Bill Whittle on The Media, The Left and GOP Elitists v. Sarah Palin: A Lesson on How to Destroy a Leader

Bill Whittle talks about how Sarah Palin was taken down from the Left and the Right in this video at PJTV. He points out in other words what I have pointed out before that if the Right insists on fighting by Marquis of Queensbury Rules while the other side fights with brass knuckles and knives, they will be beaten every time.

Healthcare Mythology - What We Know That Ain't So

A friend pointed me to this article by Clifford Asness PhD, Managing and Founding Principal of AQR Capital Management LLC, who explores in depth the mythology surrounding the debate on healthcare in this piece at Stumbling on Truth. There are six major myths and he duly shreds each one in turn:

1. Healthcare Costs are Soaring
2. The Canadian Drug Story
3. Socialized Medicine Works in Some Places
4. Public Option Can Co-exist with a Private Option
5. We Can Have Healthcare Without Rationing
6. Healthcare is a Right

From the section on Canada:

....but when it comes to pharmaceuticals they are lucky parasitic hosers. Drug companies in general sell their products to Canada at low prices, making a little profit, and reducing slightly the amount they need to charge other North Americans. This does create the silly illusion that the Canadian system is somehow better than ours because our own drugs are cheaper there. They are only cheaper to the extent we are subsidizing them by paying their portion of drug development costs and, unfortunately, we cannot subsidize ourselves (or we go blind).[4]

Update: the author has updated his article with a seventh myth, now number 4: Socialized Medicine Is Better Because Their Cost/GDP For Health Care is Lower. I also wanted to highlight another point about "rights" in what is now section/myth 7:

"Listing rights generally involves enumerating things you may do without interference (the right to free speech) or may not be done to you without your permission (illegal search and seizure, loud boy-band music in public spaces). They are protections, not gifts of material goods. Material goods and services must be taken from others, or provided by their labor, so if you believe you have an absolute right to them, and others don’t choose to provide it to you, you then have a “right” to steal from them. But what about their far more fundamental right not to be robbed?"

Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip to Mr. W)

The War Against the Producers - Victor Davis Hanson

The incomparable Victor Davis Hanson has a post up at PJ Media that is a must read. So, um, why not go read it. A sample:

Ponder a simple fact: The Obama administration is dispersing income lavishly to those who do not pay taxes and it will have to be paid for by those who do. For all the talk of that awful percentile who make over $200,000, this administration has not distinguished the hyper-rich 1% that make untold money (e.g., the Buffets, Soroses, Turners, Gateses, Kerrys, Gores, etc), from the much more demonized, larger 5% of the population whose income does not come from investments and insider influence and deal-making, but rather from providing more tangible goods and services — the family doctor, the plumbing contractor, the small lumber company owner, the car dealer, the local family-held insurance company, the airline pilot, the car-leasing firm, the patent attorney, etc.

Keith Hennessey Subjects President Obama to a Well Deserved Fisking

(via Instapundit) President Obama has an op-ed piece entitled "Rebuilding Something Better" in today's Washington Post. Keith Hennessy, a former senior economic adviser to President Bush has posted a very thorough Fisking of same right here. And lest you think it's all bad, he does give the President credit where it's due. (Link to the op-ed in the Hennessey post)

Obama on the Flying Trapeze

Rex Murphy on President Obama's first six months, in the The Globe and Mail:

We've seen him in action for a bit more than six months. What we can say with confidence, now that we have the evidence of his actions, is that had he run on (a) transforming the U.S. economy by massive federal government intervention, (b) taking an owner's stake in the automobile industry, (c) transforming the rules of America's energy economy, (d) instituting a national health-care system - all of these simultaneously and in the centre of a financial meltdown - Barack Obama wouldn't merely have lost the election, he wouldn't have got as many votes as gnarly old Ross Perot did in an election long past. He wouldn't, in other words, have beaten a bad-tempered, egotistical spoiler.

Buyer's remorse yet, Obama voters? If not, I've got a nice little bridge to sell you. I also feel compelled to point out that we're 30 months into a Democrat controlled congress.

Read it all.

(via Instapundit)

What the Democrats Are Up To - In the Words of One of Their Own

I've posted a couple of times now about how the Republican Party keeps trying to play by Marquis of Queensbury rules while the Democrats bring knives and brass knuckles to the fight. The Republicans get slaughtered, every single time. David Kahane (the nom de plume of a Hollywood writer), a self-professed "man of the left", openly tells us the same in this article at the National Review. Can we please take them at their word, that is seriously, now?

Yes, my friends, it’s once again time to quote Sean Connery’s famous speech from The Untouchables, written by David Mamet — the lecture the veteran Chicago cop gives a wet-behind-the-ears Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner, back when he was a movie star) while they sit in a church pew. “You want to get Capone? Here’s how you get him: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” If you just think of us — liberal Democrats — as Capone you’ll begin to understand what we’re up to. And we just put one of yours in the morgue.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but maybe now you’re beginning to understand the high-stakes game we’re playing here. This ain’t John McCain’s logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United States of America. This is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won’t be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it.

In other words, stop thinking of the Democratic Party as merely a political party, because it’s much more than that. We’re not just the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition. Not just the party of Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Richard J. Croker, Bull Connor, Chris Dodd, Richard Daley, Bill Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II. Not just the party of Kendall “Agent 202” Myers, the State Department official recruited as a Cuban spy along with his wife during the Carter administration. Rather, think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.

As much as most people would like to think that everyone's intentions, on both sides of the aisle, are honorable, it ain't so. If an admission like this doesn't wake you up to that fact, I don't know what will. Read the whole thing, of course.

(hat tip to MBG)

When Politicians Go Bad, Bill Whittle Gets Mad...

...and so he should. Just watch.

Jonathan Swift Weighs In With a Modest Proposal for Planetary Traitors

Paul Krugman has declared that those who oppose the Cap & Tax Trade legislation just passed by the House of Representatives are traitors to the planet. Jonathan Swift is in awe:

I must admit, as a mere scribe, I lack the wit to prove this case myself, but Professor von Krugman’s understanding transcends that of more ordinary humans, and so he must be right. It surely matters not that the matter under examination — the technique of weather control — is outside the area of study in which the professor has been accorded his prize. For if the world listens in awe to the pronouncements of beauty pageant victors upon philosophy, the affairs of nations, and other matters of general import, then why should Professor von Krugman not be granted equal credit for infallibility in all that he chooses to discourse upon? Certainly, given his celebrity otherwise, his indifferent performance in the swimsuit competition should not be held against him in this regard.

Read it all. Hilarious

How to Run a State the Right Way

You can find out how at PJTV. Glenn Reynolds interviews Texas Governor Rick Perry.