TSA is the New DMV

Critics of the president's health care plan like to ask whether you want your health care run by the Department of Motor Vehicles.

We all know why. The Department of Motor Vehicles is the only government agency that most people ever interface with as a customer. It's the only time they get ordered around by rude, uneducated, overweight dolts. And these are dolts that cannot be fired. It's the only time when they experience the eternal constant of governance: How not to do it.

On Sunday, Lady Marjorie encountered the new DMV, the federal Transportation Security Administration (TSA) the creation of 9/11. Marjorie was selected for a random search. This meant being ordered into a glass cage, barked at, ordered out of the glass cage, having her belongings spilled on the floor, being ordered around, and generally treated as though she was applying for a drivers license at the DMV.

You'll recall that on the insistence of Democrats in the Senate, airport security checks were to be performed by uniformed government employees rather than the contract personnel, as previously. They must have thought that they had scored a real coup by creating a new special interest that would be good for votes and contributions in the years ahead.

But I think they may have made a strategic mistake. It used to be that Americans didn't come into contact with the federal government too much, except to talk to the friendly ranger at a National Park. But now they have to suffer the ministrations of a new Circumlocution Office, well practiced in the arts of How not to do it, every time that they fly.

At least you only have to deal with the DMV once every five years.

I admit it. I hate the security checks at the airport, absolutely hate them. It is just wrong for a free people to be subject to such routine policing and manhandling by the government. As time goes by, I expect that I will project my distaste more and more upon the unfortunate TSA employees manning the security checkpoint.

I expect that many Americans will come to feel the same. Democrats will find out that there will be political repercussions to this.

It will mean that critics of glorious new government progams will ask, in future: Do you really want your health care run by the TSA?

It's Not the Lies, It's the Meanness

Hey, Rush Limbaugh is a public figure, right? He signed on for the big leagues, so you can figure that he'd better be man enough to take the hits. So if the boys get a bit rough with him about a fake racist comment, well, politics ain't beanbag.

Actually, Limbaugh can take the heat, including the snide little hit from the Today Show infobabe, asking him why the private Rush is so gentle and polite. Compared to the public Rush.

Hey, anyone can fabricate racist quotes from the IP of a New York law firm, as suggested in The American Thinker. Anyone can sicc the Justice Brothers, Reverends Jackson and Sharpton, on Rush. Anyone can gin up the head of the NFL players union, DeMaurice Smith, who "served as counsel to Attorney General Eric Holder and was a member of Barack Obama’s transition team," according to The American Thinker to say that the NFL players would play for a team with Rush as an owner.

But it's the meanness that gets to me. Rush Limbaugh had the chance to own a share in an NFL team, probably the one thing that this modest man would like in all the world.

And the Obama political machine decided to take him down on it. Because they could.

Here's my advice to the Obama guys. If I were you, I'd keep my eye on the ball. I reckon you chaps have about three months to reverse your economic policy, and reverse your legislative agenda. After that, it's pretty well baked in the pie that we'll have big unemployment going right through till the 2012 election. It's pretty well baked in that we'll have serious inflation. It's pretty well baked in that the American people are going to be mad as hell and are going to want to take it out on Democrats at every opportunity.

Sooner or later you chaps are going to have to start cutting spending and lowering taxes on job-creating businesses.

So these Chicago politics power plays aren't going to move anyone. In fact, they will disgust the white moderate women without whose votes Democrats don't have a prayer of winning anything.

It's not the lies. It's the meanness.

We Need Rules for Race-Hustlers

Well, now we know. When it comes to ownership in the National Football League, outspoken conservatives need not apply. But it is OK for an outspoken and divisive liberal like Keith Olbermann to be an NFL broadcaster. That's different.

For Rush Limbaugh to belong to a syndicate aiming to buy a majority interest in the St. Louis Rams is beyond the pale. That's because, you see, according to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, reported in the Washington Post he is too divisive:

"I've said many times before we're all held to a high standard here, and I think divisive comments are not what the NFL is all about," Goodell said at an NFL owners' meeting.

What was the problem? Just some made up racist quotes dredged up from Wikipedia and retailed by people like St. Louis Post Dispatch sportswriter Bryan Burwell.

You know what I think. I think it is time to establish some rules for race-baiters, particularly journalists operating in the mainstream media. If you don't follow these rules then your statements make you liable under the rules of libel: having a reckless disregard for the truth.

1. A charge of racism is the most serious charge you can make against an American.
2. A charge of racism must be supported by a primary source.
3. A primary source is a video, an audio, a transcript, s sworn statement.
4. A primary source is not Wikipedia, Wikiquote, a blogger, or an unsourced quote in a book.

If you haven't met these rules then you must expect to pay damages for your reckless speech.

Then there is the NFL. I think the NFL needs to understand that 40 percent of Americans are conservative, and that the NFL needs to keep friends in both political parties if it expects to maintain its anti-trust privileges as a national institution. It may be that the NFL needs a sharp blow upside the head before it "gets it."

The Gasping Strangled Death of a Lie

Don't say you weren't warned. What we are witnessing this Fall, as Democrats flail away trying to create a bill out of the morass of lies they call health care reform, is a watershed moment, a tipping point.

It is more than the death of an ill-thought legislative measure, an attempt to conjure up an image of low-cost universal health care with makeup, lighting, and a winning stage presence in the leading man. It is the end of an era. It is the end of the pretense that you can satisfy the basic wants and needs of humans with a bureaucratic government program.

Let us just look at just one of the crazed ideas in the Baucus bill. It is the luxury tax on excessively generous insurance plans. Notice what is going on here. First of all, government encourages the luxuriant growth of health insurance by making it into a tax-free employee benefit. The whole thing started, you will recall, in World War II as a way of evading war-time wage and price controls.

So now, in order to deal with the inevitable effect of such a subsidy, the solons propose to set up a penalty to stop health insurance from getting too luxuriant!

This sort of thing is so commonplace in the modern social democratic world that we even have a law to explain it: the law of unintended consequences.

But the whole thing is madness anyway, as Tony Blankley explains.

[T]he same Congress and president who want to stop the banks from taking too much risk cannot stop themselves from ever more deficits. Indeed, so intoxicated -- nay, hypnotized! -- by debt is the current government that it is not even proposing to try to cut back.

Yes! Even before the Baucus bill the Congressional Budget Office reports that "The federal budget is on an unsustainable path[.]" Why is that? Because "Rising costs for health care and the aging of the U.S. population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly."

Does President Obama propose a radical program of bringing the federal budget back to reality? No. He proposes to double down.

The ideology of the progressive educated class has always been a lie. It was a lie when Marx proposed the "immiseration" of the working class. It was a lie when the Prussians enacted the social insurance model that paid for the workers' social benefits out of the hide of the middle class. It was a lie when FDR enacted the cruel Wagner Act that cartelized Big Labor and Big Business. It was a lie when he passed Social Security in 1935, sent Publishers Clearing House letters to every voter in 1936 that they might already have won a pension, and then started the taxes in 1937--after the election. It was a lie when LBJ lied about the future costs of Medicare in 1965.

And it is still a lie as Democrats propose to force America, in a strictly partisan effort, to pay for the health care of slacker liberals, now and forever.

Well, it's not working. And even if some form of health reform passes, it will not stand. Democrats are heading straight for disaster, generational disaster. They are going into a reverse like Stalingrad or the Battle of Kursk. The health bill is like the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, extending slavery to Kansas and Nebraska in the moment between the fall of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republican Party. It is setting up the casus belli for a great civil war. It is the one last lie that will collapse onto and demolish all the other lies that we have been forced to believe on penalty of being labeled a racist, a sexist, an exploiter, or a homophobe.

As usual, of course, it will be the poor who will suffer.

Who Do You Trust on Healthcare Estimates?

Who do you trust to tell you the truth? That's what it comes down to as the Obama administration rushes its health care reform through Congress.

There are, of course, a lot of people who believe that government can make things work. I was talking to a gentleman recently who was satisfied that the Postal Service was an efficient organization.

But those of us with suspicions about all large and powerful organizations don't buy that. We expect government programs to slowly wind down, becoming less and less efficient, and more and more devoted to the convenience of managers and special interests. And most important of all, the politican's need for reelection.

Now that the insurance industry has finally woken up to the fact that the Obama plan will eat them for lunch they have taken the time and money to get an analysis out of PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

What does the analysis say? It's pretty straight forward. Health reform will make health insurance more expensive. It's about what you would expect. Government doesn't do anything to make things efficient. What is does is shift costs from favored interests to less favored interests.

So, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the Obama plan will increase insurance premiums due to four principal factors: insurance market reforms, a tax on high-cost plans, cost-shifting from Medicare cuts, and new taxes on the medical industry.

Overall, the study says health care costs will increase:

79 percent between 2009 and 2019 under the current system and by 111 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.

So that's all right then. Reform will only increase costs by 40 percent!

The Costs of the Healthcare Jam-down

Have the Democrats really stopped to think what they are doing with this health care jam-down?

The so-called Baucus bill (which is not a bill but "conceptual language") was clearly written to game the CBO scoring system. In other words, it was written to make it seem that the government takeover of health care would cost under a trillion dollars over ten years.

But it won't. We know it won't.

The excellent Michael Barone has a telling article about this, and about the special deals that Senators Reid (D-NV) and Schumer (D-NY) have written into the bill to help their states.

Lyndon Johnson reportedly ignored the advice of his economists back in 1965 when he was costing out Medicare. He just lied about the estimated costs and got his Medicare passed.

Maybe Democrats think that they can get away with it again.

But I think they are fooling themselves. I think that if they pass this bill they will reap a generation of rage. I think that this bill gets us to the Tipping Point on government spending. I think it will power up a new generation of conservative activism which will truly redeem President Reagan's boast that "you ain't seen nothin' yet." Here's why.

• Government health care stops the market from seeking out new procedures and new economies. It maintains health care as expensive, cartelized crony capitalism.
  
• Government health care reverses the reward for prudence. It rewards people who don't take care of themselves and their families.
• Government health care will turn into rationing. It has to, because there is an almost unlimited demand for free or subsidized health care.
• Government health care will force Americans to fight each other. That's what happens in education, according to Andrew Coulson in Market Education. Government always selects one way to do everything. That means that people that want another way have to fight.
• Government health care puts politicians at the center of power and society. It means that politics will decide issues rather than economics or compassion or caring. The only thing that matters is whether you can scare or bribe a politician.

Guess what. People don't like that stuff. And conservatives are going to have an open line to moderate women. We are going to be able to say: Democrats don't care about you and your family. They just care about power and about special interests.

Liberals and Democrats better understand what they are doing here. They are visiting a monstrous injustice on the American people and they will pay dearly for their arrogance and their pride.

Well, it's about time.

After Nobel Comes the Whirlwind

I wouldn't want to be a liberal right now. Because any liberal with any sense must see that a perfect storm is brewing.

We wish President Obama well, and we congratulate him on winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in diplomacy.

The trouble for the president is that this award probably will be remembered as an inflection point. After today, things will start going downhill for the president, and I predict that they will go down fast.

Let's look at all the issues that are combining, like weather disturbances, into the perfect storm.

1. The dollar. The Obama administration has done nothing to adjust to the fact that, after the Crash of 2008, the nation is poorer. That means it can afford less government. That means that it must revive the economy by--get this--reviving the private sector. That means it is going to have to defend the dollar or see massive inflation. But instead the Obama administration has governed as if nothing had changed. The US consumer and the US creditor aren't going to like this.
   
   
2. Government Spending. The Obama administration spent about a trillion dollars on a "stimulus" bill. Actually the bill was not a stimulus but a payoff to Democratic voters. It won't stimulate the economy. This is going to result in higher unemployment in 2010 and 2012 than otherwise. The US voter isn't going to like this.
   
   
3. War on Terror. In the Oughties, Democrats said that the Iraq War was a mistake and a distraction. The real war was in Afghanistan, and how come we haven't captured Bin Laden yet? Of course, as Charles Krauthammer makes clear, the only reason the Dems talked about Afghanistan was that it was a way to criticize President Bush while neutralizing the Democratic reputation for being soft on defense. "Bush Lied," they said. Well, you ain't seen nothing yet. The American people aren't going to like this.
   
   
4. Health Care. The Obama administration proposes to spend at least a trillion dollars on extending health care subsidies to their supporters. Probably this is a gross underestimate. This additional burden on the private sector will make the economy weaker.
   
   
5. Cap and Trade. The Obama administration is proposing to raise energy taxes by trillions of dollars in order to "save the planet." Leaving aside the science of global warming, and leaving aside whether carbon reduction is the appropriate response, Americans just don't want to pay more in taxes, especially in the middle of a recession.

Of course, there is more stuff that the American people don't like. They don't like the corruption; they don't like the regulation of the blogosphere; they don't like the use of the "race card." And on and on.

When all these issues combine together, we are going to see a perfect storm. It will transform the US economy, and it will transform US politics.

There is no way to tell what all the ramifications of the storm will be. In any storm, the damage will be horrific, but it will be impossible to tell, before the storm, what will survive and what will be utterly destroyed.

But I will make this prediction. After the storm has passed, and after the American people have viewed the wreckage, and taken in the scale of the disaster, our liberal friends will be utterly discredited.