The Problem of Incapacitated Heads of State

What do we do if the President is incapacitated? Or a drunk, or a depressive?

That’s the topic of an interesting essay by David Owen in QJ Med. Lord Owen was British Foreign Secretary in the Labour Government from 1977 to 1979.

We all know that President Wilson was completely incapacitated by a stroke in 1919. But did you know that President Mitterand of France was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981 and became almost incapacitated later on in his second term as president? No, you probably don’t because they kept it pretty secret.

And Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain was fueled with amphetamines throughout the Suez Crisis of 1956.

What should we do about presidential incapacitation, and how much secrecy is acceptable?

Winston Churchill, of course, was a depressive and endured many attacks of the “black dog.” He had a heart attack in the White House in 1941. And what about his drinking?

In May 1953, Churchill as Prime Minister was standing in for Eden as Foreign Secretary weeks before he had a very serious stroke. A diplomat from the Foreign Office records lunching with him and his Private Secretary, ‘The lunch lasted for three and a quarter hours. A varied and noble procession of wines with which I could not keep pace — champagne, port, brandy, cointreau; Winston drank a great deal of all and ended with two glasses of whisky and soda’. It is hard to imagine functioning on such an input, but he had been used to it for over fifty years.

What should be the rules regarding the health of the head of government, and when should we step in and replace them?

A View of the War on Terror

How well do we understand the war on terror? How well are we doing? What is it we are fighting against? You could read A View from the Eye of the Storm by Haim Harari in FrontPage Magazine to get a broad strategic sweep.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel had joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine had existed for 100 years.

And this great region with 300 million people has

a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone.

...

Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers.

There are four main pillars of the conflict: the suicide murder, lies, money, and the “total breaking of all laws.”

And this conflict is power by three “concentric spheres supporting death and murder.”

The first sphere is the terrorists themselves. “They are surrounded by a second wider circle of direct supporters, planners, commanders, preachers.” Then there is the outer sphere,

the third circle of so-called religious, educational and welfare organizations, which actually do some good, feed the hungry and provide some schooling, but brainwash a new generation with hatred, lies and ignorance.

We’ll win, of course. But meanwhile how are we doing?

Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon.. [Both] Iran and Syria are now totally surrounded by territories unfriendly to them... This is a significant strategic change and it applies strong pressure on the terrorist countries...
I do not know if the American plan was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the resulting situation.

Read the whole thing.

Health Care is a Right, as They Say

We know how goverment monopoly health care works in Canada, because we got a look with the Canadian movie The Barbarian Invasions. The way to get things done and actually get health care, it appeared, was a bit of bribery.

OK. We know those Canadians are wusses. But what about in the home of government health care in the Anglosphere, the United Kingdom with its beloved National Health Service?

Things are not too good, according to Dr. John Crippen an NHS doctor and blogger.

Here’s how things are going in his NHS hospital:

Third patient in is Mary, one of the local speech therapists. She is approaching retirement. I sent her husband into hospital three weeks ago in rip-roaring heart failure... The nursing care is appalling. He has developed pressures sores on his sacrum and heels.

Wanna see what a Grade IV pressure sore on the sacrum looks like? Try here. On second thoughts, you probably don’t. Meanwhile you’ll be glad to know that the nurses are eating dinner.

The nurses were all eating take-away Pizza. Deep Pan pizza from Pizza Hut... Mary thinks her husband is dying... The nurses over the weekend do not speak English. She tried to tell them that her husband is partially sighted but they do not understand. They show here the nursing assessment. Under “visual problems” it says "none".

Yep. Read the whole thing.

Handicapping Election 2006

It will take a gain of 15 seats for the Democrats to take control of the House of Representatives this fall. Can they do it?

Long time elections expert Michael Barone says maybe. It would seem that gaining 15 seats should not be that hard, given that the Republicans gained 52 seats in 1994 to take the House. But this isn’t 1994. At least not yet.

Democrats' chances of taking those 15 seats are not very good — if the voting patterns and political contours that have held steady since the 1995-96 budget showdown continue to prevail.

And that’s the point. Voting patterns have stayed steady for about the last ten years. The Republicans gains came from three sources, says Barone. First was the Democratic Class of 1974 that had won in fairly Republican districts. Twenty years later, as those incumbents moved on, their seats reverted back to the Republicans. Then Republicans benefited from an improvement in candidate quality, the movement of the conservative South into the Republican camp, a remarkable anti-incumbent feeling, and finally an anti-Clinton feeling among voters who in 1992 thought they were voting for a moderate and instead got tax increases and national health care.

How do those factors work this time around? Not too much. It doesn’t seem likely that Republicans are in for a perfect storm like Democrats were in 1994.

In his analysis, Jay Case writes in RealClearPolitics.com that we should not underestimate the difficulty of unseating an incumbent congressman. There are only about 17 Republican open seats and most of them are districts that voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004.

Then he goes through the conventional wisdom that points to a Democratic pickup in November. Democrats could win if they could unify around a set of issues. Republicans are in trouble because they are not united. Right track/wrong track polls indicate trouble for the Republicans, and so on.

All wrong, says Case. The fact is that 95 percent of Republican congressmen are running for reelection. And the open seats are mostly in districts that voted for Bush. That makes it almost impossible to retake the House unless the sentiments of the voters change significantly before November.

So it ain’t over yet.

A Look Inside Iran

Here’s an interesting look inside Iran. The Iranian establishment is increasingly worried by the actions of the president of Iran, according to John R. Bradley in the Washington Times.

Iran's clerical and business establishments, deeply concerned by what they see as reckless spending and needlessly aggressive foreign policies, are increasingly turning against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad was elected on a populist platform to root out corruption and to give priority to the needs of the poor. Is he ever!

Iran's long-term planning calls for vigorous efforts to reduce the size of government and to curb subsidies to state-owned entities, which account for an estimated 75 percent of the economy. But the Ahmadinejad budget boosts spending by 25 percent and envisions a 31 percent increase in spending on state enterprises.

We’ve seen this before. This sort of reckless expansion of the government sector to throw subsidies at the poor always ends in tears. The economic strength of a nation comes from its productive sector. And that means business enterprise not government enterprise. This isn’t too difficult to figure out, is it.

The clerical establishment has close ties with the capitalist class and is said to be appalled at the rapid slide of the economy since Mr. Ahmadinejad's inauguration. The clerics are also thought to be deeply apprehensive about the president's aggressive foreign policy.

The Iranian establishment wants the West to ease off on the confrontation with Ahmadinejad. “Let the Iranians deal with him,” they say. Then he’ll be a failure and out of power within a year.

The Outlook for Energy

Ever since Col. Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania back in 1859 people have been solemnly forecasting that oil is about to run out.

They forecast it back in the 1860s, and they forecast it just before they discovered oil in Texas. Now the current fad is “peak oil,” the idea that we just passed by the peak in oil production and that it is downhill from now on.

Maybe they are right. But it really doesn’t matter.

Actually, the forecast that we are running out of energy goes back even before the oil age. In the early nineteenth century they were worrying about the wood energy crisis in Britain. The iron smelting industry was cutting down all the trees to melt iron, and everyone knew that they would soon run out of energy. Then they discovered coal in Newcastle.

In TCSDaily, Max Schulz does a good job of showing why the peak oil hypothesis has the whole problem upside down.

The chief problem with those who say the world is running out is that they have always looked at the issue the wrong way. Questions about energy supply shouldn't be thought of in terms of how much is available, but in terms of how good mankind is at finding and extracting it.

Leave aside that extraction technology is always improving. Leave aside that there is a ton of coal out there, and then there is nuclear.

In a hundred years or less we could be erecting solar panels in space and bringing the energy back to the earth by microwave or down the umbilical chords of space elevators.

Evergy is not a question of finite resources. It is a question of human ingenuity.

And what, you might ask, is really real? Material resources or human ideas? The truth is that we just don’t know.

It's Not A Gender Gap but a Marriage Gap

For a generation Democrats have been selling the idea of a gender gap, the idea that more women vote for Democrats and that therefore Republicans have a problem.

Never mind that the gender gap implies also the reverse, that more men vote for Republicans and that therefore Democrats have a problem.

Instead, let’s talk about a marriage gap, writes Jeff Jacoby.
In 2004 there was a 36 percent marriage gap among women.

In the most recent presidential election, unmarried women voted for John Kerry by a 25-point margin, while President Bush won the votes of married women by an 11-point margin: a marriage gap of 36 points.

It’s really just practical. If you are a single woman, you rely on government for your safety net. If you are a married woman, you rely on your husband.

OK, now let’s expand Jacoby’s analysis a little. First of all:

Financial protection. Single women, especially if they have children, are more likely to be dependent on the government for welfare, Social Security, and other economic benefits... Married women, by contrast, are much less likely to depend on government support. Instead, many come to see the welfare state and its tax burden as a threat to the well-being of their family, making them more inclined to vote Republican.

Nothing remarkable there. Then there is:

Children and cultural values. Married parents with children are less likely to support the party whose policies make it harder to shield their children from corrosive cultural influences.

Yes, and the Democrats, as the party of single people, cannot get away from condoning complete license for single people. Finally, there is (easy now):

Male influence. Women are significantly less likely than men to follow national and international affairs, a knowledge gap that researchers have documented for decades.

The consequence is that married women tend to take up the political opinions of their husbands on national and international affairs.

What would be nice is for women to start taking control of local politics and getting control of their children’s education. Some of us out here shake our heads in frustration that women haven’t done something about education. How can married mothers put up with the nonsense that’s dished out at their children at the local government school?

Anything we can do to help, ladies?