Marquette Warrior

Obama Cult of Personality in Public Schools

2009-11-04T12:32:00.002-06:00

It’s more than just one school.

The Obama Cult of Personality has apparently become pretty common in public schools.

All the more reason to push for school choice.

ObamaCare: Demagoguing the Insurance Companies

2009-11-02T20:26:00.008-06:00

From Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

TWO THINGS supporters of a government-run “public option” for health insurance know for sure. One is that private health insurers are raking in obscenely high profits. The other is that only a government rival can force them to compete on price.

In a clever new commercial featuring Heather Graham as an agile sprinter named “Public Option,” the left-wing pressure group MoveOn combines both themes, describing insurance companies as “lazy” and “bloated from the profits of raising our health care costs sky-high.” Why, it asks, should anyone resist the competition a public option would generate? After all, “competition is as American as apple pie.” In a less amusing print ad a few weeks ago, MoveOn charged that “insurance companies are willing to let the bodies pile up, as long as their profits are safe.”

President Obama also attacks health insurers as avaricious profiteers.

“The insurance industry is making this last-ditch effort to stop reform,” he declared on Oct. 16, “even as costs continue to rise and our health-care dollars continue to be poured into their profits (and) bonuses.” When he addressed Congress in September, Obama insisted that only a public option will “keep insurance companies honest.” On the White House Blog, ObamaCare opponents are accused of “fighting to protect insurance industry profits.”

Indeed, there is no shortage of voices characterizing health insurers as greedy villains. Earlier this year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised her party for highlighting “the immoral profits being made by the insurance industry.” On CNN last week, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown demanded a public option “so the insurance industry can’t continue to game the system and discriminate” against women and the disabled — tactics insurers have used to “quadruple their profits in the last five years.” If quadrupled profits don’t seem rapacious enough, the union-backed Health Care for American Now! ups the ante, claiming, according to the AFL-CIO’s news blog, that “during the past five years, health insurance company profits have soared by 1,000 percent.”

Outbidding them all is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Health insurance companies “are so anti-competitive,” he said last month, “because they make more money than any other business in America today.”

To such overheated agitprop, the only useful response is a cold shower of facts, and the Associated Press supplied a timely one last week. For all the impassioned talk about obscene profits and bodies piling up, AP’s Calvin Woodward reported, “health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent” of revenues, a return “that’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries.”

87 cents out of every premium dollar pays for medical services, according to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers study for America’s Health Insurance Plans. Insurance company profits account for just 3 cents.

On the Fortune 500 list of top industries, health insurance companies ranked 35th in profitability in 2008; their overall profit margin was a mere 2.2 percent. They lagged far behind such industries as pharmaceuticals (which showed a profit margin of 19.3 percent), railroads (12.6 percent), and mining (11.5 percent). Among health insurers, the best performer last year was HealthSpring, which had a profit of 5.4 percent. “That's a less profitable margin,” AP noted, “that was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach, and Molson and Coors beers.”

For the most recent quarter of 2009, health-insurance plans earned profits of only 3.3 percent, ranking them 86th on the expanded Yahoo! Finance list of US industries. The application-software industry, by contrast, is pulling in profits of nearly 22 percent. Why aren’t MoveOn and the Democrats demanding a “public option” to compete with Microsoft and Adobe and drive down their “immoral" profits?

There are certainly industries doing worse than health insurance — airlines and newspapers, for example — but the notion that health insurers “make more money than any other business in America today” is preposterous. Advocates of a public option may find it tactically expedient to paint insurers as insatiable predators, swollen with ill-gotten profits. The reality is otherwise.

Still, the critics do have one thing right: More competition would bring down health-care premiums. But the way to increase competition is not by adding a government-run health plan to the 1,300 private firms already providing Americans with health insurance. After all, there’s no public option for auto insurance and life insurance, yet they’re sold in a highly competitive national market. There is no reason health insurance can’t be sold the same way.

Let’s be clear on this: the pro-Obama Care liberals, when they attack the insurance companies, are no different from the late and unlamented Senator Joe McCarthy in their willingness to demonize any group that stands in the way of their agenda.

And their tactic dates back to the demagogues of Ancient Greece, who would demonize the groups they wanted to oppress — typically the wealthy whose property they wanted to seize. They are, in other words, not merely misguided. They are sleazy.

Treason From Boston Store?

2009-10-31T11:40:00.005-05:00

Right now on the Boston Store website, they are selling Minnesota Vikings Brett Favre replica team jerseys.

We don’t actually mind, but it is interesting that their commercial calculation is that people in the Milwaukee area do still like Favre, and are willing to overlook his antics in recent years and remember all those great years with the Packers.

Republicans Better Informed

2009-10-30T19:08:00.003-05:00

I’m sure a lot of readers know snobby liberals who insist that all the well-informed people agree with them, and only know-nothings could possibly be Republicans.

Well . . . from the Pew Research Center, data that won’t be new to anybody who knows about public opinion. It shows Republicans more likely to give the right answer on a broad range of politically-relevant knowledge issues.

First, issue by issue.

Then we have a summary scale that shows the number correct out of the twelve items on the test.

The partisan gap is biggest for knowing who Glenn Beck is. This might seem natural, since Republicans are more likely to watch Glenn Beck. But shouldn’t liberals at least know who Glenn Beck is, especially given that he’s being vilified by the White House?

Great Vacation Idea!

2009-10-28T15:31:00.002-05:00

The most politically incorrect vacation one can imagine, but then all the fun things are these days!

United Church of Christ: Stifle “Hate Speech”

2009-10-25T22:09:00.008-05:00

UCC supposedly stands for “United Church of Christ,” but the old jibe is that it really stands for “Unitarians Considering Christ.” A very liberal denomination, its ruling elites (and to a considerable extent, the members who haven’t yet left) use Christian rhetoric, but they won’t assert anything that rankles the secular politically correct sensibility -- opposing abortion or gay marriage, for example.

But they do oppose “hate speech.”

And their definition of “hate speech” is terribly vague and broad. For example:

Hate speech takes various forms, from words inciting violence, to those creating a climate of hate towards vulnerable groups. Hate speech has one common outcome: it creates an environment of hate and prejudice that legitimizes violence against its targets.

The presence of hate speech so widely in media creates a climate that makes it impossible to have reasonable policy discussions on issues like immigration reform, and cultivates a climate that condones violence against targeted groups.

Categories of hate speech:
False Facts consist of incorrect, exaggerated, or de-contextualized facts.
Flawed Argumentation is rooted in hidden assumptions, guilt by association, and appeal to fear.
Divisive Language creates and/or encourages an “us vs. them” mentality. Hard times often incite blaming “others” as the source of trouble. Catholics, Jews, and African Americans have been routinely targets as scapegoats for those wishing to further their own agendas.
Dehumanizing Metaphors evoke messages relating to warfare, heroism, disease, and biblical characters.

Of course, what are “false facts” is often a matter of opinion. And so is the proper “context.” The last thing governent should do is decide that “facts” are allowed to be broadcast.

And of course, “divisive language” aimed at conservative Christians, or white males, or the military, or insurance companies is apparently fine.

The statement makes it entirely clear that it’s only “vulnerable groups” that get protection.

The statement is addressed to the Federal Communications Commission.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration released a report in 1993 on The Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes. Members of the So We Might See Coalition are encouraging them to update this report.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition has filed a Petition for Inquiry in the Matter of Hate Speech in the Media at the Federal Communications Commission. Members of the So We Might See Coalition support this petition.

Then we get a really Orwellian formulation:

The First Amendment does protect even the most vile speech. The government, however, can play a role in compiling statistics and adopting rules that will help members of the public form their own opinions and hold broadcasters and other media outlets accountable for purveying this speech.

So, they are against censorship but in favor of “holding accountable” broadcast outlets that allow “hate speech.”

This is what happens when a Christian denomination gets taken over by a secular clerical elite. While people in the pews drift away, they engage in a series of moralistic crusades.

The Future of U.S. Health Care (If the Liberals Get Their Way)

2009-10-19T13:28:00.004-05:00

Further news on an issue we have blogged on before.

From The Times:

AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.

Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.

Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.

Fenton’s daughter, Christine Ball, who had been looking after her mother before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital in Hastings, East Sussex, on January 11, says she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.

Ball, 42, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, said: “My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death. It really is a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS. ”

Fenton was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. Although Ball acknowledged that her mother was very ill she was astonished when a junior doctor told her she was going to be placed on the plan to “make her more comfortable” in her last days.

Ball insisted that her mother was not dying but her objections were ignored. A nurse even approached her to say: “What do you want done with your mother’s body?”

On January 19, Fenton’s 80th birthday, Ball says her mother was feeling better and chatting to her family, but it took another four days to persuade doctors to give her artificial feeding.

Fenton is now being looked after in a nursing home five minutes from where her daughter lives.

Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in palliative medicine, is concerned that other patients who could recover are left to die. He said: “As they are spreading out across the country, the training is getting probably more and more diluted.”

A spokesman for East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Patients’ needs are assessed before they are placed on the [plan]. Daily reviews are undertaken by clinicians whenever possible.”

Well that’s reassuring. Just how often is it “possible” in a system starved for resources.

In a separate case, the family of an 87-year-old woman say the plan is being used as a way of giving minimum care to dying patients.

Susan Budden, whose mother, Iris Griffin, from Norwich, died in a nursing home in July 2008 from a brain tumour, said: “When she was started on the [plan] her medication was withdrawn. As a result she became agitated and distressed.

“It would appear that the [plan] is . . . used purely as a protocol which can be ticked off to justify the management of a patient.”

Deborah Murphy, the national lead nurse for the care pathway, said: “If the education and training is not in place, the [plan] should not be used.” She said 3% of patients placed on the plan recovered.

Of course, even 3% is a large number of people who are literally being starved and dehydrated to death.

But nobody knows how many would have recovered had they never been placed on the plan to begin with.

Even if “the education and training” is in place, no assessments from even well-trained people can be perfect, and the inevitable effect will be to kill patients who could recover and live a year or two or five years of meaningful life.

And, under any system of socialized medicine, budgetary constraints will bias the assessments toward the option that releases scarce resources for other uses, that is, which lets people die.

The phrase “death panels” just can’t be avoided here.

Big Labor and Whole Foods’ Health Care Sanity

2009-10-18T16:42:00.002-05:00

Anti-Christian Censorship in the Public Schools

2009-10-16T17:59:00.005-05:00

Public school administrators continue to censor Christian expression. First, a kid who drew a poster of Jesus.

The case of a former kindergarten student whose art project with Jesus was censored by his New York school will be heard in an appeals court Friday.

Antonio Peck, the student, had drawn a poster with several religious figures with the words, “The only way to save the world,” for an art project that had to show understanding about the environment. Antonio meant to express his belief that God is the only way to save the environment, according to his legal representative Liberty Counsel.

The poster was rejected by his kindergarten teacher because of its religious content and he was told to create a second poster.

For the second poster, Antonio had children holding hands around the globe, people recycling trash, and children picking up garbage. On the left side of the poster was the figure of a bearded man wearing a robe that was kneeling on the ground with hands stretched toward the sky. Although the figure is not identified, Antonio said it was Jesus.

The second poster was allowed to be displayed on a cafeteria wall, along with 80 other student posters. But what made Antonio’s poster different was it was folded in half to hide the Jesus figure.

“Despite the federal guidelines on religion in public schools recognizing that students may include religious themes in assignments, school officials insisted on folding Antonio Peck’s poster in half to hide the figure they interpreted to be Jesus,” said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. “What a terrible message to send to students that everything is permissible so long as it is not Christian. These educators need educating about the Constitution and American history.”

Then we have this:

HARRISBURG, Pa. — On the day President Obama addressed the nation’s schoolchildren, a middle school student donned an anti-abortion T-shirt to protest Obama’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

The student wore the “Abortion is not Healthcare” T-shirt without incident until his fifth-period teacher sent him to the principal’s office. He was ordered to turn the shirt inside out because it might offend other students.

The boy’s father, William Boyer of New Cumberland, Pa., filed suit last Monday against the West Shore School District, alleging that his son, E.B., was unfairly censored by school officials on Sept. 8.

Valerie Burch, a staff attorney with the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the student’s T-shirt represented political speech, the most protected form of speech, even inside schools.

If the district does not have a dress code that prohibits wearing T-shirts, then it has to permit this one, she said.

The district’s dress-and-grooming policy prohibits clothing “which creates a hostile educational environment or evidences discriminatory bias or animus” or displays “inappropriate words.”

Boyer is seeking to have the district’s policies struck down and to remove any references to disciplinary action from his son’s record. He also is seeking damages such as court costs and attorneys’ fees.

Chronically, school bureaucrats censor any religious expression in the public sector. But the Bill of Rights does not require that religious expression, coming from private citizens, must be censored.

Perhaps some of this is just timidity. Principals and school boards are used to being scared of secular forces (usually including the ACLU), and in the past have seldom had trouble from people defending relgious freedom. To a degree this is changing, but it’s pretty obvious that the cases that get publicized and get to court are just a tiny fraction of the censorship going on.

A lot of censorship is happening under the radar.

But it isn’t just timidity. There is a positive anti-Christian animus behind a lot of this, coming from liberal school administrators.

Government Run Health Care and Killing Patients

2009-10-07T21:19:00.005-05:00

From National Review Online:

Compare America’s system with Canada’s and Great Britain’s. The latter are single-payer, universal health-care programs in which medical treatment is free at the point of service (Yay!), although citizens eventually pay for it through higher taxes (Boo!).

According to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data, there were 26.6 MRI machines in the U.S. per million people in 2004. In Canada, there were 4.9 such devices, while Britain enjoyed 5. For every 100,000 Americans, 2006 saw 436.8 receive angioplasties. Among Canadians, that figure was 135.9, while only 93.2 Britons per 100,000 got that cardiac procedure.

Maybe that’s why, among American men, heart-attack deaths in 2004 stood at 53.8 per 100,000. In Canada, 58.3 men per 100,000 died of cardiac arrest, while coronaries buried 69.5 of every 100,000 British males.

The fatality rate for breast cancer, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis and Lancet Oncology, is 25 percent in the U.S., 28 percent in Canada, and 46 percent in Great Britain.

Among those diagnosed with prostate cancer, 19 percent die of the disease in America. In Canada, 25 percent of such patients succumb to this disease. And in Great Britain — an Anglophone NATO member and America’s closest ally — prostate cancer kills 57 percent of those who contract it. That is triple the American fatality rate.

The Senate Finance Committee should sink Obama-Baucuscare and instead craft a patient-friendly, pro-market, limited-government approach to health-care reform. Perhaps some senators cannot fathom the Hippocratic Oath’s key insight: First, do no harm. If that’s Greek to them, here it is in language they understand: First, don’t kill your voters.

Unfortunately, a fair number of politicians are in thrall of an ideology that favors government, and a fair number of others don’t much mind hurting people if they can’t be blamed for it.

Academic Affirmative Action for Conservatives?

2009-10-06T12:28:00.004-05:00

A former student or ours, a conservative, got the following e-mail:

You are invited to the

Harvard Kennedy School

GOP Recruiting Reception

Hosted by

Judy Kugel, Acting Dean of Students

The University Club

1135 Sixteenth Street, NW

Washington, DC

October 7, 2009

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Acting Dean of Students Judy Kugel will discuss Harvard Kennedy School’s degree programs, admissions procedures & updates from campus.

Please RSVP to dana_garfunkel@harvard.edu by September 30.

Mid-Career Master in Public Administration

The one-year Mid-Career Master in Public Administration (MC/MPA) is an intensive eight credit program, preceded by a one-month summer program exclusively for Mid-Career professionals. The MC/MPA is designed to increase the knowledge and skills of well established, high-performing professionals, who seek to enhance their public service careers or to move from the private sector to a leadership position in either the public or non-profit sectors.

These experienced professionals, in consultation with their advisers, plan individual academic programs designed to develop new skills or to pursue emerging professional and intellectual interests. In doing so, MC/MPA students are constrained only by the requirement to take at least one course in each of the Harvard Kennedy School foundational methodological areas of analytics, management and leadership. Not surprisingly, the MC/MPA program includes some of the school’s most accomplished students. They represent many professional backgrounds and come from across the United States and around the world. They typically range in age from thirty to the early sixties, but HKS has also graduated a septuagenarian. Mid-Career students make valuable contributions to the school’s intellectual community during their year at Harvard.

People who really believe in diversity, as opposed to those politically correct people who are always talking about “diversity,” will see some logic here. Academia is often stiflingly left/liberal and politically correct, and if there really is benefit in having different viewpoints represented, it’s conservatives who are in short supply.

Politically correct academic “diversity” hustlers, in contrast, want more blacks, Hispanics, and women in traditionally male fields, but they want them to think pretty the way they do, with the proviso that articulating racial grievances or gender grievances can be useful in intimidating people who might be inclined to argue with white male leftist professors.

Of course, affirmative action for conservatives has some of the same dangers as affirmative action for (say) blacks. Will people come to assume that conservatives in academic settings are not as well-qualified as liberals and leftists, just as they now assume that blacks in academic settings are not as qualified as whites? That’s a real danger, but of course it’s a danger that liberals and leftists blow off then applied to their favorite beneficiaries.

Perhaps this is simply a rather benign form of affirmative action, an attempt to let quite well-qualified conservatives know that they are welcome to apply. There are indeed plenty of well-qualified conservative policy wonks -- on congressional staffs, in conservative think tanks and interest groups, and even a few in academia (especially in economics departments). If they are welcome at the JFK school, that’s good. There is a clear tendency (which we have seen in our own students) for conservatives to self-select out of academia, which they view (rightly) as hostile territory. If the JFK school wants to appear less hostile, good for them.

Gore Vidal Unhinged

2009-09-30T14:08:00.005-05:00

From The Times:

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics.’ In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

So is he just a crotchety old author, venting the sort of crackpot opinions that old curmudgeons are expected to have?

No, this is an extreme outcropping of the general contempt with which the intellectual class (including people who don’t have much intellectual distinction — say, your average academic or average journalist) view this nation.

Few of them would say this so bluntly, but then even in the heyday of racism in America, few Americans would actually lynch a black person. But when that happened, it was an outcropping of widely held racist attitudes.

Gaming the College Rankings (It’s Not Just Marquette)

2009-09-29T20:25:00.005-05:00

Three years ago we reported how Marquette had begun to manipulate the ACT and SAT scores of the entering freshman class, in order to improve our ranking with U.S. News & World Report.

We, for course, had no illusions that Marquette was the only university doing this. According to an essay on Minding the Campus.

The most obvious examples of gaming are efforts to increase colleges’ standing on the U.S. News rankings lists. Years ago the University of Miami created a scandal by omitting the scores of athletes and special admits when calculating average SAT scores of entering freshmen. The president of a major liberal arts college in New England told her admissions director to make SAT scores the major criterion for admissions decisions until the school made it into the top 25 schools in its category. Once that happened, she had the chutzpah to announce that they would no longer require SAT scores from applicants because they don’t really mean much.

Earlier this summer Catherine Watt, a former administrator at Clemson, gave a well-publicized presentation in which she explained how her institution approached the “reputation” part of the US News survey, which asks officials to assess the academic quality of peer undergraduate programs. This is a silly question in the first place - college administrators are the last people you would ever go to in order to get accurate information about a competing institution - but it accounts for a quarter of the rankings formula. Watt showed how Clemson simply sought an edge by rating competing schools as below average. Other gambits have included sending dollar bills to alumni with a request that they send them back to the Annual Fund so as to raise the proportion of alumni donors and inflating the number of fulltime faculty members.

And more:

Clemson has drawn heavy publicity for cutting corners on data supplied to U.S. News. But other colleges and universities are involved as well. Baylor recently asked students already accepted to the university to take the SAT again, hoping for higher scores, and gave the students $300 bookstore credits for complying. Albion College reported a $30 alumni donation as $6 a year for five years so the percentage of annual gifts from graduates would rise for several years. The University of Southern California reported that 34 of its professors were members of a prestigious engineering association, though an investigation showed that the number included people who had moved to industry or retired, while only 17 were currently on staff and teaching. In the mid-1990s Boston University raised its SAT scores by excluding the verbal scores of foreign students, while including their math scores, a practice believed to be fairly common. At about the same time, the University of South Florida raised the group SAT scores of its students by lopping off the bottom 6 percent of all scores and Monmouth University improved its statistics by simply adding 200 SAT points to its group score. More recently, in an exchange on the Inside Higher Ed Web site. a writer from an unnamed northeastern university said he knew for sure that a director of institutional research at his school had forced the resignation of the provost by telling the president that manipulated data had been sent to U.S.News. Middlebury College in Vermont has a director of institutional research and its provost was asked to resign in 2007.

In spite of all this, it’s still not the case that “everybody does it” (even if a lot of people do it) and it still leaves a bad odor.

Shouldn’t a Catholic university be teaching, by word and action, that “everybody does it” is not a sound form of moral reasoning?

Dave Barry on Marquette (And Other) Censorship

2009-09-29T10:19:00.004-05:00

This was a big issue three years ago. And it’s not forgotten: the fact that the Marquette Philosophy Department was not willing to let a graduate student express a rather mild — but offensive to the hyper-leftist types there — opinion on the door of his office.

Dave Barry, in this video, comments on the intolerance that is so common on college campuses. He looks back fondly at the 60s, when free speech prevailed.

Unfortunately, libertarians like Barry very much enjoyed free speech in that decade, but the campus left didn’t like it at all — although they had to tolerate a fair amount. Indeed, they felt free to shout down campus speakers of whom they disapproved.

When they grew up, got Ph.D. degrees and began running things, their authoritarian true selves came out.

H/T The National Conversation.

Obama Hero Worship: Indoctrination in the Schools

2009-09-23T22:09:00.002-05:00

Hat Tip: Stepping Right Up!

Those Offensive Anti-Obama Signs

2009-09-22T10:44:00.002-05:00

From the RealNews blog:

Ever since the Tea Party phenomenon exploded onto the political scene a few months back, the Left has been up in arms over the inflammatory and offensive rhetoric featured on some of the signs and placards displayed by those in attendance. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow, among others, have fumed repeatedly about the bad taste exhibited by many of those expressing their displeasure with the President and his policies.

The Huffington Post ran a feature on this subject, titled “10 Most Offensive Tea Party Signs,” which singled out, among others, the following winners — or perhaps “losers” is a more apt term:
“Obama’s Plan: White Slavery”
“The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama’s ovens”
“Our tax $ given to Hamas to Kill Christians, Jews, & Americans”
“Obama: What you talking about Willis? Spend my money?”
“Obama loves taxes, bankrupt USA, loves baby killing”
“Barack Hussein Obama: The new face of Hitler”
“Barack Obama supports abortion, sodomy, socialism, and the New World Order”
“Obama was not bowing [to the Saudi king]. He was sucking Saudi jewels.”

OK, that’s pretty rough stuff, and not at all civil. Of course, since there have been literally hundreds of thousands of protesters at tea party protests, carrying tens of thousands of signs, we have to expect a few to be pretty nasty.

But we have a collection of things said about the President that tops that.

One sign exhorted Americans to “kill” the President and “bomb his f—in White House.”
Another said, “I’m here to kill” the President.
Another urged the powers-that-be to “hang” the President.
Another said the President “is the disease, death is the cure.”
Another said the President is “the only dope worth shooting.”
Another showed a likeness of the President’s face with a bullet hole in the forehead, oozing red blood.
Another called explicitly for the “death” of the “pig” in the White House.
Another displayed a caricature of the President’s disembodied, bleeding head.
Others featured the President’s face accompanied by such captions as: “Wanted: dead or alive,” and “Death to the dictator.”
Another showed the President’s neck being fitted with a noose.
Still another showed the image of a noose accompanied by a caption urging us to “support” the President (i.e., with the noose).

But how in the world did the Huffington Post miss the second set of really nasty signs, and single out the first set?

Simple, the second set of signs are from protests directed against George Bush.

Apparently, demanding the murder of George Bush isn’t any big deal to the people who are crying crocodile tears over the lack of civility shown toward Barack Obama by some of the tea party protesters.

The signs on the second list, calling for the death of George Bush, can be seen here.

Unhinged Left Talks About Obama Assassination

2009-09-19T15:07:00.006-05:00

From the left-wing Media Matters:

A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this

That being John F. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, of course.

I’ve been thinking a lot of Kennedy and Dallas as I’ve watched the increasingly violent rhetorical attacks on Obama be unfurled. As Americans yank their kids of class in order to save them from being exposed to the President of the United States who only wanted to urge them to excel in the classroom. And as unvarnished hate and name-calling passed for health care “debate” this summer.

The radical right, aided by a GOP Noise Machine that positively dwarfs what existed in 1963, has turned demonizing Obama — making him into a vile object of disgust —into a crusade. It’s a demented national jihad, the likes of which this country has not seen in modern times.

But I’ve been thinking about Dallas in 1963 because I’ve been recalling the history and how that city stood as an outpost for the radical right, which never tried to hide its contempt for the New England Democrat.

Now, in this this month’s Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner offers up in rich detail the hatred that ran wild in Dallas in 1963. To me, the similarity between Dallas in 1963 and today’s unhinged Obama hate is downright chilling.

Of course, this entirely overlooks the fact that Kennedy was killed by a left-winger: Lee Harvey Oswald.

It also overlooks the way assassination chic prevailed during the Bush Administration.

It’s an expression of how demented the left really is. When they see conservative dissenters, they see assassins.

It’s one of the worst forms of bigotry: they can’t accept that anybody who is not evil can disagree with them.

It’s only one small step to shutting up conservative dissent as “hate speech.” A lot of people on the left would happily do that.

And it’s worth noting that a fair number of people on the left would probably welcome — in their hearts of hearts — the assassination of Obama by somebody on the political right. That would make him a martyr, and erase the memories of his now-floundering presidency. That’s what happened with JFK, except for one inconvenient fact: he was murdered by a leftist.

But that’s a fact other leftists are fully capable of denying or overlooking.

Anti-Obama Sentiment: It’s Not About Race

2009-09-18T21:40:00.005-05:00

From David Brooks of the New York Times:

You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I go running several times a week. My favorite route, because it’s so flat, is from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol and back. I was there last Saturday and found myself plodding through tens of thousands of anti-government “tea party” protesters.

They were carrying “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, “End the Fed” placards and signs condemning big government, Barack Obama, socialist health care and various elite institutions.

Then, as I got to where the Smithsonian museums start, I came across another rally, the Black Family Reunion Celebration. Several thousand people had gathered to celebrate African-American culture. I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with the mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands. They had joined the audience of a rap concert.

Because sociology is more important than fitness, I stopped to watch the interaction. These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.

Brooks goes on to frame the protest in terms of the classic American tradition of populism.

The populist tendency has always used the same sort of rhetoric: for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers.

And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.

Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.

Brooks is the sort of fellow who sides with the elite -- specifically the conservative wing of the elite. This is why he sometimes sounds like a RINO (Republican in name only). But he is onto something here.

Obama in the Bunker

2009-09-13T21:45:00.006-05:00

We’re not pushing any analogies here too hard. Obama is not Hitler. But then, there is a point to this satire.

[Update]

There is an entire genre of parodies based on this same scene from the German film “Downfall.” You might check out “Hitler Learns that Michael Jackson Has Died.”

Health Insurance as Though Economics Matters

2009-09-12T17:59:00.002-05:00

Two more examples of how market competition drives down prices are stand-alone imaging centers and dialysis centers. It’s clear that sane health-care reform would involve high coinsurance, deductables and out of pocket maximums, combined with medical savings accounts.

But that doesn’t serve the political interests of certain people.

Cream City Bluegrass This Fall

2009-09-12T10:51:00.003-05:00

From our colleague Ryan Hanley:

Hi Bluegrass Fans and Friends,

It’s been a while since I’ve been in touch about things bluegrass – but I thought you might want to be spared a play-by-play of the Cream City Bluegrass Band’s every movement across the state this summer! But now that fall is here, we have a bunch of local gigs coming up, several of which are really nice family events. They include:

Saturday, September 12: East Troy Bluegrass Festival (East Troy’s downtown square) – a great event in a lovely setting with some top national bands. We play at 1:00 PM.

Friday, September 25: Revere’s Wells Street Tavern (505 Wells St, Delafield) – a casual restaurant/bar with excellent food. We play 9:00 PM- midnight.

Saturday, September 26: South Shore Farmers Market (South Shore Park, MKE – Bay View) – a great local tradition. We play 10:00 AM – Noon.

Saturday, October 10: Swan’s Pumpkin Farm (Franksville) – hayrides, corn maze, pumpkins, bluegrass! We play noon - 3:00 PM.

Saturday, October 17: The Yard Arm (920 Erie St, Racine) – a fun restaurant/bar that we’ve played a couple of times and have really enjoyed. We play 7:30 -11:30 PM.

If any of those fit your schedule, it would be great to see you! As an added bonus, at all gigs you can pick up a copy of our just-released new CD! It was a fun project, and we’re happy with how it came out. More info here:

http://www.creamcitybluegrass.net/cd.htm.

Hope you all are well, and hope to see you sometime soon!

We have reviewed the band in the past, but we’ll just repeat the bare gist of what we had to say:

If you like bluegrass, you’ll enjoy hearing this band perform.

Obama’s Arrogant, Partisan Health Care Speech

2009-09-11T13:12:00.005-05:00

From Reason, a fairly long post, in which we found the following particularly cogent:

As the reform supporter and professional skeptic Mickey Kaus noted before the speech, “Obama doesn’t need to get ‘Republicans on board.’ He doesn’t need to get Blue Dog Democrats on board. He needs to get voters on board.” And if there’s any tactic less effective at wooing skeptics than number-fudging insincerity, it’s number-fudging insincerity coupled with attacks on the veracity, motivation, and worldview of the skeptics themselves.

Again last night, Obama invoked the boogeyman of “special interests” who “lie” in order “to keep things exactly the way they are,” despite the fact that the special interests in this case are lining up to support the president, and that the critics of his plan tend to bemoan, not defend, the status quo. Opponents of his plan, he said, were “ideological”; Ted Kennedy’s support for health care reform, meanwhile, “was born not of some rigid ideology, but of his own experience.” Obama said his door was “always open” to those bringing “a serious set of proposals,” and he slammed that door shut on any attempts to break the almost universally unloved link between employment and insurance. He yearned to “replace acrimony with civility,” then got Democrats stomping on their feet with attacks against the Iraq War and “tax breaks for the wealthy.” The center of the debate, as always, was wherever he chose to stand.

And above all else, Obama chose to shadowbox against the more extreme claims of the Sarah Palins of the world, rather than engage the most serious of the skeptics’ arguments. No, the administration doesn’t “plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens,” but what about the possibility of government cost-cutters frowning upon expensive hip replacement surgeries for the chronically old? No, the proposal doesn’t amount to a complete “government takeover” of health care, but it does continue to expand the government’s role (and, promises aside, expenses) in ways that make a deficit-whiplashed nation nervous. No, “no one would be forced to choose” a public option, but what about the argument that incentives would eventually push Americans from private insurance to the public plan?

Obama’s problem is simple: he has a hidden agenda. He wants a complete government takeover of health care. He wants health care rationed, as it is under systems of socialized medicine. He wants taxpayer money to pay for abortions. He wants illegal immigrants covered. He doesn’t mind if the deficit is drive up even higher.

But the public wants none of those things. Thus Obama simply has to lie.

Anti-Abortion Activist Shot: Will the Mainstream Media Report It?

2009-09-11T11:16:00.004-05:00

Via Real Debate Wisconsin, a story in a Michigan paper:

Anti-abortion activist shot in front of Owosso High School

OWOSSO, Michigan -- State police at the Corunna post have confirmed a well-known anti-abortion activist was shot multiple times and killed this morning in front of Owosso High School.

The victim’s identity has not yet been released but the shooting occurred around 7:30 a.m., after most students were off the buses and safely inside the building, said Owosso schools transportation supervisor Jayne Campbell.

State police also confirmed that a suspect was taken into custody about 8:15 a.m. at the suspect’s home

Owosso High School secretary Wendy Smith said the students remain in lockdown this morning and confirmed that no students were involved and all are safe with classes going on as normal. The shooting did not occur on school property, Smith said.

Meanwhile, police have completely ringed with police tape a section of North Street in front of the school.

A black car can be seen parked at the corner of North and Whitehaven streets, where a portable oxygen tank is lying in a front yard next to a large sign bearing the image of a baby and the word “Life.”

Is it possible that this killing will turn out to have had nothing to do with abortion? Yes. Had the victim been pro-abortion would the media wait to find out, or rush to the assumption that an innocent “pro-choice” protestor was killed?

We know the answer to that.

We’ll be waiting to see this on national news. We are not holding our breath.

Remembering 9/11: Our Enemies Meant What They Said

2009-09-11T10:41:00.006-05:00

This classic column from Jeff Jacoby appeared on 9/13/2001.

NOW THAT IT HAS HAPPENED TO US, the White House is not calling for “restraint.” The State Department is not concerned about “escalating the cycle of violence.” There are no editorials imploring the parties to conduct a “peace process” and “sit down at the negotiating table.”

Now that it has happened to us, the TV anchors are calling them terrorists, not “militants” or “activists.” Washington is not being warned to avoid a “provocative” response, or cautioned against retaliation that is “excessive and disproportionate.”

Now that it has happened to us, our eyes have finally opened. Now at last we understand that there is a war underway — and we are in it. For years we have acted as if the front line were elsewhere, and as if our job was to watch from the sidelines and make sure our friends didn’t defend themselves too aggressively. Now, after the worst massacre in US history, only the willfully blind can fail to see that the front line is here. The war between freedom and slavery, between hope and hopelessness, between the decent and the indecent, will be won or lost in America. For it is America that stands for everything our enemies hate.

But let us be honest. Those enemies have not been shy about declaring their enmity. Time and again they have announced that they despise us; time and again they have called for our destruction.

They have announced it from the mosques of Gaza, as broadcast live by the Palestinian Authority: “Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them — and those who stand by them. They are all in one trench, against the Arabs and the Muslims.”

They have proclaimed it a religious duty, as in the fatwa of Osama bin Laden, publicized worldwide in February 1998: “To kill the Americans and their allies, civilians, and military is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

They have made it a national crusade, as when Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, exhorted Islamic militants in 1994 to “hijack planes,” “blow up factories in Western countries,” and “declare open war on American interests throughout the world.”

How often have we seen them burning American flags? How often have we been demonized as “the Great Satan?” How often have they attacked US citizens, US embassies, US assets? For at least a decade it has been apparent that the most intense hatred of the United States and its values could be found in the world of Islamist fundamentalism. But too many Americans — and too many of their leaders — preferred not to notice.

“The suicide bombers of today are the noble successors of ... the Lebanese suicide bombers, who taught the U.S. Marines a tough lesson in [Beirut]” exulted Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Yasser Arafat’s newspaper, on Tuesday. “These suicide bombers are the salt of the earth, the engines of history.... They are the most honorable among us.” Over and over and over, our enemies have talked this way. Did we think they didn’t mean it?

Upon releasing its annual report on global terrorism last year, the State Department observed that “the primary terrorist threats to the United States emanate from two regions, South Asia and the Middle East.” That is, from the regions where Islamist fanaticism is concentrated. But the US government, it would seem, couldn’t be bothered to listen to its own warning.

Or to the warnings of the enemy. In some ways, the worst thing about this week’s slaughter is not that it occurred, not even that such obvious terrorist targets as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — the Pentagon! — could be so easily attacked from the air. The worst thing is that we were so unprepared for it even after the attack on USS Cole last fall (17 murdered). Even after the bombing of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (224 murdered). Even after the blowing up of the Khobar Towers barracks in 1996 (19 murdered). Even after the car bomb at the US military center in Riyadh (5 murdered). Even after the first World Trade Center bombing (6 murdered).

It’s clear that under the Obama Administration, we have regressed to a pre-9/11 viewpoint. Part of the reason for this has been the success of Bush Administration anti-terrorism efforts, which have given the American people a sense of security.

But a big part has been the fact that Obama is a liberal, and liberals have (at least since the late 60s) never wanted to confront America’s enemies. Sometimes this has been because liberals were simply on the other side (Vietnam) and sometimes because liberals, even if they couldn’t justify the acts of America’s enemies, believed at least that those actions were “understandable” and a response to evil things America has done.

America, for liberals like Obama, is pretty much always at fault.

Perhaps we will get away with the pre-9/11 attitudes, especially given that most of the anti-terrorism infrastructure remains in place. But then, maybe we won’t.

What Was Wrong With the Obama Health Care Speech

2009-09-10T19:55:00.002-05:00