Monthly Archives: March 2010

March 16, 2010 — John Hinderaker

Why Be Like Sweden?

Our Europhile President and many Congressional Democrats aspire to make the United States more like Sweden. More like our outdated image of Sweden, anyway; the real Sweden is undergoing something of a free market renaissance. In this video from the Center For Freedom and Prosperity, a Swedish economics student–OK, some stereotypes are still valid–explains the lessons we can learn from that country’s economic history: The Democrats seem to be the »
March 16, 2010 — Paul Mirengoff

Obama’s self-defeating crusade against Israel

President Obama is attempting to use a mistimed announcement by Israel of its intention to build housing units in East Jerusulem as a means of pressuring Israel into making major concessions to the Palestinian Authority. Israel has apologized for the timing of its announcement, but the White House is demanding much more in the way of atonement. Obama’s ploy has drawn strong criticism from mainstream American Jewish organizations like the »
March 16, 2010 — John Hinderaker

Is That A Threat Or A Promise?

Barack Obama says he won’t campaign for any Democrats who vote against the government medicine bill. Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to have the intended effect. »
March 16, 2010 — John Hinderaker

Throw the Bums Out

Voters seem to be paying attention to the corrupt processes the Democrats are using to try to take control of the health care industries, and they don’t like them. I’m pretty sure that’s the explanation for Scott Rasmussen finding Republicans with a ten-point lead in the generic Congressional ballot, 45-35%. That’s the biggest lead Rasmussen has found for the Republicans in the three years he has been measuring generic ballot »
March 16, 2010 — Scott Johnson

Obamacare through the prism of Romneycare

Tim Cahill is the state treasurer of Massachusetts. He recently bolted the Democratic Party to run for governor. The Boston Globe reports Cahill’s pointed comments on Obamacare as with a local twist: State Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill, an independent candidate for governor, today offered a wide-ranging and scathing criticism of the state’s universal health care law, saying it is bankrupting Massachusetts and will do the same nationally, if a similar »
March 16, 2010 — Scott Johnson

3,000 percent!

Stumping for Obamacare yesterday in Ohio, Obama touted its manifold virtues like the patent remedy salesmen of old. For whatever ails us, this legislation is the cure. Here Obama touts the legislation’s magical reduction of expenses for employers with an incidental benefit to employees: Now, so let me talk about the third thing, which is my proposal would bring down the cost of health care for families, for businesses, and »
March 16, 2010 — Paul Mirengoff

Support Dartmouth United

In addition to Dartmouth’s trustee elections, which I wrote about here and here, alumni are also electing the executive committee of the Association of Alumni. My friend Mike Murphy has assembled a fine slate which, this time around, is unencumbered by the presence of this cranky conservative blogger. The slate is called Dartmouth United. This is a letter I wrote to Dartmouth alums — and Scott and John joined — »
March 16, 2010 — Scott Johnson

When Obamacare met Obama-ed, part 2

Professor Peter Wood is the anthropologist and president of the National Association of Scholars. He is also the author of the invaluable Diversity: The Invention of a Concept. Professor Wood notes that congressional Democrats have added President Obama’s takeover of the student loan industry to the health care bill. He has therefore returned to the threat posed by the federal takeover of the student loan industry. “The trouble comes,” Professor »
March 16, 2010 — Paul Mirengoff

An unconstitutional solution

Michael McConnell, a law professor at Stanford and a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, argues that the “Slaughter solution” for enacting Obamacare is unconstitutional. The argument, which appears in the Wall Street Journal, is straightforward: The Slaughter solution cannot be squared with Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution. Senate rules protect against majoritarian overreach by allowing a determined minority to filibuster most »
March 16, 2010 — Scott Johnson

All about Natoma: A case study

Have more lies ever been told about a worse public policy than the Democrats’ impending nationalization of health care? If so, I can’t think of it offhand this morning. Obamacare won’t improve the health care system. It isn’t fiscally responsible. It relies on budget gimmicks. It won’t reduce the deficit. It won’t lower insurance premiums. It won’t increase coverage choices. It won’t control health care costs. And it does not »
March 15, 2010 — Paul Mirengoff

A perfect tournament for our times

The NCAA men’s college basketball tournaments begins this week, the field of 65 teams having been selected and seeded yesterday. This year, the conventional wisdom holds that the quality of the at-large teams selected to make up the numbers is poor, and that this argues against suggestions that the field be expanded to 96 teams in future years. The conventional wisdom is correct. However, I would take it one step »
March 15, 2010 — Paul Mirengoff

The soft bigotry of low expectations, blackboard jungle edition

As I noted here, the Obama administration’s Department of Education has announced that it will crack down on “civil-rights infractions” in public schools, including alleged disparities in the disciplining of white and black students. The notion behind this initiative is that black students are disproportionately subjected to discipline they don’t deserve. That doesn’t seem to be the case in the Philadelphia public school system, however. There, as Abigail Thernstrom and »
March 15, 2010 — John Hinderaker

It’s All About Natoma

In Ohio today, President Obama tried to sell the Democrats’ health care takeover bill by personalizing it: President Obama, declaring that “every argument has been made” on his health care overhaul, sought to seal the deal with Congress and the American people on Monday by focusing on a single patient: a self-employed cleaning woman who had dropped her costly insurance plan, only to discover she had leukemia. … “The reason »
March 15, 2010 — Scott Johnson

Condemn this, part 2

Haaretz reports that Israel has not only received a tongue lashing from Secretary Clinton delivered to Ambassador Michael Oren, but has also received four peremptory demands: 1. Investigate the process that led to the announcement of the Ramat Shlomo construction plans in the middle of Biden’s visit. The Americans seek an official response from Israel on whether this was a bureaucratic mistake or a deliberate act carried out for political »
March 15, 2010 — Scott Johnson

Remember real hope and change?

Minnesota is not exactly the throbbing heart of resistance to the Obama administration’s attempted nationalization of health care and other big government schemes. But we do boast of congressional representation by Reps. Michele Bachmann, John Kline and Erik Paulsen. And we also boast of private citizens who have expended their own resources to put up a billboard asking if Americans miss him (i.e., Bush 43) yet. Now Ed Morrissey reports »
March 15, 2010 — Scott Johnson

Gitmo’s indefensible lawyers: A case study

Early on in the Bush administration, the enemy combatants detained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay became a cause of the left. In particular, they became a cause of the American bar, which is itself a subset of the institutional left. From the American Bar Association, to the elite law firms, to the American Civil Liberties Union, to the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild and »
March 15, 2010 — John Hinderaker

Opposition to Obamacare Holding Steady

To the extent voters are following the Democrats’ frantic efforts to bribe or threaten the last three or four Congressmen into voting for government medicine, they remain unimpressed. Rasmussen finds that likely voters oppose the plan by 53-43 percent. These numbers have held remarkably steady since around Thanksgiving. The Democrats seem to have given up on trying to persuade voters to see the issue their way, and have fallen back »