Hillary Clinton and the Rule of Law in Honduras

I see on Fox News tonight that Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State, is concerned about ousted President of Honduras, Mel Zelaya, attempting to re-enter his former country. Why is she concerned?

Because she is desperately trying to restore the Rule of Law to Honduras and such confrontational actions on the part of Mr. Zelaya will be counter-productive.

Well. As we learned here, the ouster of Mr. Z was in fact an act pursuant to the Rule of Law, including the Constitution of Honduras. It was an act by the military pursuant to an order of the Supreme Court of Honduras lawfully issued and confirmed by the elected Congress of Honduras, including a sweeping majority of the members of Mr. Zelaya's own party.

You don't get much closer to the Rule of Law than that, especially among the thugs and miscreants in Latin America and Cuba that our Secretary of State is in solidarity with on this issue. Nor, come to think of it, among our own government, which thinks nothing of taking TARP money authorized for Bank Bail-outs and using it to buy government stakes in car companies, to name one among many gross violations of the Rule of Law in our own country.

So, if Ms. Clinton succeeds in forcing the re-instatement of Mel Zelaya as President, it will not be the restoration of the Rule of Law in Honduras, but instead a grotesque breach thereof.

For my money, if it comes down to a decision between Hillary Clinton, Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro versus the people of Honduras, then I will just have to stand with those wise Latinas and Latinos of tiny Honduras.

Headlines You Won't Ever See

Major Media headline and story here.

Disorderly Conduct Charges Dropped
Against Friend of President
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Presidential weight too much for Scales of Justice
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Professor
Gates of Harvard gets a boost from his close friend
in the White House.
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Others see this as more of the same, social and political elite
like Professor Gates of Harvard getting favored treatment,
while average Americans must toe the legal line. Says Carlos
Manzetti, Italian-American dockworker, "The day I mouth
off to a cop investigating a reported crime in progress is
the day I get my ass thrown in jail."
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White House official admits, "This is going to be hard to blame on Bush."

National Health Care STAT!

Previous Post(s) in this series here.

In other words, the insurance companies are trying to perform the function that would naturally occur between doctor and patient in a normal market: to set a proper price for medical services that balances the doctor's ability to supply the service with the demand for the service by patients. But the insurance company is not in the market for the services in question, it is in the market of providing money to pay for the services on behalf of others. So it has no first-hand knowledge of what any individual patient wants or needs, only wonkish statistical studies of its policy-holders' expenses, and its own profit or loss in the aggregate of all transactions.

So, I advocate a simple change to the system by requiring all doctors and hospitals to publish line item fee schedules for all services they perform, right down to that nurse practitioner who takes my blood pressure and temperature before any visit with the doctor. This will be another bit of paperwork that the medical establishment will have to produce at a time when it is inundated with paperwork from all sides, but the effects would be important.

With this information, I and others could begin the process of weaning ourselves from the insurance policies we are now forced to purchase and begin the process of self-insuring over normal and necessary yearly medical expenses that shouldn't require an insurance company at all. Right now, I know I am getting screwed; I am paying much more in premiums than I am incurring in actual medical expenses. The reason this is so, however, is that I am uncertain as to what my actual medical expenses might be. If I had full cost information, I could better fine-tune my out-of-pocket medical expenses, producing, I am sure, a large reduction in my medical expenses over a years time.

Ultimately, the result of the change I am proposing would be a system whereby health savings accounts would receive most of the money that is now devoted to insurance premiums, with a supplemental premium being paid to insurance companies for true catastrophic coverage. Those that like the current system whereby the insurance company bargains for health care services on their behalf would be able to continue in that system, preferring, in essence, the convenience of not having to perform the exacting pencil work on medical expenses that enervates the rest of us Scotsmen-like people.

Before I close, a quick word on Health Savings Accounts as set up under the Bush Administration. This was a great concept, reflecting almost exactly what I am proposing herein, but a joke in actual implementation. For one, as I state above, the medical marketplace lacks the information that I or anyone needs to decide whether to switch over from the current system. But more important, it limits the amount of health savings anyone can have to $3,000.00 per annum. Why does this make sense? I have one stress test in a hospital clinic, coupled with a hemorrhoidectomy in the same year, and my out-of-pocket expense will easily exceed $3,000.00. Therefore, I can only start on an HSA when I feel reasonably assured that no such twin devils will occur for at least the next two years.

Which is to say, HSAs would have to be changed to accommodate the better healthcare system I envision, as would a whole host of tax and regulatory perversities that mangle up our day-to-day health services today. The problem is that most proposals for healthcare reform see the solution as in some way fine-tuning the existing perversities, eliminating some, modifying others, tacking on additional mandates and requirements, in a process designed to graft some grand vision of healthcare over a rickety, worn out structure. One classic example: the Obama Administration believes that HSAs are a problem within its new national healthcare model and is proposing they be eliminated. Why this is so and what they think it will fix to eliminate an option for citizens to self-insure against normal medical expenses can only be described as an insanity induced by ideology.

What’s needed is not incremental or even radical changes to the existing systemic perversities, but to root out the problem at the source, which is the Cone of Silence surrounding the doctor and the insurance companies, leaving the patient on the outside with no real knowledge as to what his healthcare costs are and how much he is paying therefore.

The simple change I propose herein would be the fundamental first step in changing the system as a whole to something that makes sense. It leaves the doctor as the primary determinant of healthcare and allows the patient a greater degree of involvement in his own healthcare and its costs. And it promises to reduce costs as the choking inefficiencies are weeded out of the system over time.

National Health Care STAT!

Previous Post(s) in this series here.

So too with medical care. It's not as if I am saying my doctor is conspiring with the insurance company to keep his or her reimbursement rates secret. I don't think my doctor knows the cost of his services, nor do I think anybody in his billing department knows either. Because, you see, my doctor's medical clinic deals in aggregates of revenue versus expenses and predominantly they are negotiating with insurance companies who are doing the same. My local clinic has certain expenses, the largest being payroll for doctors, nurses, para-doctors and para-nurses, receptionists, appointments secretaries, billing clerks and insurance reimbursement professionals, and the notion of individually pricing particular services to attract a customer or class of customers is foreign to the profitability of the firm. More important is the overall reimbursements that it can receive from any given insurance company, and the overall drag on the resources of the clinic delivering the range of services necessary to get those reimbursements. And the same is true on the insurance companies side, just in reverse.

Well. Like the grocery clerk asked, So what? Why don't I simply go with the system, pay my co-pay and move on?

Because it is this one fact about the system that causes me to use my insurance policy in a quite perverse fashion. My health insurance policy in this type of system is not an insurance policy at all. An insurance policy hedges the risk of future unplanned events that might be substantial (e.g. my house may burn to the ground). But what I am really paying for with health insurance is a hedge against inchoate but foreseeable future health expenses. I will have x-number of doctor visits this year, purchase x-number of prescription drugs, get x-number of blood tests, undergo x-number of surgical procedures, and I select my insurance plan so that generally speaking, I will pay the monthly premium and have little or no other medical payments of significance in any given month. Since these are relatively normal medical events, the insurance premium I will have to pay will, on average, equal the costs of these procedures, with the profit added on that the insurance company needs to stay in business.

This is not an insurance plan, it is a medical savings plan, in which I deposit my premium each month in an account which is then used to defray my actual medical expenses as they come due. And the whole rigamarole of co-pays, partial co-pays, covered and non-covered expenses, deductibles, generic v. brand name drugs, and the rest are simply what happens over time as an insurance company learns what kinds of expenses its existing customers desire, and attempts to provide incentives to steer people towards less costly alternatives.

In other words, the insurance companies are trying to perform the function that would naturally occur between doctor and patient in a normal market: to set a proper price for medical services that balances the doctor's ability to supply the service with the demand for the service by patients.

To Be Continued......

Witness Unprotection Program: Diversity, FBI Style

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National Health Care STAT!

Since the National Health Care debate is upon us, I want to suggest that there is only one simple change needed to fix the system. This simple change will not cost anything, will not require a giant Federal bureaucracy to enforce it or taxes to pay for it, and will not in itself alter anything else about our existing system (for those 70% of you that are satisfied with your health care).

Are you ready? All the healthcare system needs is a law mandating that doctors and hospitals publish a schedule of costs for each and every service they offer. Such information is just not available currently and its lack is a major cause of the twisted shape of our healthcare system.

Oh, there are some procedures, especially major ones like hip replacements and the like, for which it is possible to get some sort of estimate. However, if I go in to a doctor for general purposes, a check up, a blood test, a specialist referral, a prescription, whatever, I rarely if ever ask, much less get an answer, as to what the cost of the services will be. That is because what I am most concerned about is the co-pay or deductible, or some other charge as stipulated in paragraph XX.4(c)d52.32xx of Endorsement 5 of my policy, issued 07-23-2005, effective 10-01-2006, which doesn't alter or amend paragraph (7) of Endorsement 3, issued 03-15-2003, effective 09-01 2003. As difficult as it is to piece together what my portion of the charges will be from the obscure puzzle that is my insurance, I can usually ball-park what the policy will require me to pay, and when I can't, most insurance companies have a helpful Hot Line to someone in India who can fill in the gaps. But at no point will I be able to consistently get from any health care provider what my medical care costs would be if I had no insurance.

Think about it. If we all had Grocery Insurance, here is what our considerations would be as we walked the aisles. Under the policy, canned vegetables are 100% covered, so long as I buy generic. Brand-name veggies are subject to a $ .15 co-pay, and tastier, locally produced corn will carry a $ .25 co-pay per item. Meats and fish are generally covered by a $ .75/lb. co-pay, but custom butchered beef, free range chicken or Alaskan Salmon are only covered 80% up to $500.00 and 100% thereafter, subject to the satisfaction of a $250.00 deductible in any given calendar year. Milk and eggs carry a co-pay, as does orange juice but only if its made from concentrate. White bread is 100% covered; any other bread is not. Chips, dips, nuts, and other "luxury non-necessary grocery items" are not covered, unless you elect to go with the Premium Personal Choice Option B policy, in which case they will apply towards your deductible up to $500.00 in any calendar year, and be covered 100% thereafter with a $ 2.65/lb. co-pay.

Well, that's enough of that. I think you see the point. I might become very well versed in what my grocery charges will be on any given trip, but I will not know what the various food items actually would cost in the absence of insurance. That particular factoid will only be known within the inner secret sanctums of the Insurance Company and the Giant Food Chain. And if I tried to find out what the actual cost of the food was, I would be met with blank stares and a "What do you need to know that for? I told you your co-pay will be $ .15."

Can you imagine the distortions that would develop in the food industry from such a twisted system as this? A system where consumers were purchasing food based on their needs as filtered through a bureacratic maze of co-pays, deductibles, premiums, exclusions and endorsements?

To Be Continued.....

Affirmative Racism

Easy: If I may put my two cents in on the topic of your excellent posts.

The political program known as Affirmative Action is actually two very different things, and this fact confuses the public debate in many ways. Originally, Affirmative Action proper was first articulated decisively by a previously obscure Federal District Court Judge in the case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971). In a decision I opposed at the time, this personally mild, gentlemanly man of the South affirmed a sweeping Constitutional right of the Federal Courts to mandate racial discrimination in order to remedy past racial discrimination. Judge James B. McMillan thereby entered into legal history, as his opinion was affirmed by the Supreme Court and taken up as the law of the land. But more importantly, he touched off a political movement which styled itself "Affirmative Action."

As I said, I disagreed with Judge McMillan's ruling at the time on many different grounds, but I always granted him the fact that he articulated the one ground upon which explicit governmental racial discrimination might very well be Constitutional: where it is clear that past racial discrimination, violative of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, could only be remedied by favoring the injured parties. A simple example: If a black man is thrown out of his home by a Sheriff because of a government policy excluding blacks from owning homes in certain neighborhoods, then clearly the Federal Courts have the perfect right to reverse this situation and give the black man back his property. No one in their right mind would call such affirmative action by the Federal Courts anything but Constitutional, even though in some daft sense it could be described as reverse racism.

Where it gets a bit more tenuous is where the argument moves away from actual individuals and seeks to apply itself to an entire class of people, i.e. that blacks in general have been deprived of Constitutionally protected rights and the Federal Courts have the right to step in and grant a remedy to put them in the position they would have been in if the initial discrimination had never occurred. This is properly speaking what Judge McMillan ruled.

Now, I say "tenuous," but it is important to note that Judge McMillan's was a solid Constitutional argument, even if you disagree with it. It is a fact that blacks suffered as a race from deprivations of their life, liberty and property in untold and manifold ways since the conclusion of the Civil War, and that the remnants of this unconstitutional behavior in the South did not disappear with Brown v. Board of Education, nor with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There are plenty of good faith arguments that Judge McMillan was wrong in his ruling, not least those rooted in the consequence of his decision, which was the degeneration of the Mecklenburg County school system for both blacks and whites (that continues to this day). But it is undeniable that his version of Affirmative Action was rooted not only in the Constitution, but also in the wider and more important ethics and morality of the American culture. Blacks as a race had been discriminated against for many generations; some remedy based on the fact of their race was necessary to make them whole.

That's affirmative action as envisioned by Judge McMillan, the version of Affirmative Action in American culture that I submit is the most persuasive to those people who don't devote their lives to following either legal or political hair-splitting. But as in most things over the past century or so, the political Left co-opted the concept and bent it to their own particular agenda. For willful partisans such as these, Affirmative Action has become Affirmative Racism, with a new politically privileged class entitled to special benefits.

The arguments in favor of Affirmative Racism mouth the formula of Affirmative Action, but are devoid of interest in the question whether any actual discrimination has occurred. They just take it as given, and that's that.

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In the Ricci case, it was clear that the local government was favoring the local blacks in rejecting the results of the firefighters promotion test, but there was no corresponding evidence anywhere that any of the blacks involved had ever suffered actual discrimination, whether at the hands of the City, the State, the Federal Government, the local City Council, the Police, the educational system, the Governor, the PTA, the Elks Lodge, the Realtors Association, the Master Gardeners, the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, the YWCA, or .... anybody. Compare this situation to Charlotte-Mecklenburg at the time of Judge McMillan's ruling, when 100 years of the Jim Crow South was coming to an abrupt end.

To sum up, Affirmative Action that is based on the reality of actual discrimination that has taken the life, liberty or property of a whole class of people is solidly grounded in Constitutional law, ethics and morality, and the only argument between people of good will concerns the often problematic details of implementation. Affirmative Action that is based on some version of statistical representation of a particular race simply because it is a politically favored minority without regard to any real evidence of actual discrimination is in fact Affirmative Racism, just as much as Jim Crow was in the Old South.

Affirmative Racism is a pox on our society, and a growing threat to our way of life. To this day, the Affirmative Racists in our society practice their devilish trade in the halls of government and in many of the most prestigious educational institutions, oftentimes in violation of actual court orders!

So, Easy, I agree with you that the Sotomayor hearings are a perfect time to make the point "again and again, that this kind of racist thinking has no place on the Supreme Court or in any other branch of government entrusted with the responsibility of upholding the Constitution." The fact that Ms. Sotomayor will be confirmed anyway is irrelevant. This type of thinking will not be stopped unless it is first dragged out of the sewers and exposed. These Senate Hearings are an ideal time and place to cast the harsh glare of the public eye on this grotesque philosophy.

Deregulatory Stimulus

Now this article is encouraging. It's by Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He is responding to Newt Gingrich's latest call for a real stimulus plan. Mr. Crews says:

"We do need tax reforms like we see in the [Gingrich] outline, but also need to reduce the scope of government that leads to the calls for taxes in the first place."

He then goes on to list 8 proposals, amounting to what he calls a "deregulatory stimulus" for the economy:

"–A freeze on government regulation;
–A “Regulatory Reduction Commission” to weed out decades of bad rules;
–A radical abandoment of so-called “antitrust” law, a step essential to getting government off the backs of our economy’s greatest wealth-creating sectors
–Limiting the scope of meddlesome, turf-expanding agencies like the Federal Communications Commission
–A more ambitious “R3″ program at the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy to give entrepreneurs an avenue to protest onerous rules pouring out of more than 60 agencies;
–The beginnings of “regulatory budgeting”;
–Ends to unfunded mandates on lower-level governments;
–Requiring congressional approval of any major or controversial new agency rule, henceforth."

I don't know exactly what all these items mean, but I like the sound of his program.

See my previous posts on this topic here.

Derivative Regs: Failure is the Only Option

As of last week, our Regulators were continuing their interest in Derivatives, which according to them is that-which-caused-the-greatest-Recession-since-the-Great-Depression.

Here is a nice simple history of concern for greater regulation of Derivatives by our Best and Brightest:

"Administration officials want to establish a central clearinghouse for OTC derivatives, bulk up their regulatory oversight and require reporting for all derivative trades. They also want to determine which products can be considered standardized, and thus traded through the clearinghouse. Geithner and regulators from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission outlined their ideas for OTC derivatives in May. A month later, the administration detailed these plans more fully when it rolled out its proposal for overall financial regulatory reform ... Nonetheless, lawmakers will seek details on the many vague components of the plan on Friday."

Not clear yet? Let me unpack it for you. The "greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression" was noticed by the Best and Brightest last Fall almost a year after it started. Playing catch-up, the Best and Brightest then began working furiously on the problem and finally settled on Derivatives as the culprit. After months and months of work, however, they were only able to float an "outline" of the problem. Thereafter, in June, they finally produced what they called a "detailed plan," which turned out a mere month later to be only the "vague components of the plan."

Here is the real problem: our Regulatory Guardians don't have any idea what Derivatives are, or were, or might be in the future, and so they really don't know exactly what kind of regulation is appropriate. In such a situation as this, the correct approach would be to regulate what you understand and leave the rest for the market. A simple bench-mark might be: identify those financial companies that are Too Big to Fail and prohibit them from indulging in such things. Then let anyone else who wants to play with Derivatives or Hedge Funds or any number of other financial buzz words that most of us normal citizens do not understand play their games with their own capital, and win or lose as the case may be. If a Big financial firm wants to play with such exotic financial products, then they can simply quit taking deposits of normal citizens, quit advertising themselves as Banks insured by the FDIC (aka you, the taxpayer), and simply opt out of the regulatory world, to sink or swim as the case may be.

This is, of course, almost exactly how our former regulatory system functioned before the Big Collapse. Investment Banks (do you remember them?) were financial players that never opted into the banking system of the United States and were therefore free to play any financial game dreamed up by the Best and Brightest wonks they could hire. Along about 2007, however, the merciless market, which had been so good to them for so long, turned on them with the ferocity of an ex-wife and they saw their precious capital disappear almost overnight. Following the logic of the market, which says that there will be winners AND losers, our government Best and Brightest let Lehman Bros. fail. But then they lost their nerve in an election season, and from then on it was Bail-Out City for any and every financial firm that had the foresight to hedge their portfolio with massive contributions to powerful Washington politicians (e.g. Senator Schumer, in this story from last December).

Government by the Best and Brightest of Government is an idiocy that has been inflicted on this Republic periodically since the Great Depression. It never works and in fact always leads to greater harm. Hopefully the public will wake up sooner than they usually do and thunderously rebuke these arrogant people at the next most convenient election.

Congress Anachronistes: CIA Assassination Plots

A big CIA flap is abrewing again, and it has all the earmarks of a classic Democrat talking point. It involves a secret CIA program, assassination of foreign leaders, willful failure to disclose to Congress which might arise to criminal violations of the law. And to top it off, there are indication that it was all orchestrated, planned, produced, created and/or directed by none other than Darth Vader himself, Dick Cheney.

The italics portions are the sum and substance of a typical Democrat talking point on these matters. The rest is mere fill-in, taken from whatever handy square "facts" the Left can wedge into the round holes of a pre-packaged narrative. Please note also that this particular narrative dates from 1975 when a Democratic Congress banned assassination by the CIA, which means that by this point its getting rather worn around the edges from all the square pegs jammed in over the years by the Democrats.

Here are just a few of the Democratic Party leaders running with this talking point football:

"Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, hinted that the Bush administration may have broken the law by not telling Congress ... Withholding such information from Congress, she said, 'is a big problem, because the law is very clear' ... Ms. Feinstein said Mr. Panetta told the lawmakers that Mr. Cheney had ordered that the information be withheld from Congress ... The Senate's second-ranking official, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, echoed those concerns and called for an investigation ..."

So, what are the real facts about this matter? There is actually only one fact that explains all of this. After 9/11 the U.S. was at war with a radical muslim group known as Al Qaeda. Pursuant thereto Congress authorized and the President issued orders to everyone under his command to seek out and kill every Al Qaeda soldier and leader they could find. These orders were directed to all military personnel, of course, but also, we now learn, the CIA. Are you shocked at this revelation? Or would you be more shocked if the President had told the CIA to lay off killing Al Qaeda operatives?

The Democratic Party leaders apparently are just now finding out about this war against Al Qaeda, and so they are shocked that they had no briefing from the CIA about its role. That, I guess, is the price they pay for living in talking points rather than the real world, especially when those talking points are some 30 years old. The rest of us, who actually keep up with the news on at least a yearly basis, eschew such anachronistic concerns about CIA assassination programs and wonder why after 8 years the CIA's role in the war against Al Qaeda was still only in the planning stages, never operational.

The real bottom line is that this incident makes it clear once again that the Democrats are willing to use whatever fodder they can dredge up to make political points, no matter how absurd, how outrageous, or how harmful to our national security. They are bratty, spoiled children pretending to be leaders of the most powerful country in the world, and an embarrassment to themselves and us.

And don't think the supposed Bush-Haters in foreign capitals don't notice. Their hatred was always of America, not Bush, and finding our great country being led by such light-weights as Reid, Pelosi, Feinstein, Durbin and Leahy, believe me they are licking their chops.

There will be consequences, consequences that will take a long time and hard work to fix, once real adults get back in charge.

Obama Anachronistes

Last Sunday, the New York Times wrote about President Obama at Columbia University in the 1980's. The article opens:

"In the depths of the cold war, in 1983, a senior at Columbia University [Barack Obama] wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of “a nuclear free world.” He railed against discussions of “first- versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads."

I don't think the Times reads The Mercurial Pundit, so it must be a coincidence that I wrote a week ago:

"[President Obama] is locked in a 1980's ideology of the Left that he learned as a young man, that Reagan's "Star Wars" was the mad plan of a Cold War ideologue."

The Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980's, which is what Mr. Obama was cheering in the 1983 Sundial article, is a classic example of the completely ahistorical nature of Leftist ideology. It formed itself on an undeviating moral principle "Freeze Nuclear Weapon Development Now!," which was chosen for no other reason than (1) it was a great sound-bite, and (2) in application it could be used to oppose every aspect of Ronald Reagan's agenda. It's often unstated premise was that Reagan, and every other Republican who viewed the Soviet Union as a massive threat to world peace and security, was a war-monger, locked in the Military-Industrial Complex with their rich buddies, hoping against hope for some chance to use nuclear weapons against somebody (x-ref. numerous Hollywood cartoon caricatures).

However, the actual history of the public and private debates within the serious sides of the Democratic and Republican Parties of the 1970's paints a different story. These debates revolved around complex and nuanced differences over just how the Cold War competition between East and West could be stabilized and deep dangers like the Cuban Missile Crisis avoided. Sounds like a goal worthy of the idealists of the Nuclear Freeze, right? If they were idealists, yes. Unfortunately they were ideologues, and idealogues couldn’t care less about what might really be going on in the world.

Another historical nicety the Left missed was in assuming Ronald Reagan was an amiable dunce/puppet of others. This was all so much hooey. Reagan left the Governor's mansion of California and immediately established himself as a powerful voice on foreign affairs. All during the 1970's he was the focus and spokesman of opposition to the foreign policy Realism strategy of the Nixon-Kissinger types. And he gave much better than he got from the educated elite of the foreign policy establishment.

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His views on our strategic posture were typically simple and yet powerful. Fueled by a gusher of oil revenues from the world-wide oil shocks of the early 70's, the Soviets were becoming increasingly aggressive and belligerent around the world. In the face of this, we had adopted a weak negotiating strategy on nuclear weapons which culminated in the SALT treaties of the 1970's that allowed the Soviets, for the first time, superiority in the number of nuclear warheads. As a result, Reagan believed the SALT treaties only emboldened the Soviet's further in their adventurism around the world, and that from a nuclear standpoint, the situation was untenable. It would only be a matter of time before the Soviets provoked a nuclear showdown through arrogance, ignorance or negligence.

Now you can accuse the Democratic-Republican foreign policy Realists of being wrong, or Reagan of being wrong, but you cannot accuse any of them of being war-mongers. That is just not what the debates of the 1970's were all about. They were all about how to stabilize the world during the Cold War and make nuclear confrontation less likely, not more.

Here is an example of how the Nuclear Freeze ideology blinded the Left. In his 1983 article, young Barack Obama quotes approvingly the opinion of one Mark Bigelow of the campus group Arms Race Alternatives that the deployment of Pershing II's and Cruise missiles in Europe needed to be stopped. Mr. Bigelow said,

"Because of their small size and mobility, their deployment will make possible arms control verification far more difficult, and cut down warning time for the Soviets to less than ten minutes. That can only be a destabilizing factor."

Mr. Bigelow overlooks, of course, the fact that the destabilizing factor was not the proposed deployment of these nuclear missiles by the United States, but the hundreds of SS-20's already deployed by the Soviets, aimed at Europe, China and Japan. Each of these missiles had three nuclear warheads, were reloadable, and highly mobile to insure survivability in the field. Mark Bigelow should have been asking the same question Reagan was: how do we get the Soviets to back away from this crazy ham-handed nuclear confrontation strategy they were embarking on? But Mr. Bigelow couldn't ask such a question, because his ideology told him Ronald Reagan and the rest of the war-mongers were the problem.

A more rational version of Mr. Bigelow's opposition to Reagan's nuclear strategy might have been that it was too dangerous to ratchet up the confrontation provoked by the Soviets with our own Pershing II deployments. But now we have the benefit of historical hindsight, which shows that Reagan was correct in his strategy and marvelously adept in negotiations with the Soviets. The Pershing II's were deployed, and within five years, dismantled, along with all of the Soviet SS-20's.

History vindicates Reagan on the Pershing II's, SDI and on his vision to reduce nuclear arms in the world via his START treaty with the Soviets. As such, this "war-monger" did more to advance the ideals of the Nuclear Freeze movement than Mr. Obama and his friends could ever have hoped for. Before START, the Soviets and the United States had almost 20,000 nuclear warheads. Today, after 20 some years of START, the number is 2,200.

But as I said last week, “ideologues like our current President are not much interested in history that doesn't conform with their prejudices.” Reagan was bad, SDI and START were feints designed to continue the Cold War and the Military Industrial Complex, and our President has nothing to learn about negotiating with the Russians from old war-mongers.

Mr. Obama has a bold new goal, the elimination of nuclear weapons forever. But prior to his summit meeting with Russian President Medvedev this week he unilaterally made drastic cuts in spending on SDI and on deployment of missile defense in Eastern Europe. Presumably, he’s channeling his inner Mark Bigelow in his concern over how “destabilizing” these things are.

So, he goes to Russia with negotiating leverage of … what? Old bumper stickers from his Nuclear Freeze days? Putin and the like will chew him up and spit him out, and somebody like Reagan will then have to come along and clean up President Obama’s nuclear mess.

Hopefully before anyone gets hurt.

Political Poison

This is really kind of a local story, and not the kind of thing we want to write about on this blog, but the situation is so incredulous, that I feel a need to document it herein.

It is a part of the continuing Sarah Palin story, who from the start was subjected to the most devastating media "hit" job in modern political history. Successful governor of America's largest state, attractive person with a compelling life story, and most of all, a stunningly new, riveting political speaker who was one of only two people in the recent election cycle capable of drawing 20,000+ to any event she attended. Apparently that she was a political draw in the same class as Obama scared the left to such a degree that they became, frankly, unhinged in their reporting about her.

Of course, that's all we can expect from the degenerate media we have today. But what was not expected was to see some anonymous persons, high up in the McCain campaign, add their own substantial weight to the media "hit job," and therein lies the peculiarity that makes me write this post.

It began before the McCain campaign ended when a "Senior McCain Official" leaked to CNN's Dana Bash that Palin was acting like a spoiled selfish celebrity “diva." Then, immediately after the McCain campaign lost its bid for the Presidency, Carl Cameron of Fox News suddenly broke into the Shepherd Smith and Bill O'Reilly shows to breathlessly report that "Senior Officials" of the McCain campaign said that during the campaign Sarah Palin was a shop-a-holic who indulged in temper tantrums and refused to prepare for the important interviews with Charlie Gibson and/or Katie Couric, she was grossly ignorant about foreign affairs to the extent she did not know the countries involved in NAFTA or that Africa was a continent, not a country, that she was unprofessional, once appearing at a meeting with the Campaign staff in a bathrobe, and etc., etc., etc.

These reports were subsequently shot down by various other McCain campaign people, including the foreign policy expert who briefed her for the upcoming debates. He insisted that she was very bright and extremely knowledgeable about foreign policy. So, ultimately Carl Cameron's report (which he subsequently regretted, according to Greta van Sustern), simply exposed that there was a faction within the McCain campaign that somehow felt the need to throw Palin under the bus with information that was at best malicious gossip, and at worst, outright lies.

My thoughts at the time were simple and straightforward: who the hell are these petty "Senior Officials" who would go out of their way to trash their own Vice Presidential candidate a day after the election. And what the hell is their agenda? Because whatever it is, I personally want no part of any candidate they might be supporting in the next election cycle. This was grubby politics of the worst kind that I will not abide in any political candidate I might support down the road.

But the story is not over. Vanity Fair recently published a 9,300 word article trashing Sarah Palin, complete with, yes, you guessed it, more quotes from "Senior Officials" of the McCain campaign, which included the stunningly crude statement that “Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression?". I am pleased to report, however, that they went to the poisoned well of anonymous gossip once too often, and the evidence suggests that these Senior Officials are in fact Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace.

Mark Krikorian of National Review Online does a great job of unraveling all of the threads in this current controversy here, but here are the salient points:

The major players are Senior Campaign Managers, Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace, Randy Scheunemann, a McCain Senior Foreign Policy Advisor, and Bill Kristol, Managing Editor of The Weekly Standard. After the Vanity Fair article, Bill Kristol reveals that Steve Schmidt was the anonymous leaker from the McCain campaign. Steve Schmidt vehemently denied this, and then stated the following: "

At the end of the campaign there were a series of leaks that were so damaging that it was consuming the 24-hour cable news cycle. Leaks to reporters where Sarah Palin was called all manner of names. [McCain senior adviser] Rick Davis and I jointly felt that was outrageous. So we made an attempt for the first time in the campaign to try to ID who was leaking information that was so damaging and demoralizing to a campaign that was in very difficult circumstances ... “What was discovered was an e-mail from a very senior staff member [Randy Scheunemann] to Bill Kristol ... ”

So let's see. Steve Schmidt is accused by Bill Kristol of spreading damaging gossip about Sarah Palin. He responds by insisting how outrageous he thought the Palin campaign leaks were, so outrageous that he ordered an investigation at the time to find the leakers. And what does he find? That the leaks were, in fact, from "Senior Staff Member" Scheunemann to Bill Kristol!

This is patently absurd. Randy Scheunemann was always one of Ms. Palin's most ardent supporters and Bill Kristol, also a Palin supporter, would not ever be described by anyone as a "Senior Official" of the McCain campaign. Mr. Schmidt's response is an embarrassing and clumsy prevarication.

Any candidate considering a run in 2010 or 2012 best stay well clear of Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace. These two should be forced to work for their more natural clientele among the poisonous partisans of the Left.

The Individual in American Society

The central argument today seems to be between those who believe the community is the most important operator in our society and those who believe it is the individual.

These natural poles then take on an extremist clarity. The individual must have complete libertè in himself, must in all cases be allowed to do what he wants, no matter how detrimental to himself, his family, or his community. It's the old slippery slope argument: if we let one bit of infringement on liberty occur, then the individual will vanish, crushed under the jackboot of a police state.

On the other hand, the opponents of this extreme conception of liberty insist that equalitè and fraternitè must trump liberté, or else the bonds of community will be forever broken. And, then that same slippery slope appears, dictating that if any rights of liberty are permitted, then the community of men will perish in the flames of apocalyptic nihilism.

What is America? Are we a community or are we individuals? And if we are not solely either, then how might these two coexist without destroying each other?

The answer is that America is a community and Americans are individuals, and these two are brought together in a historically unique way: we are a nation of individuals who band together in voluntary associations. These “little communities” are myriad and extend from the smallest neighborhood coffee clash to the Senate of the United States. They are usually in some form of vague hierarchy, which in many cases corresponds to the size of the geographical area they encompass, but American associations tend towards the eccentric too.

Not eccentric in the sense of odd-ball, like The Wiccan Practitioners of Tattoo Removal might be, who practice painful repentance from their youthful attempts at self-esteem and get together for pot luck dinners every 2nd Tuesday of the month. But eccentric in the sense that such little communities do not gain their primary sense of value from a relationship with a larger ethic or cause. A garden club, weekend golf group, bird watchers, Elks Lodge, Cancer Awareness Group, Church social, Bible study group, Fantasy Football League, motorcycle club, book club, and various and sundry other temporary or permanent associations might have tangential relations to some larger ethic or culture, but at base are personal and local in nature. It is the association with others per se which is the value, not its movement within a wider context.

In this way, American society moves up and down, but also forward, backward and sideways, from the personal to the public and back again, in myriad streams of constantly shifting alliances, allegiances and common interests between family, friends and acquaintances, each association forming one part of the total life of the individuals involved.

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All of this might be called the "civil society" of America. Burke expressed a similar notion of social structures such as family and church being mediating institutions in society However, the American notion of civil society goes beyond Burke in that his social institutions were in service (at least in a certain sense) to the State, but American civil society is not. The uniquely American view, or better yet, insight, is that both the Burkean mediating institutions and the State are (or ought to be) themselves voluntary associations within this wider conception of individual freedom, and are more properly subordinate thereto. In other words, both mediating institutions and the government derive their essential function and vitality from this larger life of the culture, not the reverse.

It is important, then, to remember that when we talk of the individual in American society we are not talking about an isolated Liebnizian monad, which might collide with but never touch others. We are, or should be, talking about the person who is exercising his innate and God-given freedom to associate and cooperate with others. In doing so, he forms a concrete life that is neither purely individual nor purely communal, but a fusion of the best of both.

Sarah Palin, RIP?

Everyone has an opinion, left and right, Democrat and Republican, main stream, minor stream, and slip stream. It all boils down to the following: (1) She is starkers, or (2) she is not starkers, but something that looks very much like starkers, so maybe she's starkers after all, but we can't tell yet.

Well, relax. Take a deep breath, and entertain the possibility that she is doing exactly what she says she is doing: giving up a governorship solely because she is under such intense pressure from a National Political Delusive Class that she is unable to effectively carry out the program that the citizens of Alaska elected her for (the same citizens who would, by the way, overwhelmingly re-elect her if she had decided to run again). Note also that, as most of the smart money has suggested, she could have simply run out her governorship and then gone on to do whatever else she wants to do in politics. But she answered that suggestion very clearly: she has no interest in remaining governor to "milk" the office as a lame duck.

She ran for Mayor, and Governor, and also for Vice President, as a citizen-politician, i.e. as that rare type of politician who has no interest in the office for the office's sake, but for getting involved so as to do something important for her Country. Many doubted her bona fides in this regard, but her latest political "move" is nothing more than further proof that she was very serious about the matter. If it will advance her Alaskan program to leave the stage and let others accomplish her goals without the harsh glare of national politics that she brings to the matter, then she is willing to leave.

Ronald Reagan once revealed how he was able to govern California so effectively for 8 years: he was always more than willing for others to get the credit, so long as he got what he wanted. That expresses the essence of a citizen-politician, and that explains why Sarah Palin did what she just did.

Certainly she has national ambitions, and now she is freed from the rare (for a politician) concern about her fiduciary obligations to Alaska, freed to raise money for SarahPac, make speeches, help other candidates, write a book, and perhaps most of all, begin confronting her critics in earnest.

With this unorthodox move I don’t know if she will ever make it to the Presidency. But I do relish the energy she apparently intends to bring to politics in the lower 48, and can’t wait to watch the growing consternation of her critics.

She scares the Hell out of the Left wing of this Country, and for good reason. Who else in national politics has shown the ability to regularly draw 20,000+ crowds? No one, except the One, and I don't think he could do so today.

But give Sarah Palin a good, well advertised Tea Party? I see 30,000 as a certainty, 50,000 as a possibility.

Fasten your seat belts, the ride might get a bit bumpy. But I think this Palin person will give us quite a show.

50 Things Wrong with Waxman-Markey

This National Review Online article itemizing 50 things wrong with the recently passed Waxman-Markey Climate Control bill is a must read. And 50 only scratches the surface of the utter monstrosity that is this law contemplated for our country.

Call your Congressman, Senator and your President, and protest this stunningly bad bill. Or else call your travel agent. The United States will not be a good place to be if this bill or any version thereof passes the Senate.

Talking Points and the Major Media

All posts in this series may be found here.

This story has everyone up in arms at the ethics (or lack thereof) displayed by The Washington Post in attempting to sell (for $25,000.00 a pop!) private dinners with the publisher of The Washington Post, Katharine Weymouth, and her top-flight, inside the beltway, powerful-doesn't-begin-to-describe-it journalists. See, for instance, this bludgeoning of the Post by Roger Kimball of PajamasMedia.com.

I dunno. Katharine Weymouth is pretty big stuff, and her average dinner parties are undoubtedly quite exclusive things, but $25,000.00 for the privilege? As for the A-lister journalists in attendance, my outside-the-beltway feeling is that such journalists would tend to dumb down the event, social status wise.

What is not emphasized in all the outrage I've been reading is the fact that the Post promised contact with high-level Administration officials. How high-level? Well, as high as $25,000.00 worth of level, at least. Is Joe Biden worth that to your average lobbyist? Probably not. Rahm Emmanuel? Undoubtedly, if not more.

How does a private company like the Post get the ability to sell, for cash, intimate dinners with the likes of Rahm Emmanuel? And would any of that $25,000.00 have flowed back to the Administration? If not in actual cash, then in favorable headlines? I think these questions answer themselves.

This is Washington back-scratching at its most outrageous. Or to put it another way (as I have in this series of posts), what we have here is evidence of one more "major tributary of Washington politics," this time involving the Administration and The Washington Post.

Or to put it still another way, without metaphor, this is further evidence of the rank corruption of both the Major Media and the Obama Administration.