One - make that 120-plus - for the good-move side of the ledger

Squirrel-Hair's saving grace is that he takes seriously the counsel of serious people.

This is obviously the case with regard to this move:

Having filled a Supreme Court vacancy, President Trump is turning his attention to the more than 120 openings on the lower federal courts. On Monday, he will announce a slate of 10 nominees to those courts, a senior White House official said, the first in what could be near monthly waves of nominations.
The White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, said the nominations were a vindication of a commitment Mr. Trump made during the campaign “to appoint strong and principled jurists to the federal bench who will enforce the Constitution’s limits on federal power and protect the liberty of all Americans.”
The administration continues to draw on lists of 21 potential Supreme Court nominees, put together with the help of the conservative Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, that Mr. Trump issued during the campaign. But it is looking at other sources, too, the White House official said. Mr. McGahn, who has supervised the selection of the nominees, is looking for scholarly credentials and “intellectual boldness,” among other qualities, the official added.
Jonathan H. Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said the appeals court picks on Mr. Trump’s list included “incredibly strong nominees” who were within the judicial mainstream and should “have an intellectual influence on their courts.”

A look at a few of these stellar picks:

 . . . attorneys Kevin Newsom for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, John Bush for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit and perhaps most notably Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.

Newsom clerked for Supreme Court Justice David Souter, served as the solicitor general of Alabama and wrote a well-regarded article for the Yale Law Journal, “Setting Incorporationism Straight: A Reinterpretation of the Slaughter-House Cases.”

Barrett clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, served for six years on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure and has an impressive scholarly record.

Bush is an accomplished litigator and president of the Louisville Lawyers’ Chapter of the Federalist Society. He served on the Sixth Circuit’s Advisory Committee on Rules from 2012 to 2015.

In addition to the appellate nominees noted above, Trump is poised to nominate Damien Schiff of the Pacific Legal Foundation to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Among other things, Schiff successfully argued Sackett v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Rescuing the overall federal bench from activist Freedom-Haters may be the best part of  S-H's  legacy.

The Left's disingenuousness is on full display when it comes to solar energy

David Harsanyi has a must-read essay today at The Federalist on the "logic" that leftist demagogues use to try to delegitimize economic truths about the inefficiency of the solar-power sector of the overall energy industry.

The other day, American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Perry wrote this postdetailing the astonishing unproductivity of the solar sector, which boasts of 20 percent of all electric power payrolls yet produces less than 1 percent of the electric power in the United States. Perhaps there is a strong argument that funding a “clean energy” economy is worth the trouble because one day it will save the Earth, but right now it exists only as a morally pleasing proposition that serves little economic purpose.

The reaction to Perry’s tweet, though, was a revealing exposition of progressive economics ideas. Which is to say, productivity doesn’t matter if your heart is in the right place. Take Sally Kohn, a CNN analyst, who mocked Perry’s article by saying, “In case you mistakenly thought conservatives mean it when they say they believe in creating good jobs…”

Christopher Hayes and Sam Biddle responded to Perry in similar fashion on Twitter.

Harsanyi quite appropriately offers up the Milton Friedman "why-not-use-spoons-instead-of-shovels" quip.

He then returns to Kohn, who also claims in a subsequent tweet that solar energy is cheaper than normal-people energy forms, thinking she's come across a real gotcha, because that would render the inefficiency argument pointless.

Um, reread your supposed substantiation of this "cheaper" business, Sally:

If solar is also CHEAPER why do we need subsidies and state mandates? Surely Americans would turn away from fossil fuel immediately if this were the case. I know I would. Now, the piece Kohn linked to (but didn’t read apparently) only forecasts that prices will be cheaper, while ignoring the many supplementary costs of creating an entire new infrastructure, not to mention the cost of the fossil fuel capacity necessary to back up a system that runs on the vagaries of sunlight. But that’s another story.

I am particularly pleased that Harsanyi concludes by castigating the populist impulse to bellow about "bringing back" manufacturing jobs, although I wish he'd fleshed out how said impulse is situated on the right side of the ideological spectrum. The case could be made that his use of the phrase "many conservatives" is unfortunate, as I believe that right-of-center types who so exhort are not actually conservatives, but rather boneheads guided by shoddy thought processes.

The way that you say it is nearly as important as the content in determining whether you are contributing to civilizational rot or helping to stem it

So there is a post at RedState today about Paul Ryan's appearance this morning on ABC's This Week. The author, Teri Christoph, kind of leaves it up to the reader to form the conclusion that she presumes a RedState reader is going to come to.

It's the conclusion I come to. You have this Ryan fellow, a lifelong go-getter whose core orientation toward three-pillar conservatism has catapulted him into a very high position: Speaker of the House. But along the way, he's swallowed some Beltway Kool-Aid. He had to make himself palatable to Romney and the RNC to run as Vice President in 2012, for instance. As speaker, he's had to navigate some tricky situations.

And he's got maybe a bit more of the nice-guy inclination than a lot of us would like to see. The same trait that occasionally frustrates us concerning Mike Pence.

The gist of this RedState post, and the video of his appearance that fleshes it out, is that he hemmed and hawed his way through an attempt to explain where the version of the AHCA that finally passed the House stands on pre-existing conditions. Do you need a spoiler alert for my assessment that he comes up a little short? Maybe waffles a little?

But what I really want to draw attention to is a particular comment in the comment thread underneath:

Lying POS

This is so emblematic of the taking-a-crowbar-to-a-Rubic's-cube mode of expression that one finds in - well, it's inadequate to continue this sentence with "the comment threads of cyberspace," isn't it? After all, one finds blog posts and social media posts fraught with the same combination of crude analogies and unsubstantiated slanders anywhere on a routine basis. Hell, late-night television hosts dish this stuff up with not only impunity but fist pumps now.

Come on, you idiot who posted this comment. Paul Ryan is a devout Catholic from Janesville, Wisconsin who immersed himself in the works of great thinkers on the subject of human freedom early on. His 2016 endorsements come from an array of organizations that any American who doesn't hate freedom and dignity would find unobjectionable:

2016 Endorsements

• Air Line Pilots Association, International
• Council for Citizens Against Government Waste
• National Association of Home Builders
• National Federation of Independent Business
• National Rifle Association
• Wisconsin Right to Life

But because he did not choose the tactical route on this particular aspect of this particular policy that you are pretty much completely invested in, he is, in your estimation, a liar and a stool.


This is of a piece with the Polar Pop cups one sees placed - not alway dropped, sometimes they are upright - within ten feet of trash cans at convenience stores, or even libraries. It is of a piece with the "the cameras kept rolling" clickbait you can't avoid no matter what you're reading on the Internet. It is of a piece with the tattoos that cover the bodies of a high percentage of professional and even college-level athletes.

It is of a piece with the all-caps comments one has seen for the past twenty-two months unreservedly supporting Donald Trump.

Stop it. Not only is your level of discourse a problem. There is also the secondary effect of those disputing you overlooking your way of expressing yourself in order to engage you in a discussion or debate.

You are one of the major sources of civilizational rot. Your intellectual sloppiness combined with your embrace of crudity makes the task of those of us seeking productive polemical discourse all the more daunting.

Pull up you pants, put your styrofoam cup in the damn trash can, and address public-policy matters in a focused, informed, thoughtful and articulate matter.

Otherwise, those interested in such a level of conversation have no more use for you than we do the leftist jackboots whose disregard for cultural refinement you've clearly embraced.

Saturday roundup

The congregation of an Episcopal church in a little hamlet in the hills of southern Indiana gets played for saps:

A few days after the election of Donald Trump, a church community in Indiana was shocked to find that someone had spray-painted ugly and un-Christian things on their church.

St. David’s Episcopal Church in Bean Blossom, Ind., was vandalized with Nazi slogans, anti-gay slurs, and Donald Trump graffiti on November 12, 2016 -- but it wasn't from a hateful Trump supporter.

After a six-month investigation, the Brown County prosecuting attorney’s office determined that it was the congregation’s own organist—a Hillary Clinton supporter and gay activist—who did the deed. The culprit, 26-year-old George Nathaniel Stang of Bloomington, is also the person who first reported the vandalism to police last November.

It was immediately thought to be a hate crime because the small Episcopal Church is a progressive congregation that welcomes gays. The graffiti spray painted on the church walls read “Heil Trump” and “Fag Church.”

But during their inquiries police quickly came to feel that the vandalism was done by someone familiar with the church and began looking at the crime as an inside job. After an investigation, police arrested Stang.

The church organist allegedly admitted to the crime telling police he did it because he wanted to “mobilize a movement after being disappointed in and fearful of the outcome of the national election.”

In a three-page confession entered into court documents, Stand reportedly said he was trying to spark his congregation into activism.

“I suppose I wanted to give local people a reason to fight for good, even if it was a false flag,” he wrote according to court records. “To be clear my actions were not motivated by hate for the church or its congregation. I, of course, realize now, this was NOT the way to go about inspiring activism.”

Brilliant David French essay at NRO in which he examines the sociocultural cudgels that could be used to explain the death of Bob, a fictional middle-aged American with high blood pressure, a divorce, an inability to stay abreast of changes in his career field and other problems that boil down to the choices he's made in life.

Squirrel-Hair doubles down on his praise for Australia's health care system. If some of his highest-profile water-carriers had either acted like the conservatives they claimed to be or kept their populist-nationalist traps shut, we could have had Ted.

Remember those bad actors from Iran that post-America under the Most Equal Comrade released in order to sweeten the nuke deal? Well, the House Oversight Committee is going to investigate the matter.

Leaked emails are now a feature of the French election. Whodunnit?

Perpetual adolescence, a societal problem that's been addressed at least since 2004 when Joseph Epstein wrote a Weekly Standard piece about it, followed in 2007 by Diana West's The Death of the Grown-Up, is still with us. One of the handful of US Senators that could rightly be called great human beings, Ben Sasse, revisits the subject in a WSJ column called "How to Raise an American Adult." He says there are five main components to the project that parents should impart to their offspring: resist consumption, embrace the pain of work (that is, do something dirty and physically demanding even if it takes time away from the extracurricular activities the college you're applying to wants to see), connect across generations, travel meaningfully, and become truly literate.

"A rapidly vanishing window of opportunity"

Good morning. How is your Saturday going so far? Perhaps you have a to-do list for the day, maybe some social plans. If this weather weren't so annoyingly sub-normal, there might be some gardening to be done.

But I feel compelled to offer this backdrop to your thoughts and actions today. We face a situation that is not just going to calm down of its own accord, and we've really and truly run out of good options.

Dr. Peter Pry is the Executive Director of the Task Force on National Homeland Security, Chief of Staff of the Congressional EMP (Electric Magnetic Pulse) Commission, and is considered one of the country’s most knowledgeable experts on nuclear weapons technology. He is the undisputed preeminent authority on the existential threat presented by the proliferation of EMP weapons and gained national prominence in various testimonies before Congress, where he has categorically stated that the detonation of a single EMP weapon by a rogue state such as North Korea or Iran could destroy the US. 

In September of 2014, Peter and I collaborated on a Blaze Magazine article, Blackout, where he outlined how a single EMP nuclear weapon, detonated at apogee (between 50 to 200 miles above the US), would destroy the country’s entire electrical grid. Airplanes would fall out of the sky, our cars would not start, banking, nearly all non-barter related commerce would cease, and nine out of ten Americans would eventually die due to total societal collapse. 

I recently caught up with Peter to ask him what he thought about the new North Korean nuclear missile crisis.

Kelley: If Trump’s negotiations with President Xi Jinping and the Chinese government fail to bring about regime change in North Korea, can the US successfully take out their nuclear sites? And do we know where they all are? 

Pry: We don’t know where they all are. We do, however, have the ability, I believe, to do a successful preemptive strike. Which doesn’t mean we get a hundred percent of everything. But we would be able to effectively disarm them, certainly of their ICBM’s (intercontinental ballistic missiles). They don’t have that many of them, maybe only a dozen. So, we have this window of opportunity when it comes to their ICBM’s.

Kelley: How should the strike be conducted? 

Pry: It should include everything in our arsenal, our own EMP, cyber, conventional forces (ours and Korea’s). We can get most of their stuff in a first strike but there’s no guarantee we get all of it, even all of those small number of ICBM’s. But if any of those survive, our missile defense forces should be able to handle them.

Kelley: But what about all those vast numbers of short-range missiles we read are pointed at South Korea? Can all of those be taken out in a surprise attack?

Pry: It’s problematic when you’re talking about medium-range missiles, the no-dong’s. Most are not nuclear-armed. But I think we are grossly underestimating the number of nuclear warheads they have. They could have 100 nuclear weapons, most of them mounted on the no-dong’s. So there is no doubt, our allies would be more at risk from some of these surviving missiles. They hide them in tunnels and under bridges. But what are we going to do? Wait until they have enough (nuclear weaponized missiles) to make preemption impossible?

Kelley: Is North Korea reaching critical mass in terms of its nuclear weapons capability?

Pry: Not yet. Through our offensive and defensive systems we still have a reasonable chance to get all of their weapons and systems. But some of the short range missiles, the no-dongs, could get through and hit some cities.

Kelley: Cities where?

Pry: South Korea or US military bases in Japan. They could even get off an EMP attack which would be utterly bad news. We now have a rapidly vanishing window of opportunity. If they were to hit our allies with an EMP, we could help them recover. But if they deploy many more nuclear-armed short and long-range missiles, the problem becomes unmanageable. The key is to stop them before they get more ICBM’s, when they can hold the US mainland at risk. No American president is going to take out North Korea, at the risk of Los Angeles or Chicago, for the security purposes of Japan and South Korea.

It might be useful at this time to revisit a chillingly prescient 2003 Commentary article by Joshua Muravchik entitled "Facing Up to North Korea." He walks the reader through the chain of folly that was North Korea policy up to that time - the Agreed Framework, the predictions of wonks that the regime would sink under the weight of its economic failure. Of course, since then, we have seen utterly pointless Six-Way Talks and eight years of "strategic patience."

And now we are forced to face what Muravchik urged us to consider fourteen years ago:

Horrible, war would be. But to say that it is unthinkable is once again to hide our head in the sand. Pyongyang itself suffers under no such illusions and no such inhibitions. For its part, it insists that economic sanctions will be taken as an act of war, implying that it would respond with military strikes. Indeed, far from having viewed war with us as unthinkable, the North has calculated its demands on us over the years—that we remove our tactical nuclear weapons, that we persuade the South Koreans to forswear nuclear weapons of their own, that we cancel joint military exercises with Seoul—precisely in order to weaken our ability to resist its own military power. These demands we have systematically granted.

Not only does the North’s belligerence leave us no choice but to “think” about war, we cannot exclude the possibility of initiating military action ourselves. Part of the cause of our present predicament is that we ruled out the use of force at earlier points in this saga—when, however painful, it would have been less costly than today. And today it may be less costly than a few years from now, when North Korea will have dozens of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles (it has tested one that could reach Alaska) or when it will have shared them with al Qaeda and others.

Let that phrase "less costly than a few years from now" echo in your head as you head out to engage the world today.

The overall report card on the day's proceedings

I suppose the biggest news is that the House passed the revamped AHCA bill. This is one of developments that falls in the category of something that is far from ideal, but is on balance favorable, even if nearly undetectably, and had to be supported given the confluence of time frame and votes.

Damn it, that's just the way it works in a representative democracy in a fallen world. You'll be a dejected creature indeed if you can't live with anything less than the gleamingly perfect enactment of a public policy measure reflective of all the tenets of your worldview. It has never happened, and it won't in your lifetime.

But then this subsequent development may surpass it for the status of biggest news:

Senate Republicans said Thursday they won't vote on the House-passed bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, but will write their own legislation instead.

A Senate proposal is now being developed by a 12-member working group. It will attempt to incorporate elements of the House bill, senators said, but will not take up the House bill as a starting point and change it through the amendment process.

"The safest thing to say is there will be a Senate bill, but it will look at what the House has done and see how much of that we can incorporate in a product that works for us in reconciliation," said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.

"We are going to draft a Senate bill," added Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. "That is what I've been told."

The working group has been meeting for weeks, said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the group.

"What we have to do is build a consensus among our conference and that is what the working group is designed to do," Cornyn said. "To get to a compromise we can agree to and then present it to the larger conference."

Cornyn said there is "really no deadline" for the group to produce a bill. "We are just working toward getting 51 votes," he said.

Then there is Squirrel-Hair's meeting with Abbas.

The way that should have gone down is that, as soon as Abbas entered the room, the president would say, "Does Fatah still have as a central aim driving the Jews into the sea? Answer honestly, and if the answer is yes, get out of this office and get off the North American landmass."


Cut back over to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and let's zoom in on another bill that House Pubs did themselves proud on:

House Republicans voted today to approve a bill that would defund to Planned Parenthood abortion business.

This was the second attempt to get enough votes on the reconciliation bill that would not only defund the nation’s biggest abortion corporation but also repeal major portions of Obamacare. The first attempt to pass the bill saw liberal Republicans oppose the repealing Obamacare portion and conservative Republicans not happy as well because it did not repeal Obamacare fully. Republican leaders reworked the legislation, called the American Health Care Act, and Republicans passed the measure today despite Democrat objections.

The House voted 217-212 for the bill to defund Panned Parenthood with Republicans voting 217-20 for it and Democrats voting 192-0 against it. The legislation now moves to the Senate for consideration.

The pro-life bill would eliminate more than $390 million (over 86%) of over $450 million in annual federal funding to Planned Parenthood, from all mandatory spending programs. The measure also redirects funding to community health centers which outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities 20 to 1 and offer a wider array of health care services, but not abortion. AHCA also repeals Obamacare abortion subsidies, adds reforms to give states more flexibility and lower costs, and provides families more options.

The bill would close the largest pipeline for federal funding of Planned Parenthood, Medicaid, and it applies as well to the CHIP and the Title V and Title XX block grant programs.

Importantly, the bill ensures Obamacare will not fund abortions. National Right to Life explains:

“As enacted, the PPACA contains multiple provisions authorizing federal subsidies for abortion, and abortion-expanding regulatory mandates. A 2014 GAO report revealed that over 1,000 federally subsidized plans nationwide were covering elective abortion. The American Health Care Act would repeal the provisions of law that created this system, and prohibit any future federal tax credits from subsidizing the purchase of plans that cover elective abortion, thereby restoring the longstanding principles of the Hyde Amendment with respect to federally funded health coverage.”

“National Right to Life praises the Republican leadership for putting this bill together and making sure the most vulnerable members of our society are protected,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “Over two million Americans are alive today because of the Hyde Amendment. This new health care bill ensures that we are one step closer to getting the federal government entirely out of the business of subsidizing abortion.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told LifeNews he is delighted by the vote.

“Today is a day that should and will be remembered. The House GOP today fulfilled its nearly decade old promise to pass a bill that replaces Obamacare with a law that is pro-life and reduces premium costs for the American people,” he said. “We are proud of the House Freedom Caucus for working diligently in coalition with conservative groups and others to make this day possible. After entrusting the GOP with authority to lead the country based upon their campaign promises, the House GOP has made good on turning promises into policy. Now it is time for the Senate to follow in the House’s footsteps and pass the AHCA, so that this vital legislation can be signed into law by President Trump who understands the value of every person, born and unborn.”

I'm going to say a B minus overall. Health care bill opens up the door of possibility and establishes a clear direction for Pubs, an obvious A plus for the thumbs-down-on-killing-fetal-Americans-with-adult-Americans'-tax-dollars bill, and a D minus at best for hosting a real chunk of dog vomit at the post-American White House.

Art-gallery jackboots shut down an exhibit using a charge of genocide

A respectful approach to her subject matter got this painter nothing but slanderous vitriol:

An art gallery in Toronto canceled a scheduled exhibit of a Canadian artist’s work after she was accused of committing “cultural genocide” against indigenous people with her paintings.

The artist, Amanda PL, told CBC Toronto that she “tried to learn all she could about the Aboriginal culture, their teachings, their stories” and “capture the beauty of the art style and make it [her] own by drawing upon elements of nature within Canada that have meaning to me.”

Sounds nice, right? Learning about another culture, and appreciating it enough to want to include it in your own work in a special way? Well, according to critics, “nice” is not the right word; a better one might be something like “murderous.”

“What she’s doing is essentially cultural genocide, because she’s taking [indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau's] stories and retelling them, which bastardizes it down the road,” Chippewa artist Jay Soule said, according to CBC. “Other people will see her work and they’ll lose the connection between the real stories that are attached to it.”

Yes — Amanda PL’s paintings were apparently not just “insensitive” or “cultural appropriation,” but full-on, all-out genocide.

Dennis Prager, who has been calling the current state of affairs in our society a second civil war for a while, asked in his column yesterday how much longer it could go on being waged without widespread violence.

We may have a few minutes, Dennis.

Campus jackboots at Claremont base their position on the idea that actual truth is an abstract construct designed to press

You probably knew about the Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald's experience in trying to speak at Claremont McKenna College. It was fairly typical of the way mobs have used brownshirt-style violence to prevent conservative figures' appearances from taking place.

 . . . angry students surrounded the building, screamed obscene words and banged on the windows. Mac Donald ended up giving the speech to a mainly empty room via live video-streaming and then fleeing the university under the protection of campus security. 

But the kicker is the "reasoning" the organizers of the violence used:

The letter to university authorities from "We, few of the Black students here at Pomona College and the Claremont Colleges" loses no time in libelling their subject:

"If engaged, Heather Mac Donald would not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist. Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live."

Needless to say, none of this is true. Nowhere has Mac Donald suggested that black people or any other type of person has "no right to exist". The accusation is levelled without evidence. But as with all anti-free-speech activists today, the line is blurred not merely between actual words and violence, but between wholly imagined words and violence. Thus the students write:

"Advocating for white supremacy and giving white supremacists platforms wherefrom their toxic and deadly illogic may be disseminated is condoning violence against Black people. Heather Mac Donald does not have the right to an audience at the Athenaeum, a private venue wherefrom she received compensation. Dictating and condemning non-respectable forms of protest while parroting the phrase that 'protest has a celebrated' place on campus is contradictory at best and anti-Black at worst."

Amid the semi-literacy, linguistic ostentation and intellectual dishonesty, it is hard to single out what is worst about this letter. But, against stiff competition, what is worst is that the whole thing is built on one massive misunderstanding which might also be described as a false premise.

"Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of 'subjectivity vs. objectivity' as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth--'the Truth'--is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples."

As the English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote in his book Modern Philosophy, "A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't."

This is horrifying. The fact of objective truth is no longer merely being mocked. It is being called a tool of tyranny by those imposing actual tyranny - and it's all taking place on what until recent years had been sanctuaries of the free exchange of ideas.

We are at an unprecedented juncture. We are about to find out what happens when our civilization's outposts of higher learning and preservation of foundational assumptions are utterly ruined, rendered worthless, destroyed.

The darkness has clearly not receded in post-America.

Absolutely the most succinct explanation of what health care is, is not, and how it's been dealt with in America you've ever read

I'm going to excerpt at length from this one, because it is so important for everyone in the universe to read.

The Cato Institute's Michael Tanner at NRO:

1. Health care is neither a right nor a privilege; it’s a commodity. Worse, it’s a finite commodity. There are only so many doctors, so many hospitals, and so much money, and there are limits to how much these things can be expanded. That’s why no health-care system, outside Bernie Sanders’s fantasies, provides unlimited care to everyone.

Every health-care system in the world rations care in some way, either through bureaucratic fiat (Scandinavia, the U.K.), waiting lists (Canada), or price (that’s us). One can argue about which of these rationing mechanisms is fairest or most efficient, but let’s not pretend that it won’t occur.

2. Coverage is not access. Democrats like to pretend that giving everyone a piece of paper called insurance guarantees them access to the care they need. It’s sort of like magic. Say the right words, and poof, medical care appears. But in the real world it doesn’t work that way.

For example, take Medicaid, which is responsible for more than half the increase in coverage under Obamacare. Nearly a third of primary-care physicians won’t accept Medicaid patients. And when doctors do see Medicaid patients, they tend to be slower in granting appointments. Moreover, for the working poor, seeing doctors during normal office hours can be problematic. Perhaps that’s why Medicaid patients continue to use emergency rooms for routine care at a disproportionate rate. Numerous studies show that health outcomes for Medicaid patients are little better than those for the uninsured. In fact, some studies show patients faring worse under Medicaid than if they had no insurance at all.

Similarly, if Obamacare forced your insurance carrier to cut back its provider network, your shiny new coverage may no longer include the physician of your choice. And the incentive structure of Obamacare, notably its pre-existing-condition rules, encourage insurers to drop coverage for top doctors and hospital centers of excellence.

3. The uninsurable are uninsurable. Let us remember that the definition of “pre-existing condition” is: someone who is already sick. It’s a little like driving your car into a tree and then trying to retroactively buy auto insurance. It won’t work. Insurance is the business of spreading risk. But for someone who, say, has cancer, there’s no risk to spread, just cost. That’s not insurance, it’s paying for health care.

Obamacare tried to square this circle by mandating that young and healthy people buy insurance to offset the cost of providing care to those already sick. It turns out that didn’t work. Not enough healthy people signed up to pay for the influx of sick people. Insurance companies either dropped out of the market, cut back on high-quality providers, or raised premiums. All of this forced more healthy people out of the insurance pool and threatened an adverse-selection death spiral.

Republican proposals to keep the popular pre-existing-condition protections while jettisoning the mandate for coverage is only going to make the adverse-selection problem worse. It may have sounded like a moderate compromise, but it is like trying to be a little bit pregnant. It’s not going to work. The only realistic approach to dealing with pre-existing conditions is to take those people out of the insurance pool altogether and somehow pay for their care directly. There are several options for doing so, from state insurance pools to a revamped Medicaid program.

4. Medicare is not a success. Faced with the wreckage of Obamacare, Democrats are increasingly embracing the once controversial idea of “Medicare for all.” Most of them would start slowly, with a Trojan-horse “public option,” a taxpayer-subsidized plan that would undercut private insurance, but the result would still be a government-run national health-care plan based on Medicare.

Medicare is undoubtedly popular, especially with its beneficiaries. It should be. The average two-earner couple pays about $150,000 over their lifetime in Medicare taxes and premiums, while collecting almost $450,000 in benefits. Jackpot! But that disparity is one of the reasons why Medicare is running some $58 trillion in the red, after totaling all projected future liabilities. A program facing more long-term debt than most countries probably isn’t begging to be expanded.

Moreover, almost everything that people complain about with our health-care system is even more evident in Medicare. Medicare is inefficient, spending lots of money without evidence of better results. According to the landmark Dartmouth Atlas study, the counties with the highest per-patient Medicare costs showed no better outcomes than low-spending areas. Medicare over-covers routine care but stops covering you if you get really sick. It is based on an old-fashioned “fee for service” payment protocol that rewards inputs, not quality. And, its bureaucratic price controls under-reimburse doctors, shifting costs to private insurance plans, or discouraging doctors from seeing Medicare patients. About 15 percent of doctors don’t accept Medicare, and as many as a third limit the number of Medicare patients that they will treat. 

5. No, we didn’t have a “free market” health-care system before Obamacare. Suggest free-market reforms to our health-care system and critics will inevitably suggest that you want to go back to the flawed system we had before Obamacare. But that system had little to do with a free market. Nearly all health care was subsidized in some way, either directly or indirectly. Actual health-care consumers paid barely 13 cents out of each dollar spent on health care, while the government directly paid for more than half of all health-care spending. This third-party and even fourth-party payment mechanism insulated consumers from the cost of their health-care choices and drove up both spending and prices. 

At the same time, provider cartels, both insurers and medical professionals, used regulatory and licensing barriers to protect themselves from competition and inflate prices. Other markets in goods and services routinely produce lower prices and better quality. Health care has always been different precisely because free-market competition and consumer choice have been missing. 

6. You are never going to make everyone happy. Obamacare is unpopular. The GOP replacement was unpopular. Single-payer in unpopular. In fact, one searches in vain for a health-care reform that voters will love. 

Given the above, there is only one thing to be done: put caring for health on the same normal-people footing as any other good or service that is bought and sold in a free market.

Wednesday roundup

Michelle Malkin sticks it to Jimmy Kimmel for using his show's monologue to employ his newborn son's congenial heart defect as a way to launch into a falsehood-riddled diatribe about health care policy.

Great interview with Rick Hess, an American Enterprise Institute scholar who focuses on education policy. A taste:

 . . . it’s important to recognize that the center in education is two standard deviations to the left of the American public. People in and around education think they have the whole spectrum covered: there is, after all, a fierce conflict between the “reform” camp and teachers unions. But this clash has primarily existed within the Democratic Party. The “reformers” have mostly been Great Society liberals who believe in closing “achievement gaps” and pursuing “equity” via charter schooling, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and test-based accountability. And their opponents have been staunchly Democratic teacher unions and their allies.

Unfortunately, many in education spend so little time talking to or engaging with anyone on the right that they sometimes seem to conclude that no reasonable person would be on the right. Expressing mainstream conservative concerns about federal overreach or the problems with race-based policy can be enough to get you called a clueless reactionary.

A core difference between the two camps is that progressives tend to see social policy in terms of structural inequities—particularly race, class, and gender—while conservatives are more prone to see things in terms of individual responsibility. But those things are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, American education has always been about combatting structural inequity and cultivating personal responsibility, so there should be lots of room for cooperation. Education can open the doors of opportunity and give all students a more equitable start. These are things that we all want. And we all want every child to attend schools that fire their imaginations, impart knowledge, teach critical skills, equip them to be responsible citizens, inspire joy, and prepare them for success. Our disagreements are usually over how to do all this.

Donald Trump is not a great president, and Roger Kimball, an erudite and incisive fellow who seems to have swallowed the Kool-Aid,  is either mistaken or being disingenuous when he says he is (and glosses over the stuff enumerated in the linked Bloomberg article).

In discussing a documentary about the mid-1970s period in US-Vietnam relations, Kyle Smith at NRO spells out the shameful truth:

Last Days in Vietnam, the Oscar-nominated 2014 film by Rory Kennedy (the youngest child of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who died before she was born) is available for streaming on Netflix. It’s a devastating counterpunch to the anti-American propaganda Hollywood and the rest of the leftist culture have been spewing about Vietnam for more than four decades. Kennedy’s film should make us angry only that America didn’t go far enough. South Vietnam could have been another South Korea if our cultural-political resolve had just remained steadfast at the crucial moment. It’s as if we spent years painstakingly building a billion-dollar palace, then let termites destroy it rather than spending money on an exterminator.

Mixing in interviews with, among others, Henry Kissinger and Richard Armitage, who was then a Special Forces adviser, as well as astonishing archival footage of the events of 1975 in Saigon, the film explains that the North Vietnamese were “terrified” of President Nixon in 1974. The Paris Peace Accords had sparked a full withdrawal of American troops, and Nixon had warned in writing that the U.S. would “respond with full force” if the North failed to abide by the ceasefire terms. But after Nixon’s resignation in August of 1974, says then-CIA analyst Frank Snepp in the film, “Hanoi saw the road to Saigon as being wide open.” In the spring of 1975, the North Vietnamese army scythed through South Vietnam with astonishing force. Five thousand or so Americans and their families were all that remained of the U.S. presence, and when President Ford asked Congress for $700 million in new military aid, he was scorned, to the undying shame of the lawmakers in question. Democratic senator John McClellan of Arkansas said, “I think it is too late to do any good. Further military aid could merely prolong the conflict and perhaps postpone briefly the inevitable — a Communist victory.” 

The danger in the Abbas visit to the White House lies in Squirrel-Hair's zeal to be seen as  a deal-maker.

The mindset to which the fact of freedom is utterly alien

In the course of a New Republic observation on Bret Stephens's NYT column on "climate change" and the subsequent uproar, Brian Beutler lets a very telling cat out of the bag.

The first several paragraphs are predicated on the typical Leftist assumption that the global climate is indeed in a dire predicament, fleshed out here with a asteroid-speeding-toward-earth analogy that ignores all the East Anglia and NASA data-fudging that mars the certainty Beutler would like to impart to his position.

But he actually does conservatism a great service - one that it would behoove the likes of Paul "we'll -give-people-more-choices-and-lower-cost" Ryan to recognize. Quite simply, many conservative elected officials lack the balls to argue for conservative policy on the grounds of fundamental principle.

U.S. conservatives face a similar predicament across a wide range of issues, including climate change, but few of them are prepared to do the dull, repetitive, and frequently unconvincing work of explaining why their opposition to an active federal government should trump other urgent concerns. It would be unpersuasive to argue, “Stopping runaway climate change requires federal interventions that I object to on the following abstract ideological grounds” over and over again; applying the same principles to other pressing questions—like whether we should reduce the rate of uninsurance, or provide poor children adequate nutrition—yields similarly unsatisfying opinions. 

The remedy most conservatives have adopted, consciously or otherwise, is to devise more genial justifications for their conclusions and use those to backfill their arguments. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait called this “a tic of American conservative-movement thought — the conclusion (small government) is fixed, and the reasoning is tailored to justify the outcome. Nearly all conservatives argue this way...”

In Stephens’s case, the tic manifests in his depiction of policies designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions as “abrupt and expensive,” and his intimation that supporters of such policies may harbor unspoken “ideological intentions.” The truth is very nearly the opposite. The debate over how aggressively to limit greenhouse gas emissions is driven, to coin a phrase, by how “abrupt and expensive” it might be if the response comes up short. The unspoken ideological intention, on the other hand, is harbored by conservatives, whose aversion to taxes and regulation outstrips their interest in insuring against worst-case climate change scenarios, and motivates them either to play down the risks of climate change or deny that human activity is changing the climate in the first place. 

It is this same tic that aligned the entire Republican Party behind the claim that a conservative health care bill would cover more people and at a lower cost than Obamacare, rather than admit the truth, as conservative writer Phil Klein admirably did when he encouraged Republicans to say, “We don’t believe that it is the job of the federal government to guarantee that everybody has health insurance.” The tic, in other words, is a fallacious mode of reasoning that commits many conservatives to sloppy thinking or outright dishonesty.

Now, of course, Beutler is up to something different in his discussion of this tic than, say, LITD is up to when it upbraids righties for dodging the real reason for championing certain policies and rejecting others. Beutler is inviting the reader to buy into the assumption that these fundamental principles are actually fundamentally wacky, not to mention mean-spirited. And he's no doubt getting a lot of takers, given the venue in which his piece appears.

But let's take the big three that he intends to disparage in the above excerpt.

We all know damn good and well that by "we," he means government when talking about providing poor children with adequate nutrition.

Listen up, Beutler. There is nothing wrong with responding to that with a series of questions:

• Where are those kids' parents, and why aren't they feeding them?
• What particular circumstances are causing poverty in each of the individual households in question?
• How many of these households are chronically poor, and how many are just going through momentary hard times?
• Are there not non-governmental sources available for addressing this?
• On what grounds can the taking of Citizen A's money be justified to address the particular situation of Citizen B?

Hell, yes, we have an aversion to taxes and regulation. They are encroachments on human freedom. Government ought to have to puke all over itself to justify taking one cent from any citizen. Ditto creating laws that tell people and organizations what they can and can't do, which is, by definition, what a regulation is.

And that's exactly right that we don't believe it's the job of the federal government to guarantee that everybody has health insurance. The only things government ought to be guaranteeing are our personal safety from domestic criminals and foreign enemies, a fair trial in the eventuality that we're ever accused of a crime, enforcement of contracts, and maybe well-maintained roads.

(I realize that I am here opening myself up to the quibbling of ankle-biters who will want to know why I haven't included national parks, public libraries, air-traffic safety and prohibitions against child labor. To such I say, go somewhere else to get mired in distractions. You know what the main point is.)

But a kind of backhanded gratitude is owed Beutler for exposing to the light the lameness of a whole lot of our right-of-center public figures who perpetuate the notion that the public is too far gone to digest solid core principles with their appeals to the cattle-mentality desire to know that there is a Mommy-Daddy figure out there earnestly working to see that it's going to be alright.

This realm is never going to be alright, and the only Mommy-Daddy figure worthing consideration beckons us to set our sights on another realm entirely.

Now, that's a core principle for you. And the greater the number of people who understand it, the fewer there will be who buy into Beutler's collectivist snake oil.

The Stupid Party, the rudderless president and the ongoing terminal bloat of Leviathan

The omnibus bill that establishes the government-spending path through September is as glaring an example as we'll get of two facts: Republicans in Congress have no spine and Donald Trump has no consistent worldview.

It's the same damn kind of carry-us-through-a-few-months-because-we-are-totally-unable-to-articulate-a-governing-philosophy-plus-we're-scared-to-death-of-being-labeled-as-mean spending bill we see pretty much every damn spring.

Dems are crowing, and understandably so. Planned Parenthood still gets funded. Agencies and programs that shouldn't even exist still get funding increases. No staff cuts at EPA.

And what does Squirrel-Hair have to say about it?

President Donald Trump said he’ll sign a bipartisan $1.1 trillion spending bill that largely tracks Democratic priorities and rejects most of his wish list, including funds for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We’re very happy with it,” the president said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg News. The plan would allocate some new funding for border security, though the funds couldn’t be used to build his promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. The president said he will sign the bill if it remains "as we discussed."

The compromise measure, announced early Monday morning, would keep the government open through the end of September. Under House procedures, a vote could be held as early as Wednesday. The plan drew howls of protest from conservatives. 

It's clear that he cannot see that this approach - the same damn approach we've had to live with for decades - negates any kind of turnaround effect from his tax plan.

But then, it's a fool's errand to be asking for that degree of rigor and clarity from the guy who let loose with this:

In an interview with the Washington Examiner's Salena Zito, Trump compared himself to President Andrew Jackson and said Jackson, if he was born later, could have helped avoid the Civil War.

And then, in comments that whipped Washington into frenzy Monday morning, Trump said he didn't understand why the Civil War had to be fought.

"I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn't have had the Civil War," he said. "He was a very tough person but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw with regard to the Civil War, he said 'There's no reason for this.'"

"People don't realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don't ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?"

Jackson, a slaveowner who once threatened South Carolina with a federal invasion if they did not abide by a protectionist tariff during the Nullification Crisis, died in 1845 and likely did not offer any direct comment on the Civil War. 

Or this:

Between this and the White House invitation to Duterte over the weekend, we now have a firm answer to the question, “Is there any foreign leader so repellent Trump won’t meet with him?” Believe it or not, Obama’s willingness to meet with foreign bad guys without preconditions once he became president was a major early knock on him as a candidate in 2007 among Republicans — and not just Republicans. Although, in fairness to Trump, he says nothing here about meeting with Kim unconditionally. On the contrary:

President Donald Trump said he would meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un amid heightened tensions over his country’s nuclear weapons program if the circumstances were right.

“If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it,” Trump said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg News. “If it’s under the, again, under the right circumstances. But I would do that.”…

“Most political people would never say that,” Trump said of his willingness to meet with the reclusive Kim, “but I’m telling you under the right circumstances I would meet with him. We have breaking news.”

“Honored” is weird hyperbole to use about someone who runs a gulag state but this may be part of a conscious strategy by Trump to de-escalate in North Korea by flattering Kim. Yesterday he called him a “smart cookie” and has made a point lately of marveling in interviews at Kim’s ability to consolidate power as an untested 27-year-old thrust into leadership after his father’s death. The uncharitable view of those comments is that Trump’s once again betraying his admiration of strongmen, especially the most ruthless members of the breed.

Not only do these word-salad blurting provide the lowest of low-hanging fruit to the Samantha Bees of the world, they confirm for Congressional Democrats what an easy mark he is, trademark scowl notwithstanding.

Thus do we get the same kind of omnibus spending bill that we've seen year after year.

And, because the complete mess that his mind is gets abated by a Republican Congress with a chronic case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, the task of presenting, explaining and defending conservatism to a post-American public gets even more daunting.

The less relevant they become, the more self-congratulatory they become

Byron York at the Washington Examiner on the White House Correspondents Dinner:

A prominent writer who walked up had a different take. "This is going to be the most pious ever," he said. Among the WHCA officials who ran the event, he explained, there would be piety for freedom of the press, for the First Amendment, and for the commitment and dedication they themselves display every day. Among the the entertainment — Minhaj — there would pious lesson-teaching about the evils of seeing Muslims and immigrants as "others." Piety all around.

As it turned out, the writer-filmmaker team won the night's prediction game. Just as the writer predicted, the media self-regard on display at the Hinckley Hilton Saturday was of a degree seldom, if ever, equaled at traditional Washington events — and that is saying something. And Minhaj did indeed take his opportunity to teach those assembled about the dangers of discrimination. On the other hand, the filmmaker correctly foresaw the sheer, unfiltered, nastiness — directed not just at Trump but also at top members of his administration — that Minhaj delivered along with his lessons.

Bottom line: The White House Correspondents' dinner, the premier event of the Washington press corps, was two hours of mawkish self-celebration followed by 30 minutes of Trump-bashing.

He goes into the details, if you can stand it.

A brittle state of affairs indeed

Having one of those mornings in which a number of things I've read so far suggest an merging theme.

Let's start with Joel Kotkin's piece at The Daily Beast. Entitled "The Arrogance of Blue America," it is chock-full of important insights and statistics. His basic point is that Blue America has gone beyond looking down its nose at Red America, and indeed now seeks a sequestering of the latter - or perhaps letting trends that could spell its extinction run their course:

The rage against red America is so strong that The New York Time’s predictably progressive Nick Kristoff says his calls to understand red voters were “my most unpopular idea.” The essential logic—as laid out in a particularly acerbic piece in The New Republic—is that Trump’s America is not only socially deplorable, but economically moronic as well. The kind-hearted blue staters have sent their industries to the abodes of the unwashed, and taken in their poor, only to see them end up “more bitter, white, and alt-right than ever.”

The red states, by electing Trump, seem to have lost any claim on usually wide-ranging progressive empathy. Frank Rich, theater critic turned pundit, turns up his nose at what he calls “hillbilly chic.” Another leftist authorsuggests that working-class support for Brexit and Trump means it is time “to dissolve” the “more than 150-year-old alliance between the industrial working class and what one might call the intellectual-cultural Left.”

The fondest hope among the blue bourgeoise lies with the demographic eclipse of their red-state foes. Some clearly hope that the less-educated “dying white America,“ already suffering shorter lifespans, in part due to alcoholism and opioid abuse, is destined to fade from the scene. Then the blue lords can take over a country with which they can identify without embarrassment.

The Left's notion that all the cool people live in urban enclaves brings with it one huge overlooked factor: They need what the rubes in Red America are turning out:

The blue bourgeoisie tend to see the activities that take place largely in the red states - for example, energy and manufacturing - as backward sectors. Yet manufacturers employ most of the nation's scientists and engineers . . . 

Besides supplying the bulk of the food, energy, and manufactured goods consumed in blue America, these industries are among the country’s most productive, and still offer better paying options for blue-collar workers. Unlike a monopoly like Microsoft or Google, which can mint money by commanding market share, these sectors face strong domestic and foreign competition. From 1997-2012, labor productivity growth in manufacturing—3.3 percent per year—was a third higher than productivity growth in the private economy overall.

For its part, the innovative American energy sector has essentially changed the balance of power globally, overcoming decades of dependence on such countries as Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela. Agriculture—almost all food, including in California, is grown in red-oriented areas—continues to outperform competitors around the world.

He makes the point that media activity - not just print outlets or even radio and television, but Internet news, commentary and entertainment  - is getting concentrated in the largest, bluest and most generally coastal metropolitan areas. But those areas aren't growing, generally speaking. Populations are increasing in their suburbs, as well as in inland metropolitan areas such as Phoenix, Atlanta and Charlotte.

Blues may see Reds as utterly alien and in need of quarantine, but the converse is that it has become plain to Reds that Blues are utterly irrelevant to their lives. Does a supply-chain specialist for a fasteners-and-fittings maker in central Ohio have any use for the attitude of, say, Samantha Bee?

Canadian Comedian Samantha Bee is just the latest in a long line of political comedy hosts produced by the “The Daily Show” empire. Despite being unable to vote here for most of her life and having no knowledge of American history, the Constitution or the framework of American freedom, Samantha Bee nevertheless has had plenty to say about our electoral system and our new President.

She also has the privilege of being protected from criticism under the “Hey, I’m just a silly comedian” banner.

Bee appeared on Jake Tapper’s Sunday show on CNN to talk about the convergence of comedy and politics in the Trump era.

Editorial side-note: Every election cycle that yields a Republican president also produces a segment of the left that truly believes this is the first time comedy has ever been so closely related to politics. The largest hubris of the modern left at this point in history is their sincere belief that they are the first generation to ever discover the intersection of politics and culture, when the rest of us have been living in reality for…well, forever.

“But is there a smug liberal problem?” asked Tapper.

“I don’t think there is,” replied Bee.

“I do the show for me and for people like me, and I don’t care how the rest of the world sees it quite frankly. That’s great. We make a show for ourselves. We put it out to the world. We birth it and then the world receives it however they want to receive it. “

Observations about demographic and geographic trends are immensely useful, but we do well to avoid the broad brush. One can zoom in and out, Google Map style, and see that little yet significant flecks of blue dot the nation's red landscapes. It's not just the liberal-arts campuses found throughout the country (Oberlin, for instance, is in the aforementioned central Ohio), but community colleges ostensibly focused on the vocational preparation of their students as well (and obviously big universities). No campus of any kind - save Hillsdale and perhaps one or two others - is free of diversity councils, sustainability programs and gender-studies offerings. And, speaking of manufacturing supply chains, the OEM firms at the tops of those chains are well known as hotbeds of such blue-ness. (A letter to the editor of the Indianapolis Star by the CEO of Cummins in the wake of Indiana's RFRA dustup is a prime exhibit.) Every community above hamlet classification sports a Unitarian fellowship and a Presbyterian Church USA congregation.

The foreman at the fabricating-and-stamping shop is a smart fellow, the assessment of the smug Blues notwithstanding. He understands the filter through which the news to which he's exposed comes out. He keeps a lot of thoughts to himself, strives to instill character in his children, enjoy a hobby or two. He may even go to church and pray about it all.

My point is that Blues and Reds are still inevitably going to bump into each other throughout the expanse of America. The civic fabric, then, is surely more brittle than we may be considering.

Conversations free of mutual suspicion and withholding of relevant information are at a premium. It's the quiet civil war that serves as the backdrop to the attempt of each of us to live out fulfilling, meaningful days.

The little secret is that one side really needs what the other side is contributing to what is left of this thing called American society. The latter will grudgingly continue to provide it, because there is money to be made in doing so. The side to whom it's being provided? It is left to scream, "We're the only relevant people in this scenario!"

And thus does post-American life proceed in all its cold absurdity.