Not the first president to break promises
November 6, 2009
"The doer is always conscienceless; no one has a conscience except the spectator." - Goethe
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Massive fraud makes Medicare a lousy model
October 30, 2009
In what must be considered a monumental understatement, Attorney General Eric H. Holder told CBS News' "60 Minutes" that more oversight of Medicare funds is needed. I'll say, considering what we have learned about the scope and ease of stealing billions of dollars from the American taxpayer by means of fraudulent claims for care that never happened. To Mr. Holder's credit, his agency has been frantically cracking down on this thievery for some time now, resulting in the indictments of dozens of criminals in Miami, Detroit, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Still, this is merely the tip of what turns out to be a gargantuan iceberg.
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Obama's war in Afghanistan crashes on a craggy reality
October 16, 2009
Tuesday's night's season premiere of Frontline on PBS examined "Obama's War," the eight-year-long conquest and occupation of Afghanistan. A lot of people puzzled over the documentary's title, since the war was initiated by President Bush, but the truth is that on the campaign trail and since taking office, President Obama has said this is a war that must be won, that it is, as opposed to Iraq, "the right war." Right or wrong, the impression I came away with was that once again fanciful, brainy theorizing has run aground on the jagged rocks of reality.
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Perpetual war is here — and Americans are getting used to it
October 9, 2009
A new poll shows a substantial majority of Americans have resigned themselves to the reality of our nation's perpetual foreign wars. They don't like it, but they see it happening and know there is nothing they can do about it. The poll, conducted by Clarus Research Group, showed that 68 percent of us agree with idea that we won't either win or lose the war in Afghanistan, now eight years long, but will instead just remain there. The image of flies and flypaper again swirls in my head, just as it did at the time of the invasion of Iraq. We invaded these places and now we're stuck there, and President Barack Obama is likewise stuck, not on flypaper, but on the horns of a dilemma: Does he send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, as his area commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has publicly demanded, or does he change strategies a la Joe Biden and rely more on special ops and drones to harass the Taliban and kill whatever members of al-Qaeda we can find?
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Increasing uneasiness over Obamacare
October 2, 2009
To change something that isn't what you'd like into something else is not necessarily to "fix" it, if that something else comes laden with significant new unwelcome negatives. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with the proposed remodeling of our health care system. As Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute put it on my show this week: "Congressional leaders and the White House are pushing through their aggressive agenda to remake our health sector as though they are oblivious to the fear and outrage outside the Beltway and the pleas of the American People to apply the brakes."
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Can a test be meaningful if failure isn't allowed?
September 25, 2009
I don't know which is more annoying: folks who grouse and grumble about what's going on - like me - or people like those who tell us that the results of Maryland's new required exams to graduate from high school are a success. Here's a set of tests, in English, algebra, biology and government, designed ostensibly to boost the level of learning needed to receive a diploma, administered to more than 60,000 students, and only 11 fail to graduate solely because they could not pass them. I understand the political need to dumb down the tests, or in the delicate wording of a Washington Post story on the matter, "the compromises educators face in balancing what is politically palatable against raising academic standards." But the degree of the dumbing down is quite remarkable.
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The awful prospect of turning war over to machines
September 18, 2009
"Once in a while, everything about the world changes at once. This is one of those times."
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Eight years after 9/11, bin Laden seems closer to his goals than we are
September 11, 2009
None of us will ever forget where we were and what we were doing that fateful morning eight years ago today, when the hijacked airliners flew into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. I was just leaving the house for work when my wife called out for me to come back inside. The first plane had just struck its target, and for a moment we didn't know if it was an accident. All doubts disappeared seconds later when we saw, live on television, the second tower struck by another plane. In that amazing moment we knew that life would never again be quite the same. Then came the third attack, the one on the Pentagon - and the worries about what was next.
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Anger over big government, high taxes is reshaping politics
August 28, 2009
Editorialists at major American newspapers have a history of magical thinking when it comes to taxing us. How many times have we read editorials urging higher taxes as the preferred solution for any perceived governmental budget problems? Liberals have a catechistic response to most any demand for greater social spending: Raise taxes and get on with it. They seem ignorant of one of the basic laws of economics, which is that taxes discourage production. The more a thing is taxed, the less you get of it. This is why the huge expenditure of money by the federal government in the name of "stimulus" cannot possibly make up for the wealth destroyed by the taxes extracted from the productive economy to pay for it.
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Liberals at the FCC want to muzzle talk radio
August 21, 2009
Reflecting on my 24 years hosting a radio talk show, I realize once again how timing is everything in life. In 1984, when I worked Saturday nights and as a vacation fill-in, talk radio was pretty primitive. There was no Internet, no cell phones, not even fax machines. The programs we did back then were drastically limited, both in who was likely to call in and in the ways we hosts collected news and opinion pieces to talk about on the air. The callers were stay-at-homes, the proverbial little old ladies in tennis shoes, or, late at night, insomniacs of one sort or another.
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At least the health reform bill is good for somebody: lobbyists
August 14, 2009
There is no government that doesn't demand tribute from those it rules. The French political philosopher Frederic Bastiat famously argued that all government is in essence organized theft. It can safely be said that government is the biggest, baddest gang in any gathering of humans. It decides everything and backs its decisions with armed force and legal coercion. It can put its subjects in jail and take away their property, lay down rules for behavior and punishments for those who break them. There doesn't seem to be any way around this, since the alternative would be anarchy, and anarchy is attractive only in the abstract.
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Short attention spans and short memories
August 20, 2008
Nicholas Carr thinks that Google is making us "stoopid." In a recent piece in The Atlantic, he says those of us who constantly surf the Net can't concentrate properly anymore -- that instant access to virtually all information reduces our attention span. Mr. Carr says he can no longer immerse himself in a book or a long article, something that used to be easy for him. Has this happened to you? I thought so. It's happened to me as well.
