A QUESTION: Do you want your medical care controlled by people who think it’s “Un-American” to criticize them?
Archive for 2009
August 10, 2009
IN THE MAIL: From Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, A Code of Jewish Ethics, Volume 2: Love Your Neighbor as Yourself.
NO YOUNG SOLDIERS: Michael Yon posts another dispatch from Afghanistan.
BUT WE TRY HARDER: TaxProf: U.S. Corporate Tax Rate is Second Highest in Industrialized World.
FINANCIAL TIMES: Fraud Spotlight On Hollywood. “Hollywood studios and film producers are set to face increasing scrutiny from anti-fraud officials, as a result of a trial involving incidents in Bangkok that could have repercussions across the entertainment sector. . . . Cash inducements to local officials are common in overseas shoots and such payments have hitherto been subject to only patchy scrutiny in Hollywood’s notoriously opaque accounting system.”
THE FEMPIRE STRIKES BACK.
ARNOLD KLING: Economic Forecast: Slow Job Growth and Inflation. “But the numbers will probably be good enough to enable President Obama to get re-elected.”
SCOTT JOHNSON: Does Linda Douglass know about this?
Plus, from Michael Barone: Government Health Care in Stealth Mode.
DARREN HUTCHINSON on protests, good and bad.
J.D. JOHANNES is reporting from Afghanistan, and emails:
Hitched a ride from Jalalabad to Kabul to start working the elections.
In Kabul, then flying commercial to Herat for election work.
The elections are on the 20th and things are heating up on the campaign trail. Afghanistan used to have elections throughout the 1960’s and even into the early 70’s. Then the stopped during the Soviet and Taliban era. There were elections in 2005 and now this year there is the presidential and provincial council elections.
Karzai and Abudullah Abdullah are duking it out on radio and a little on TV. Radio is more common in Afghanistan, especially in areas like Mehtar Lam, Jalalabad, Kunar, etc.
Attached is a picture of campaign posters and some scenery from the helicopter flight from JBad to Kabul.
More at his blog.
INDEED: “One has the sense that lawmakers are just stunned that ordinary citizens would have the temerity to speak up. Spending most of their time with staffers, lobbyists, and fellow legislators (i.e., sheltered from real people) and soaking up the talking points from their leadership, they simply never encounter people who disagree so bluntly and so loudly with them.”
ANNOUNCING THE 2009 Hugo Award Results.
One of the winners is John Scalzi, for his Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded.
MEGAN MCARDLE: Jobless Figures: Good, Bad, or Indifferent? “Good, I’d say. Sort of. In a very weak way. . . . Still, it is good news, of a sort. Job loss is slowing, and a 12% eventual unemployment peak seems less likely than it did even a few months ago. But we should keep in mind that this also reinforces a grim fact of modern unemployment–it’s getting longer and harder than it used to be.”
UPDATE: Dan Indiviglio: “As a recession drags on for this long, and people are unable to find jobs, they begin leaving the workforce. They become discouraged regarding job prospects. BLS offers an unemployment rate that includes these discouraged workers. In June 2009, that was 10.1%. For July, it was 10.2%. . . . The jobs lost were the lowest in about a year. I just think we need to be careful not to get too excited about today’s numbers. Although they appear to show a decrease in the unemployment rate, the deeper numbers show the contrary. We may see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we’ve got a ways to go.”
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: McClatchy: Where did that bank bailout go? Watchdogs aren’t entirely sure.
YES: To pay for health care, treat aging. “As politicians try to reform a health care system that could swallow one-fifth of the nation’s economic output by 2020, they should consider making a small bet with a potentially huge payoff: research that could slow the process of aging.” I’ve had some related thoughts here. (Bumped).
UPDATE: Reader Darryl Boyd compares this post with the earlier one in which the CBO says that “preventive care” won’t save money and asks: “Isn’t your yes to treating aging pretty much the definition of Preventive Care? Doesn’t that make these two a bit at odds with each other?”
I don’t think so. “Preventive care” as studied by the CBO involves a lot of screening (and sometimes preventive-treatment) for conditions that most of the screened will never actually get. But everyone ages. There’s also the pension-savings element mentioned in my linked article above. Am I wrong here?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Boyd writes: “Glenn, please help me to understand this….isn’t prolonging life, even if that life is happy, healthy and productive (and most certainly that’s a worthy goal), just pushing the end-of-life costs out further into the future, and therefore not reducing costs, but rather postponing them?” Well, postponing costs is reducing them, on a present value basis. But if you push end-of-life farther out, several other things also happen. First, you have more time for further medical innovation, which may reduce costs. Second, you have a longer productive lifetime against which those costs can be offset. (And, as I note in the linked column above, you reduce or delay pension outlays and set those against a longer earnings career, too). It’s also possible — perhaps even likely — that effective treatment of aging won’t just postpone, but may actually reduce or eliminate, many “end-of-life” expenses.
ANDREW BREITBART: I Am Kenneth Gladney.
UPDATE: Mark Steyn: “Gotta love this ‘post-racial America’: Democrat union heavies can beat up a black guy using racial epithets and leave him in a wheelchair unable to speak – and happily (unlike, say, a black professor being asked for picture ID) it’s not ‘symbolic’ of anything at all. Not a Sharpton in sight to speak up for him: Mr Gladney’s only shot at fame is an entry in The Guinness Book Of Records under ‘Least Famous Black Hate-Crime Victim In America’.”
HOPE: Opposition Emerges to House’s Jet Spree. “Bipartisan opposition is emerging in the Senate to a plan by House lawmakers to spend $550 million for additional passenger jets for senior government officials. The resistance to buying eight Gulfstream and Boeing planes comes as members of both chambers of Congress embark on the busiest month of the year for official overseas travel. The plan to upgrade the fleet of government jets, which was included in a broader defense-funding bill, has also sparked criticism from the Pentagon, which has said it doesn’t need half of the new jets.”
Whether it goes through or not, I don’t want to hear any crap about my carbon footprint from the House leadership after this.
Here’s a thought: What if Obama said, to the health care protesters and worried seniors, “I understand your concerns” instead of letting his press secretary and party allies sneer at them (for being “well-dressed” or thugs or dupes who don’t know “the facts,” etc.)? Isn’t that more the Obama Way, as opposed to the Lehanist “fight club” way?
Hmm. My first thought was that this would be more consistent with how Obama ran his campaign, as opposed to how he’s governing. But then I remembered Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg. And, of course, the Barack Obama Truth Squad. So I’m not so sure that what’s going on is really inconsistent with the “Obama Way,” though I agree with Kaus that it’s probably hurting them more than it’s helping.
UPDATE: Having Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer call protesters “Un-American” isn’t going to help.
PHOTOS FROM THIS WEEKEND’S ANTI-OBAMACARE PROTEST in Raleigh, North Carolina. And here’s a local TV news report.
HEALTH CARE “REFORM” — WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
If Obama has his way, his health care plan will be funded by his treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, overseen by his surgeon general who is obese, signed by a president who smokes, and financed by a country that is just about broke.
Heh.
A DUMB OBAMA CRITICISM: Michelle takes the girls for burgers, and in the comments, you get this: “Jeesh – what a horrible example to set for young people and families. Hamburgers are probably single-handedly one of the worst aspects of American health and obesity. And I thought we’re trying to reform healthcare?? Start by stop eating so many burgers! Eat something that actually feeds your brain.”
Burgers aren’t really especially bad for you, and the food Nazis need to give it a rest.
UPDATE: Reader Nick Marschel writes: “I am with you Dr. Reynolds… Stop the war on burgers!”
ROBERT REICH: How the White House’s Deal With Big Pharma Undermines Democracy. It’s not about democracy. “It’s bad enough when industry lobbyists extract concessions from members of Congress, which happens all the time. But when an industry gets secret concessions out of the White House in return for a promise to lend the industry’s support to a key piece of legislation, we’re in big trouble. That’s called extortion: An industry is using its capacity to threaten or prevent legislation as a means of altering that legislation for its own benefit. And it’s doing so at the highest reaches of our government, in the office of the President.”
I’m pretty sure the extortion is running the other way, but in the end I suppose it doesn’t make a huge difference — except that the pharmaceutical industry’s willingness to sell out on this issue will make some people less willing to defend it on other issues.