No matter how bad Sarah Palin does in front of a microphone somebody tries to tell us how great the speech was.The American Thinker may want to amend its name.
Geller writes: “her speech embodies what a great American sounds like, and what a President ought to sound like.”
Palin speaks: “And it is our men and women in uniform securing it, and we are facing tough challenges in America with some seeming to just be Hell bent maybe on tearing down our nation, perpetuating some pessimism, and suggesting American apologetics, suggesting perhaps that our best days were yesterdays.”
Geller:” Sarah Palin embodies what an American is. She is what Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin envisioned when they carved out the American idea.”
I wish Geller would explain how Palin is this figure.
Geller: “The more evil succeeds and overwhelms our foreign and domestic policy, our culture, our discourse and the very social fabric of our lives, the clearer it becomes that Palin is the antidote”
Sarah Palin sounds like a super hero.
Geller: “Smart, sharp, patriotic, she best represents the majority of Americans.”
I guess not since she did not get elected in November.
Geller: America wants Palin.
Again, obviously not in November.
Geller: “Sarah Palin is a Great American. She is the leader Americans need. She is the leader the tea parties need. In closing, Palin said, "G-d bless America." Have you ever heard Obama utter those words?”
Radley Balko at Reason agrees with Harvey Silvergate that the first amendment and "police arrest powers" should be the topic of discussion regarding the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.
Balko writes:
"By any account of what happened—Gates', Crowleys', or some version in between—Gates should never have been arrested. 'Contempt of cop,' as it's sometimes called, isn't a crime. Or at least it shouldn't be. It may be impolite, but mouthing off to police is protected speech, all the more so if your anger and insults are related to a perceived violation of your rights. The 'disorderly conduct' charge for which Gates was arrested was intended to prevent riots, not to prevent cops from enduring insults. Crowley is owed an apology for being portrayed as a racist, but he ought to be disciplined for making a wrongful arrest."
Steven Benen at The Washington Monthly asks Fox News Execs if its talent can say "literally anything on the air" with out any reaction from the network. Of course he is asking about Beck's latest episode of crazy.
Harvey Silvergate writes at Forbes magazine that the appropriate lens in which to understand the Gates-Cambridge PD affair is as a violation of a citizens first amendment protections.
Silvergate writes:
"By longstanding but unfortunate (and, in my view, clearly unconstitutional) practice in Cambridge and across the country, the charge of disorderly conduct is frequently lodged when the citizen restricts his response to the officer to mere verbal unpleasantness. (When the citizen gets physically unruly, the charge is upgraded to resisting arrest or assault and battery on an officer.) It would appear, from the available evidence--regardless of whether Gates' version or that of Officer Crowley is accepted--that Gates was arrested for saying, or perhaps yelling, things to Crowley that the sergeant did not want to hear.
As one of Crowley's friends told The New York Times: 'When he has the uniform on, Jim [Crowley] has an expectation of deference.' Deference and respect, of course, are much to be desired both in and out of government service--police want it, as do citizens in their own homes or on their porches or on the street. However, respect is earned and voluntarily extended; it is not required, regardless of rank."
Silvergate, a first amendment attorney, as he points out several times, takes the reader through a compelling explanation of his claim that Gates' first amendment rights were violated. He discusses the applicable precedents. Silvergaet writes:
Today, the law recognizes only four exceptions to the First Amendment's protection for free speech: (1) speech posing the "clear and present danger" of imminent violence or lawless action posited by Holmes, (2) disclosures threatening "national security," (3) "obscenity" and (4) so-called "fighting words" that would provoke a reasonable person to an imminent, violent response.
He later writes in reference to Gates' own writing on free speech on university campuses:
"Under Gates' own analysis of the University of Connecticut 'harassment' speech code, neither Officer Crowley's words to Gates, nor the professor's responses, nor the officer's replies to those responses, should prove the guilt of either. There was no violence. There were only words, some of which might have been insulting and otherwise unpleasant. And in a free society, verbal expression--even if disagreeable--should never lead to clamped handcuffs."
A twenty minute speech is a funny nightmare to hear. Can you imagine what three hours would be like. I imagine she would need a sidekick.
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"Bill Kristol, who writes frequently about health care and advises the Republican Party about how to vote on bills, is misinformed on the basic facts of the situation. And even his misinformation isn't terribly coherent: Later in the interview, he says that the Army health-care system -- which is fully socialized -- is the best health-care system we've got, and the reason we can't give it to all Americans is that it's too expensive. Socialized medicine, in other words, works. The rest of us just don't deserve it.
To be fair, I don't believe that Kristol believes that. When he says that the danger with Obama's plan is that it 'would put us well on the road to government-run health care,' I take him at his word. But it is interesting to watch what happens when his adoration for all things military collides with the distrust of all things federal. Turns out that the conservative in Kristol is no match for the militarist"
I thought about this a couple of days ago but not seriously. A story from ABC News claims that Gates "and the Cambridge, Mass., police officer who arrested him, Sgt. James Crowley, both trace their ancestry back to the legendary Niall of the Nine Hostages."
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He may have killed someone then dined on the body.
American Thinker may be one of the most disgusting websites I have seen. Writers for this site continually make outrageous arguments and comparisons. Today Randall Hoven writes "How Cops Should Do It?" The emphasis on "should" is Hoven's. Be warned, Hoven is a master the art of Reductio ad absurdum.
Hoven tries to explain the similarities between between Jeffrey Dahmer and the Gates-Cambridge PD affair. In his description of the Dahmer situation Hoven writes that police were called to the scene where a naked man, a homesexual, was walking naked outside a house. The house belonged to Dahmer. The police ask the naked man if he was OK and Dahmer tells them that the man is fine. The police leave and the man is killed by Dahmer. Dahmer had killed 17 men and boys before he was captured.
I know the connection to Gates so far is thin. But if you drink a lot it will not become clearer. Hoven tries to put the final coat of crap on this story. He writes:
"But the police did their jobs: no ethnic profiling, no homophobic biases - just good, politically correct police work.
When called to a potential crime scene at a residence and the legitimate resident tells you everything is fine, a good police officer makes no further inquiries, calls in his report that 'all is well', and returns to his previous duties.
Heck, politically correct policing is so easy that anyone can make the right call without even being at the scene, hearing witnesses or gathering evidence. You can do it from your own house, or even the White House."
The police did not capture Jeffrey Dahmer so Hoven believes the fourth amendment should be repealed unilaterally by police just in case.
How outrageous is that? Is that a conservative attitude?
"If I lived in a country in imminent danger of a Bolshevik or Fascist seizure of power, I’d be a cowardly fool if I failed to use every means to prevent it, including violence if need be. If it were true that our political opponents wanted to impose tyranny on the United States – if (as Rush Limbaugh said the other day) a vote for the other party was a vote for “totalitarianism, dungeons, and torture,” then what patriot could possibly abide a political defeat?
Happily, none of those things are true. As wrong and harmful as the Obama administration’s plans are, the administration is playing by the rules of the game. To agitate people into thinking otherwise is to corrode the foundations of the American constitutional regime."
"'Some of these things cannot be trained, obviously,” said Jennifer Murphy, a psychologist at the Army Research Institute and the principal author of the I.E.D. study. 'But some may be; these are fighters who become very sensitive to small changes in the environment. They’ll clear the same road every day and notice ridiculously subtle things: this rock was not here yesterday.'"
I have counted so far essays at various outlets that call President Obama a liar, either implicitly or explicitly. I am OK with that, I don't think it is true but it seems hard for people working in policy, politics and opinion to avoid the assumption if someone disagrees that person must be lying.
What bothered me was Thomas Sowell in the National Review online. Sowell's A Post-Racial President? asserts that the idea that we were entering the post-racial era was a naive hope. Sowell thinks if you understand where President Obama comes from a place where people "benefit greatly from crying racism." The place which Sowell refers is "community activist." Sowell writes:
"For 'community organizers' as well, racial resentments are a stock in trade. President Obama’s background as a community organizer has received far too little attention, though it should have been a high-alert warning that this was no post-racial figure.
What does a community organizer do? What he does not do is organize a community. What he organizes are the resentments and paranoia within a community, directing those feelings against other communities, from whom either benefits or revenge are to be gotten, using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish that purpose."
That is not my experience as a community organizer. Actually not my experience as a community organizer in the exact position Barack Obama held in early 1980 in Harlem. Perhaps there is a difference between a white and black community organizers but I have not witnessed any differences. A community organizer does not promote "grievance and polarization" as Sowell asserts. A community organizer, such as Barack Obama, is a instrument for people and communities that need to enter the policy process where they have been ignored.
Sowell's implication that a community organizer is a fan that blows rage, resentment and division between communities to gain "politically, financially, and socially" is grossly overstated and offensive. I agree there are some organizers who have a developed self interest but they are few.
Now to a point of act that Sowell gets wrong. Sowell writes:
"As a state senator in Illinois, Obama pushed the 'racial profiling' issue, so it is hardly surprising that he jumped to the conclusion that a policeman was engaging in racial profiling, when in fact the cop was investigating a report received from a neighbor that someone seemed to be breaking into the house that Professor Gates was renting in Cambridge."
Here his claim is that President Obama in the July 22 news conference accused Sergeant Crowley and the Cambridge PD of racial profiling. But a simple return to the text and or video of the news conference dispels this error. From the transcript of the news confernce (the video is at teh bottom):
Question: "Thank you, Mr. President. Recently Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you and what does it say about race relations in America?"
Answer: "Well, I should say at the outset that "Skip" Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don't know all the facts...
But so far, so good. They're reporting -- the police are doing what they should. There's a call, they go investigate what happens. My understanding is at that point Professor Gates is already in his house. The police officer comes in, I'm sure there's some exchange of words, but my understanding is, is that Professor Gates then shows his ID to show that this is his house. And at that point, he gets arrested for disorderly conduct -- charges which are later dropped.
Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact."
It is very clear to me that President Obama did not claim this incident to be racial profiling. This line, "what I think we know separate and apart from this incident," is very important. Perhaps Sowell missed it or perhaps he is engaging in fanning the flames of "resentments and paranoia" and "using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish [his] purpose."
Mark Hemingway’s piece at the National Review Online attempts to criticize the Green the Capitol Initiative but his arguments are ill formed, demeaning and distorted. The initiative is an effort to transform the U.S. Capitol into carbon neutral building. Becoming the first carbon neutral legislature in the world.
In his criticism Hemingway finds it necessary to belittle Allison Rogers, a graduate of Harvard University, because she happened to be Miss Rhode Island 2006. Hemingway writes:
“This is all overseen by the House’s Green the Capitol office, which is staffed mostly by eager young Ivy League grads billing themselves as “sustainability experts,” according to one of the business cards being handed out. The most notable member of the Green the Capitol office is one Allison Rogers. Ms. Rogers does her darnedest to appear thoroughly businesslike in her official portrait, but the Harvard grad is probably best known for an extracurricular achievement: Miss Rhode Island 2006.
It seems only natural that climate change is the 21st-century equivalent of “world peace” among the pageant set. Rogers used her reign to promote global-warming awareness. As a beauty queen, she made a point of walking the entire length of every parade she appeared in, because riding in the back of convertibles isn’t terribly fuel efficient.”
I looked back through Hemingway’s past pieces and was unable to find any reference to Sarah Palin’s beauty pageant past. So I am left wondering if beauty queens of progressive ideas can be less professional or as serious as those of the right.
Rogers has a degree in religious studies from Harvard according to Hemingway her conservation efforts are a dogmatic effort. Hemmingway further demeans Rogers as he refers to as a “non-fiction version of Tracy Flick.” This is an unnecessary jab that he does not explain. To what is it that Hemmingway thinks Rogers believes she is entitled? Other women in politics, government or activism have been labeled as Tracy Flick but none as undeserved as Rogers. Hemingway, again, never labeled Palin as Ms. Flick and her entitled attitude is legendary. How dare anyone question Gov. Palin’s qualifications or ask her questions and expect an answer. Hemingway never dared.
To get away from Hemingway’s obsession with degrading Roger, he literally goes on for two-thirds of his column talking about Rogers once calling her and people involved in the green effort a “precocious child demanding that the neighborhood association fine Mom and Dad for violating the housing development’s codes, covenants, and restrictions.”
The critique that the House of Representatives “isn’t paying for all these changes — American taxpayers are” displays a silliness that I am sure Hemingway would correct upon further thought. The House does not have funds that do not come from taxpayers.
Finally the easiest lie to prove and most credulous. Hemingway writes:
“In fact, getting any sort of cost-benefit analysis out of Green the Capitol is difficult at best...But if you do some digging on the site you can download the report submitted to Congress giving the details of the initiative. Buried 30 pages into the 60-page report is this pertinent information: In 2006, the House’s energy costs amounted to $15 million. In 2008, after the implementation of Green the Capitol, the House was spending over $20 million. The program claims that by 2017 it will have reduced the House’s energy use by over 50 percent, resulting in a significant annual savings.”
I also read through the report. Hemingway may have read the report but either way he is attempting to mislead. Hemingway implies that there was a five million dollar increase in energy between 2006 and 2008 therefore implying that the Green the Capital Initiative was a failure. He is wrong on two points with this argument. First the date of the report to the committee is dated June 21, 2007. Therefore costs are estimates. Second, these costs are estimates. Is it possible to conduct any cost cutting or efficiency exercises without incurring costs? Can Hemingway cut his own energy costs by installing a new furnace without have upfront costs and long-term savings? I don’t think so.
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"Why would freedom-loving lawmakers want to hide behind guards and metal detectors? Shouldn't NRA members be outraged that Second Amendment rights mean nothing in the very seat of our democracy?
Congress seems to think that gun restrictions are for wimps. It voted this year to allow people to bring their weapons into national parks, and pro-gun legislators have pushed for the right to carry in taverns, colleges and workplaces. Shouldn't Congress set an example in its own workplace?"
Much like Shane, Sarah Palin came to us to fix our problems. And much like Shane we don't know is she is dead (politically). We can only hope not, because she is endlessly entertaining.
My favorite line from the end of Shane is not in this clip. "Man has to be what he is. Can't break the mold."
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I think the President addressed the Gates and Cambridge Police issue magnificently on Friday. I don't think he had to revisit the issue, if all thing were equal, but politically it was a distraction that needed to be dealt with.
What is the point of inviting Dr. Gates and Sgt. Crowley to the White House for a beer. The invitation is a good way to defuse the problem but the beer seems unneeded. Was President Obama trying to identify with Crowley?
Just three "regular guys" sitting around drinking some brews talking about race. That doesn't seem real.
"It is a death that has come too early, as even the nation's latest unemployment numbers show. African Americans have close to double the joblessness of whites, while the unemployment rate among Latinos is a third higher than that of whites. In a nation that is rapidly becoming more racially diverse, these are destabilizing disparities in power and class. In the professional world, blacks and Hispanics make up a mere 4 percent to 6 percent of the nation's lawyers, doctors and engineers. These gaps are exacerbated by differences in education and income and, more important, by the history of government-enforced segregation that long denied African Americans entry into schools and the business world.
So, why now? More often than not, it is the American left that gets lost in absurd fantasies about race in this country. They pretend there has been no progress in recent decades, even when they see the rise of a black middle class and witness the election of a mixed-race president and the likely confirmation of a Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court. But today, it is the right wing and its supporters on the high court who are making stuff up. They pretend that the nation is already so transformed that a colorblind America is a reality and that affirmative action is superfluous, so much so that white employees in a city fire department -- an arena long dominated by Irish and Italian Americans -- need help from the Supreme Court to get a promotion."
Opponents of developing an American health care system can only seem to demonize the Canadian health system. They essentially are comparing no oranges to oranges since current proposals in Congress are not the same as the Canadian system and the United States doesn't have a health care system. Since their no oranges argument is a distraction I have found their new argument:
Apparently CNN chief Jon Klein will allow Lou Dobbs to descend deeper into the lunacy he is helping to foment. After telling the Dobbs show that the birth certificate story was dead Klein has said that he will not stop the network or specifically Dobbs from continuing to discuss this "dead story."
"He's got more than 30 years as a television journalist, and I trust him, as I trust all our reporters and anchors, to exercise their judgment as various stories evolve."
Klein's lack of courage in the face of the truth is disgusting. To defend Dobbs as a journalist of great experience, while at the same time you explicitly describe his reporting as ignoring facts. Klein wrote in an email earlier to Dobb's producer:
"It seems to definitively answer the question. Since the show's mission is for Lou to be the explainer and enlightener, he should be sure to cite this during your segment tonight. And then it seems this story is dead -- because anyone who still is not convinced doesn't really have a legitimate beef."
I can understand, I don't agree, but I understand not just accepting the claims of authenticity of the certificate from FactCheck.org but to ignore the confirmation from the State of Hawaii is just wrong. Dobb himself has said that the Certificate of Live Birth is a document that shows that there is another document. It takes a special kind of genius to ignore the logical conclusion at which you just arrived. The State of Hawaii is saying that they have the birth certificate.
I don't think that Dobbs should be fired for perpetuating this non-issue but he should be fired for not doing his job. If Dobbs is truly a journalist and CNN, therefore Klein, truly values good reporting based on facts and the logical conclusions that those facts present they should stop this mess before any further legitimization of the conspiracy nuts continue.
I firmly believe that this non-issue is so important to the conspiracy nuts because the of 44 presidents Mr. Obama is “one of these thing is not like the others, one of these thing does not belong” (Sesame Street for the ill informed). Responses from readers to previous posts about the birthers have used language that sounds troubling. Perhaps I am being too sensitive. Here is an example:
“Mr. Obama was born to a woman separated from her Kenyan husband, a woman who went to see him shortly before Obama was born. Obama spent his early youth abroad, thinks of himself as a citizen of the world, and wrote an autobiography strongly focused on his absent father and his supposed African roots.
That's unusual. We've never had such an exotic candidate with such a peculiar personal story. Most past presidents have had two American parents.
So it's not unreasonable to ask to see some proof of his place of birth. What is unreasonable is that he steadfastly refuses to provide it. In fact, that goes beyond unreasonable: it's bizarre.”
What do you think am I being too sensitive? Are the use of "exotic", "citizen of the world", "unusual" and "peculiar" innocent or are they displaying that President Obama's differentness from the previous 43 presidents is threatening?
Barack Obama's birthday is next week do you think we will do anything special, such as getting over this craziness?
I love my copy of The Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic has brought a new term of argument to my attention. reductio ad Hitlerum. Hopefully it makes in to the next addition. Sphere: Related Content
The birthers have the best names. They have two lawyers with names that could come out of a Mike Myers movies or the next Naked Gun movie, Gary Kreep and Orly Taitz.
The Washington Independent reports how the McCain Campaign dimissed these nutjobs and how McCain fought his own battle on this front.
"While in Phuket, Thailand, for the regional ASEAN conference, the Secretary of State has been trying to drum up regional support for isolating the North Korean government and for U.N. sanctions on North Korean arms and missile development. In an interview with ABC on Monday, HRC had this to say in response to Pyongyang's recent missile tests: 'What we've seen is this constant demand for attention. Maybe it's the mother in me, the experience I've had with small children and teenagers and people who are demanding attention: Don't give it to them."'When she added on Wednesday that North Korea 'has no friends left,' Pyongyang hit back in personal terms, asserting that Clinton was 'by no means intelligent' and that North Korea 'cannot but regard Mrs. Clinton as a funny lady as she likes to utter such rhetoric, unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community. . . . Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping."
"The media likes to talk about 'momentum'. It usually talks about the momentum in the present tense -- as in, 'health care has no momentum'. But almost always, those observations are formulated based on events of the past and sloppily extrapolated to imply events of the future, often to embarrassing effect: see also, New Hampshire, the 15-day infatuation with Sarah Palin, the Straight Talk express being left for dead somewhere in the summer of 2007, the overreaction to 'Bittergate' and the whole lot, and the naive assumption that Obama's high-60's approval ratings represented a paradigm shift and not a honeymoon period that new Presidents almost always experience."
"generalizations about race don't lead only to bad things, like an unjustified arrest. They can lead to good things, too. The best example is well known around Harvard Square and other academic communities: affirmative action. Part of the rationale for affirmative action is that African Americans are more likely than whites to have struggled harder, under the burden of greater disadvantages, to reach the point where they are poised to enter Harvard. Therefore, they deserve a break. No doubt this is true on average. And no doubt it is false in many cases. You can easily decide that some generalizations are just too toxic to allow, even if true on average, and race might be a good area to start. But you'd be hard-put to justify forbidding racial generalizations in split-second decisions during tense confrontations between citizens and cops, while allowing them in the relatively leisurely precincts of a college admissions office."
The Pew Global Attitudes Project announced Thursday that the image of the United States in the world has improved. Much of this can be attributed to the election of Barack Obama.
I will read the full report tomorrow and write something if anything strikes me as interesting.
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I am hopeful that President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's "race to the top fund" will help public schools. Finally we will be able to get a clear picture of the state of our education system. With 50 different standards for performance the data available about performance is very inaccurate. We are well past the time and need for absolute local control of standards and curriculum. The department is to hand out five billion dollars to states and nearly three quarters of a billion dollars directly to districts. Hopefully this is just to start. But this is a nice carrot to present the states when they can really use the dollars.
Arne Duncan said in February:
"If we accomplish one thing in the coming years—it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America.
I know that talking about standards can make people nervous—but the notion that we have 50 different goal posts is absolutely ridiculous.
A high school diploma needs to mean something—no matter where it's from.
We need standards that are college-ready and career-ready, and benchmarked against challenging international standards."
I read the police report and have initially three questions.
1. Is it possible to act disorderly on your own property or in your house? 2. If you are going to show ID to an officer in this situation why not show ID with your address? 3.It is possible the person with the real problem with race is the woman who called the police?
I did find funny the line in the report that says Gates said his front door was unsecurable because of a previous break in attempt.
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Jason Zengerle at The New Republic distills the aftermath of Dr. Gates interaction with Cambridge police and President Obama's statement.
23.07.2009
Race, Power, and the Law
And, while I realize there are all sorts of issues of race tied up in the Gates case, I think that the power dynamics involved are getting short shrift. Even if you're white, any time you have an encounter with a police officer, the officer has the upper hand in terms of power, since he's the guy who has the power to arrest you. After that initial encounter, however, that power dynamic can be reversed--at least if you're sufficiently rich, accomplished, and connected, as Gates is. (If you're not those things, that power dynamic will probably never change.) Which is why, at this point, Gates clearly has the upper hand over Crowley in terms of power. The irony is that Crowley's initial abuse of power has now put him in the position of being largely powerless.
"Still, viewers who sincerely wanted to know the essentials of the president's health-care reform plan got an opportunity."
The evening was a little weak on policy specifics. I was hoping for much more from President Obama. I was disappointed with only ten questions. The reporters were also disappointing because they did not ask detailed policy questions.
The only two detailed questions were why the rush? and are the "American people are going to have to give anything up in order for this to happen?" The Presidents answer to the timeline question was ridiculous. President Obama responded to the query about the dealine with,
"I'm rushed because I get letters every day from families that are being clobbered by health care costs. And they ask me, 'Can you help?'"
He goes to convey some very touching examples and anecdotal stories about Americans experience with health care. But he gets letters everyday. Come on. He is the President of the United States I am sure he get many letters everyday. This does not seem to be a justification of this timeline he is demanding. Is there wisdom in the philosophy that we need to get this done quickly?
The image that the President needs to express more, as does the Congress when speaking to the American people is that "in a country like ours, that's not right." It is not right that people suffer because we don't have a health care system, but we need a system that is structured smartly not rushed in a couple months. I want the President to come to me and be able to explain what the plan is not just anecdotal stories that display the urgency. Even though those stories are important.
Can President really say that the American people with health insurance are not going to sacrifice something after a new structure is in place? Maybe he his correct but it does seem fanciful.
Shale's also wrote,
"Obama did nothing at the news conference -- other than preempt or delay some prime-time shows -- that would seem potentially harmful to his image. About the most justifiable criticism that could likely be made: "Barack Obama still seems too good to be true." It's doubtful any president would lose sleep over such criticisms as that -- no matter what the Cambridge police department might be saying about him Thursday morning. "
I don't care that he did nothing to hurt his image. I wanted more information.
P.S. I love that a reporter stood up to ask a question even though he was not called on bt the President.
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While I don't think the news conference was very informative or very useful there are some reactions that just don't make sense. It is almost as if they watch the news conference on television but imagine what is being spoken.
Michelle Malkin describes the evening as fear-mongering. She writes, "Uhhhhhh, demonizing doctors doesn’t exactly seem the best way to shore up support for the ailing, failing government health care takeover." Fear-mongering. demonizing doctors. What was she watching. It can't be news to her that doctors are susceptible to incentives. Malkin does not provide specifics when she makes claims such as fear-mongerer, much like the president was very weak on specifics last night. I can only assume that she was referring to this section of the news conference:
"Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that's out there. So if they're looking and you come in and you've got a bad sore throat or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, "You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid's tonsils out."
Now, that may be the right thing to do, but I'd rather have that doctor making those decisions just based on whether you really need your kid's tonsils out or whether it might make more sense just to change -- maybe they have allergies. Maybe they have something else that would make a difference.
So -- so part of what we want do is to free doctors, patients, hospitals to make decisions based on what's best for patient care. And that's the whole idea behind Mayo. That's the whole idea behind the Cleveland Clinic."
This is where President Obama was the most expansive regarding doctors but is this fear-mongering? Perhaps the President could have quoted George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor Dilemma and avoided this jab from Malkin. Shaw wrote:
"That any sane nation, having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest in baking for you, should go on to give a surgeon a pecuniary interest in cutting off your leg, is enough to make one despair..."
Much more colorful and entertaining and it makes the same point. The Progressive Policy Institute reported last year that "$700 billion is wasted each year on unnecessary tests and procedures that do not improve patient outcome." To call out behavior that is wrong doesn't equate to Demonization.
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David McIntosh has created of number of errors.I made some coffee and now to get to work.
In today’s Wall Street Journal McIntosh writes “Vote No On Sotomayor.”He attempts to assert facts that support his case but his claims are wrong.Unlike Mr. McIntosh, I am not a lawyer but I can read.To be fair these errors have been made everywhere.
As I said I am not a lawyer so if this wrong or boring I apologize (I hope I am not wrong).
Mr. McIntosh writes:
“Judge Sotomayor is almost certainly a vote in favor of restricting Second Amendment protections and property rights, upholding racial preferences, and providing unlimited abortion on demand.”
From this premise he cites rulings she has made while on the Court of Appeals.
According to McIntosh, as Justice, Sotomayor will certainly “vote in favor of restricting Second Amendment protections.”His first error is the reading of a Second Circuit decision on Maloneyv. Cuomo (2009). Here McIntosh quotes the Second Circuit opinion, “the Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose on this right.” In Maloney v. Cuomo the court considered a claim by a New York attorney that a state law prohibiting possession of a chuka stick (also known as nunchaku, a device used in martial arts consisting of two sticks joined by a rope or chain) violated his Second Amendment right to bear arms.
The problem with McIntosh’s complaint is that it does not support the idea that legal precedent and rule of law.His argument is that in ruling on Maloney, Sotomayor disregarded the Supreme Courts decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.Unfortunately a close reading of Heller shows that the ruling is not explicitly applicable to Maloney.Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller states,
“The handgun ban amounts to a prohibition of an entire class of ‘arms’ that is overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose. The prohibition extends, moreover, to the home, where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute. Under any of the standards of scrutiny that we have applied to enumerated constitutional rights, banning from the home ‘the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family,’ 478 F. 3d, at 400, would fail constitutional muster.”
The first problem I find is that a chukka stick is not a handgun therefore not the weapon “most preferred” “to keep and use for protection”.It is also not in the “class or arms” considered in Heller.As written in the Maloney decision Heller “did not present the question of whether the Second Amendment applies to the states.”Knowing this and the importance of rule of law and precedent there seems no way the Second Circuit could have ruled the way McIntosh would have preferred without being the horrible “judicial activists.”Since Heller was not applicable the Second Circuit applied Presser v. Illinois, it explained that it was “settled law . . . that the Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose” on the individual’s right to bear arms.
McIntosh commits the same error as he cites Ricci v. DeStefano. McIntosh writes “a Second Circuit panel of judges, including Judge Sotomayor, upheld the city’s decision to disregard the results of a promotion examination because too few racial minorities passed.”But in reality, if McIntosh had read the decision he may have avoided his error.The Second Circuit upheld the case because they found:
“The remedy chosen here was decidedly less “race conscious” than the remedies in Kirkland and Bushey, because New Haven did not race-norm the scores, they simply decided to start over, to develop some new assessment mechanism with less disparate impact. Thus, while the evidence shows that race was taken into account in the decision not to certify the test results, the result was race-neutral: all the test results were discarded, no one was promoted, and firefighters of every race will have to participate in another selection process to be considered for promotion. Indeed, there is a total absence of any evidence of discriminatory animus towards plaintiffs-under the reasoning of [Hayden v. County of Nassau, 180 F.3d 42, 51 (2d Cir. 1999)], “nothing in our jurisprudence precludes the use of race-neutral means to improve racial and gender representation.... [T]he intent to remedy the disparate impact of the prior exams is not equivalent to an intent to discriminate against non-minority applicants.”
Again I’m not a lawyer but I can read.I agree with McIntosh that this sucks for the firefighters that did well on the first test but that is not the standard by which the law functions.
There are other problems with McIntosh’s latest attempt but I won’t don’t want to bore you with why Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund aren't crazy abortionists.
Note: There has been a correction from the original posting. I attributed the essay Vote No On Sotomayor to Karl Rove. The essay was written by David McIntosh. Apologies.
I have heard twice tonight the argument that the world comes here for care. That is true. The world comes to the United States for complicated surgeries and procedures. People who can afford to come here and pay for procedures use that market power to take advantage of the amazing research and hospitals. But no one is coming here from Canada to take part of the everyday medical care because it is so great. We need to be honest about the differences between everyday health care or preventative care and the complicated procedures make our health care amazing. But don't forget that too many people can't afford either.
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I have thought that Glenn Beck was not for real but have not tried to articulate the idea. Luckily Cajun Boy @ has the overnight at Gawker to think about Glenn Beck.
Cajun writes:
"...I think that Glenn Beck is a guy who looked out across the vast expanse of America and saw a nation filled with paranoid dipshits waiting to have their irrational fears confirmed and exploited by an expert modern charlatan, a role he's been all too happy to fill."
In a Charlie Rose teaser Dr. Cortese makes the point that has not occurred to me nor have I heard anyone else say. We can't have health care reform because we never had a health care system. He says that truth is very liberating because it tells us that we can design one.
