about 14 minutes long (please excuse the commercial; I was unable to extract it), but it will definitely brighten your day.

Derek Paravicini, in the words of Leslie Stahl, "is a musical savant, blessed with an island of extreme talent in a sea of profound disability."

"It's like he's got libraries of pieces and styles in his head," Adam Ockelford, Derek's teacher, told Stahl. "And he can just whip out a piece book and a style book and just bring them together. It just kind of explodes."

So how does such a profoundly disabled from birth young man come to possess such a musical talent? Could it be some mysterious by-product of the "Big Bang?" I don't think so.

Have a Beautiful Sunday - and God Bless.


H/T: josiere

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New Medical Symbol

Got this from a circulating E-Mail, and couldn't resist posting it.

To prepare for the new healthcare reform package, the White House felt it necessary to develop a new medical symbol that truly depicts the Health Care Plan you will be getting.


H/T: dfelder

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New CPR Method - Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic Presentation of Continuous Chest Compression CPR - a new approach to patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest that has been shown to improve rates of neurologically intact survival by 250%--300% over the approach advocated by the 2000 American Heart Association guidelines.


H/T: ga76821

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High Praise for ObamaCare

Fidel Castro obviously thinks ObamaCare is Socialized Medicine - but how would he know?

This is from The Heritage Foundation Blog today.

Castro Calls Passage of Obama's Health Care Plan "A Miracle" | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.

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So, You Still Want to Close Gitmo?

Andy McCarthy explained clearly yesterday, in the following article on National Review Online, perhaps the most important reason NOT to close the state-of-the-art prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

So, You Still Want to Close Gitmo? - Andrew C. McCarthy - National Review Online

(Andrew C. McCarthy's new book: Willful Blindness is available at Amazon.com. You can use the search box on the right side of this Blog to read a review or order a copy.)

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Senior Congressional Staff Exempted from ObamaCare

This post from The American Thinker probably isn't news to anyone, but it is, and always will be, grating to me that the Democrats who shoved this so-called health care reform Bill down our throats not only exempted themselves from it, but also exempted their staffs. Feel like a peasant? You should. It's probably safe to say that should they ever succeed in creating a single payer universal health care system, they and their staff members will also be exempt from that.

Senior Congressional Staff Exempted from ObamaCare

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Senate, Say No to Liu for 9th Circuit

The School of Athens (that's Plato and Aristotle in the top center) is the logo of Verum Serum, a very interesting website. Click on the photo to enlarge. Here's a link to the site:

http://www.verumserum.com/



That's President Obama's pick to fill a vacancy on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu. He seems to be philosophically drawn slightly (shall we say) to the Left, so he would fit in perfectly with that judicial body. The above video and an accompanying post appeared on Verum Serum two days ago, and created more than a mild stir among Blogs from the other side. You can read the post here, and see if you have a problem with it. I don't.

Alan Dershowitz: Obama's Legacy - A Nuclear Iran

Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz is one of the best known criminal defense attorneys in the United States. At the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor of law at Harvard. He is seldom on the Right side of issues of importance (especially in the criminal justice system), but, when Israel is involved in any way, he becomes almost a Conservative. In an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal today, he argues that Obama's legacy will NOT be his revamping of our health care system (which, according to Dershowitz, is not a bad thing - see what I mean?), but whether Iran becomes a nuclear power on his watch - something that appears to be inevitable.

Here are some excerpts from the Dershowitz article (emphasis added):

In these respects, allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is somewhat analogous to the decision by the victors of World War I to allow Nazi Germany to rearm during the 1930s. Even the Nazis were surprised at this complacency. Joseph Goebbels expected the French and British to prevent the Nazis from rebuilding Germany's war machine.

In 1940, Goebbels told a group of German journalists that if he had been the French premier when Hitler came to power he would have said, "The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!"

But, Goebbels continued, "they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!"

So too will Iran's construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama's enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world's first suicide nation—a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.

The Wall Street Journal now requires a subscription to read the whole article online, but the above excerpts provide more than an adequate glimpse of the piece.

So Who is the Coward, Mr. Holder?

Andy McCarthy wrote, once again, about Attorney General Eric Holder, on NRO. You'll recall that Holder, in one his earliest speeches after his confirmation, called the United States "a nation of cowards" when it comes to race relations. This from a guy who refuses to provide an honest answer about his position on the treatment of captured enemy combatants, when questioned before a Congressional Committee.

Here are some clips (emphasis added).

There is dishonest, and there is asinine. Combine them and you have Attorney General Eric Holder’s congressional testimony on Tuesday.

...Cornered, he insisted to Rep. John Culberson (R., Texas) that there was no need to answer the question of whether Osama bin Laden would be Mirandized on capture because . . . he won’t be captured. Holder guaranteed that bin Laden would instead be killed: “We will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden,” Holder said. “He will never appear in an American courtroom.”

...What is even more troubling than Holder’s stubborn failure of imagination is his twisted mindset. According to the Obama administration’s dogma, we must abandon the war footing that we’ve been on since 9/11, go back to approaching jihadist terror as a crime, and treat every perpetrator of a “man-caused disaster” as an ordinary defendant clothed in the Bill of Rights. This shining example of “our values” in action, we’re told, will impress the Muslim world and thus improve our security.

So how impressed is the Muslim world going to be when we summarily kill Muslims so that we can avoid inconvenient questions about Miranda warnings and thereby spare the Obama administration some political angst?

...Holder clearly believes — as he argued in the amicus brief he withheld from the Senate before his confirmation hearings — that our al-Qaeda enemies should be regarded as common criminals: given Miranda warnings upon capture and endowed with all the due-process protections of civilian defendants. This is an ill-advised position, but it’s not an uncommon one. It is predominant on the academic Left. Yet Holder bobs, weaves, and contradicts himself on the question — whatever it takes to avoid giving us a straight answer about his own beliefs. So who is the coward?

Here's the whole article:

This Corpse Has the Right to Remain Silent - Andrew C. McCarthy - National Review Online


H/T: bkmck

Rep. Paul Ryan's Final Remarks on ObamaCare

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), speaking before the House voted last night, summed up why the (since passed) so-called Health Care Reform Bill is not something of which Americans should be proud.

Sundays are for Beauty - The Beach Boys

Surfin' USA, the second album released by The Beach Boys, came out in 1963. It reached #2 on the charts in the USA and stayed listed for 78 weeks.


Have a Beautiful Sunday.

Milton Friedman on ObamaCare

Milton Friedman (1912-2006), the Nobel Prize winning economist published an article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "A Way Out of Soviet-Style Health Care," on April 17, 1996. That was the year Obama was first elected to the Illinois State Senate, and 13 years before anyone had heard the term ObamaCare. Dr. Friedman, the disciple of Frederick Hayek, and mentor of Thomas Sowell, was nothing if not prescient. Would that he were alive today to lend his learned voice to the chorus of other great economists (such as his protege, Dr. Sowell) who have been trying to explain the horrors of the soon-to-be-voted-on "health care reform" Bill.

The Journal reprinted the article in today's edition, and it could not be more timely. To read the article, click here.

Katie Spotz Rows Across the Atlantic - Alone

That's Katie Spotz, a 22 year old adventurer from Mentor Ohio. Last Sunday, she paddled her row boat into Georgetown, Guyana (South America), after rowing all the way from Dakar, Senegal (Africa). She left Dakar, on January 3rd. She became the youngest person to row SOLO across the Atlantic, a distance of some 2,817 miles from her starting point to the finish, and she did it in 70 days.

The following is from the attached article:

According to the Ocean Rowing Society, she is the 43rd person to complete this east-to-west row across the Atlantic. The previous record for the youngest solo ocean rower was set by Oliver Hicks, a 23-year-old from Great Britain who rowed from New Jersey to England in 2005.

To find out more about this amazing young lady, and to view more photos, go here.

H/T: mckte

Duplicitous Demagogues Win: Senate Votes Against School Choice

The D. C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (DCOSP) has been covered on this Blog since Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the original duplicitous demagogue, first stripped its funding from the Omnibus Spending Bill last year. This is a travesty, and further proof that Democrats are more in sympathy with unions (especially the NEA) than they are with the idea of poor minority children obtaining a good education. The Heritage Foundation posted the below on their Blog today.

Senate Votes Against School Choice | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.

To revisit earlier Ocean Kayaker posts on the DCOSP, click on the below links.

http://wwwpopblogger.blogspot.com/2009/04/victims-of-duplicitous-demagogues.html

http://wwwpopblogger.blogspot.com/2009/04/victims-of-duplicitous-demagogues-part.html

http://wwwpopblogger.blogspot.com/2009/05/victims-of-duplicitous-demagogues-part.html

http://wwwpopblogger.blogspot.com/2009/07/dc-city-council-supports-opportunity.html

http://wwwpopblogger.blogspot.com/2009/07/nea-general-counsel-union-dues-not.html

The Obama Apology Tour Continues: No U.S. Flag in Haiti

Please make sure you're sitting down before clicking on this link from The Heritage Foundation.

The Obama Apology Tour Continues: No U.S. Flag in Haiti | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.

A Few Questions for President Obama

Ever since it was announced yesterday that the president will be giving an exclusive one on one interview to Fox News Channel tonight (the subject of which will be the "Health Care Reform Bill"), and since Bret Baier, host of Fox News Special Report (who will be doing the interviewing) asked the general public to submit questions to the station's website, I have been trying to come up with one. The first obvious question would be: "Why Fox News, Mr. President? You've been more than a little critical of that outfit for quite a while now. Your administration has accused them of distorting the facts and being biased against you and your agenda. In fact, your spokesman even stated that they are not really a legitimate news source. So why choose Fox for your last ditch effort to salvage your extremely unpopular attempt to impose government control over one sixth of the economy?"

I decided not to submit that question because the answer is obvious: More people (thank God) depend on Fox News (especially Special Report) to keep them informed, in a fair and balanced way, on what is happening in the world than on any other news source.

Fortunately, the Independent Institute's Beacon Blog today published better questions than any mere blogger could conjure. Click on the below link to read them; I'm sure Bret Baier has already done so.
A Few Questions for President Obama

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