Archive for August, 2009
4 Aug
Teachable Moments
4 Aug
Uncle Jay’s new word: Clunker
“Happy Birthday Mr. President, even though you were really born on the International Space Station with the covert help of those who shot JFK from the off-site branch of Area 51 beneath Loch Ness. Also, Cash for Clunkers becomes Crash for Flunkers.
4 Aug
Obamacare: Not Waterloo, Just a Tactical Retreat
“[B]y year’s end [Obama] will emerge with something he can call health-care reform. The Democrats in Congress will pass it because they must. Otherwise, they’ll have slain their own savior in his first year in office. But that bill will look nothing like the massive reform Obama originally intended. The beginning of the retreat was [...]
4 Aug
When Is a Human a ‘Human Being’? Ask the White House Science Adviser
“Last August, Pastor Rick Warren stumped then-Sen. Barack Obama with a seemingly simple question. ‘At what point,’ asked Warren, ‘does a baby get human rights, in your view?’ ‘Well, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my [...]
4 Aug
A Shooting Star Dims
“Barack Obama was a rock star on the campaign trail, and his aura went undimmed in his first few months of office. But then he began taking too many curtain calls. The applause subsided, but he kept coming back to center stage to try harder to wow us. He forgot what every star must learn, [...]
4 Aug
Is There a ‘Right’ to Health Care?
“The question of health care is not one of rights but of how best in practice to organize it. America is certainly not a perfect model in this regard. But neither is Britain, where a universal right to health care has been recognized longest in the Western world. Not coincidentally, the U.K. is by far [...]
4 Aug
Wise insights . . .
“Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism…. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To [...]
