The 'Big Lie' About Fox News

Bruce Hendry

You have probably heard that we all listen to the news that we want to hear and that because of that our respective opinions get hardened because we never hear an opposing view. There is some truth to that but it applies a lot more to leftwing media outlets than it does to the conservative ones. It’s an asymmetrical argument, and here is the reason why: Conservatives are bombarded every day with the liberal point of view if they go to the movies, if they watch network television or listen to Public Radio or Public Television, even Sesame Street. If they view any of the major news channels or read almost any newspaper, such as the Minneapolis StarTribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or even magazines like Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Time and National Geographic, they are getting the Left’s view of the world.

The Fox News channel, a major source of news for conservatives, also features liberal points of view. It does so by featuring liberal anchors like Juan Williams and Chris Wallace, liberal and leftwing guests, liberal regulars like Democrat strategists Jessica Tarlov, Donna Brazile, Leslie Marshall and Mary Ann Marsh. It also gives respectful platforms to radicals and Democrats like Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and it replays clips from what has been broadcast on liberal channels.

In addition to being bombarded by liberal television, newspapers, magazines and movies, conservatives get a big dose of liberal thinking on Fox News. For example, The Tucker Carlson Show is on for an hour, five days a week, and Tucker has mostly liberal guests. Nothing, to my knowledge, occurs like that on any of the liberal channels.

I started watching Fox News two years ago when a liberal friend told me that Fox News is the channel for fake news. I’m a curious guy and so I wanted to find out what fake news is all about and so I started watching Fox. In three years, I haven’t seen a single fake news article on Fox. All I have found is the actual news, something that I wasn’t getting, although I didn’t know it at the time, on NBC. Real news reported on Fox that the liberals don’t like is labeled “fake news.”

I now have learned firsthand about how MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS shape the news in favor of the Left and present the absolute worst view of anything conservative. Omission bias is the number one tool of the leftwing press; it leaves out anything that looks good for President Trump or conservatives, and leaves out anything that looks bad for the Left. It’s actually disgusting and unless you take the effort to watch both liberal and conservative channels, you won’t see it.

The reason that the comparison of news inputs is asymmetrical is because liberals have no opportunity to consistently hear a conservative view unless they make an effort to do so, and very few make that effort.

Even on Facebook, Twitter and Google, anything that smacks of a conservative point of view is scrubbed from their sites and labeled “hate speech.” To give just one small personal example: Candace Owens, a young black conservative, was giving a talk to 450 conservatives at a luncheon I attended. Her talk was being broadcast by one of the attendees to his Twitter group and was taken off the air by Twitter, mid-speech.

Dennis Prager’s Facebook and Twitter accounts have been shut down, along with their platforms, because the Left accuses him of spreading “hate speech.” I listen to Prager on occasion and find that he is a mainline, effective, conservative, religiously-focused speaker. His sin is that he is effective in explaining the conservative view, not that he uses “hate speech.” Liberals can’t tolerate an effective conservative and feel compelled to silence him, as they obstruct and shut down conservative speakers who try to speak on college campuses today.

Democrats say that “hate speech” should be prohibited and is exempted from the First Amendment, which allows free speech to everyone. Sounds good except that Democrats get to decide what “hate speech” is. It turns out that hate speech is almost anything that conservatives say or believe. Saying that “hate speech” is exempt from the protection of the First Amendment is another way to stifle free speech.

David Horowitz, a well known former liberal and now conservative writer, was denied the use of Visa and Master Card for donations to his conservative think tank because of his “hate speech”. Horowitz is a particularly hated conservative writer because he was once a very vocal leftist who raised money for the Black Panthers. He reasoned his way out of his Marxist philosophy and realized that, if successful, progressives would take our country in a bad direction. He changed his emotional progressive views to a reasoned conservative perspective. Liberals consider him a traitor for switching sides and he has personally suffered enormously for that defection. His book Radical Son details his painful journey from the Left to the Right. This is an amazing book that everybody would enjoy reading. I have read it twice.

It turns out that my liberal friends who think that Fox News is fake news don’t actually watch Fox News on a regular basis. One liberal friend claimed to watch Fox News, but upon further discussion I found out that he counted watching Fox Sports as watching Fox News. My liberal friends may have watched Fox once or twice just to say that they did it, but they get most of their opinions on Fox News from other liberals, who don’t watch Fox either.

The Liberal view on Fox News is a perfect example of many things that is disturbing about the liberal Left, like trying to silence those whose views don’t conform to the liberal agenda. The liberal uniform opinion about Fox News is a perfect example of liberal Group Think. Another example is the “Big Lie” about Fox News being fake news. If you tell a lie over and over again, it becomes the truth. In addition to all of that, conservatives everywhere, on campus, or in the school board meetings, or in the neighborhood, are shouted down and not heard by liberals or even other conservatives. By contrast, conservatives are bombarded throughout the day with liberal thought through the media and there aren’t any conservatives shouting them down or trying to stop them from expressing themselves.

If you only read Time magazine, and other East Coast magazines and read the New York Times and the Minneapolis Tribune, and if you only listen to CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and MSNBC, you would have a completely distorted view of what’s going on in America. This is the unfortunate truth for many, maybe even most Americans who call themselves liberal or progressive. Not only is this truth sad, but it is dangerous for the long term outlook of our Republic.

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The Bidens’ Long History of Aid and Comfort to Our Communist Enemies with Actions—Not Just Words

"What I said is what Barack Obama said, in terms of Cuba, that Cuba made progress on education." -Bernie Sanders to Joe Biden at South Carolina's Democratic debate, Feb. 25, 2020.

"He (Obama) did not in any way suggest that there was anything positive about the Cuban government!…” -Joe Biden angrily responded to Sanders.

How’s that again, Joe? Because: "Cuba has an extraordinary resource -- a system of education which values every boy and every girl.” -Barack Obama, Havana, March 22, 2016.

More idiotically (or alarmingly) during the same speech Obama also hailed Cuba’s famous “doctor diplomacy” (i.e. Human Trafficking using slave doctors) “No one should deny the service that thousands of Cuban doctors have delivered for the poor and suffering."

But didn’t Bernie--during that 60 Minutes interview-- double-down on his Cuba praise, comes the response?

Sure, but again he was only aping Obama, who at a town hall meeting in Argentina two days after this Cuba visit himself “doubled-down” on his Cuba praise: “You (the Castro-regime) have made great progress in educating young people.  Every child in Cuba gets a basic education -- that's a huge improvement from where it was.  Medical care -- the life expectancy of Cubans is equivalent to the United States, despite it being a very poor country, because they have access to health care. That's a huge achievement.  They should be congratulated.”

As your humble servant has often pointed out here at Townhall, hailing Castroite Cuba’s healthcare and education is not exactly newsworthy for a prominent Democrat, and certainly didn’t start with Bernie Sanders—or Barack Obama. In fact, it’s more of a rote recitation that rolls off some Democrat tongues more effortlessly –and probably more gratifyingly – than the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance.

Interestingly, Bernie started using that very defense only after it was pointed out here at Townhall, in an article quoting Obama, among many other Democrats. 

In case Bernie plans to stay in the race, and his staffers need more debate ammo, next time you might mention that Joe’s wife, Jill Biden herself, (while in Cuba making a tourism commercial to boost the income of the terror-sponsoring Castro regime) dutifully recited the Democrat Cuban healthcare and education mantra. Or so she was quoted by the KGB-trained communist apparatchiks she was partnering with in Stalinist Cuba. To wit:

“Jill Biden in Cuba to study Cuba’s achievements in health and education," read a headline in Stalinist Cuba’s media, Oct. 6, 2016.

More interestingly, during Jill Biden’s co-production with communist apparatchiks of her Potemkin tourism commercial to boost the income of Castro’s military and secret police who majority own Cuba’s tourism industry —during this apparently gratifying endeavor, Biden’s frequent escort was a Cuban lady named Josefina Vidal.

The KGB-trained Vidal was expelled from the U.S. in Oct. 2003 for her suspected operational links to Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes, responsible for the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in recent history. Montes was known as “Castro’s Queen Jewell” by the intelligence community and was convicted of the same crimes as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Today Montes serves a 25-year sentence in federal prison. Only a plea bargain saved her from frying like the Rosenbergs. If Jill Biden suspected Vidal’s background, she gave no indication.

While Joe Biden served as U.S. vice president, President Obama, employing executive order after executive order, whittled down the (so-called) Cuba embargo and opened a U.S. economic lifeline to the terror-sponsoring Castro regime to a point where the cash-flow from the U.S. to Cuba (mostly in remittances and the tourism spending Jill Biden so graciously boosted) exceeded what the Soviets used to send Cuba at the height of their Castro-sponsorship. No small “achievement.”

As a result—and in a thundering refutation of the liberal/libertarian/Castroite propaganda line that an avalanche of U.S. tourists and their dollars would magically convert Cuba’s Stalinist rulers into Rotarians and their fiefdom into a Caribbean Switzerland—during this Obama/Biden-engineered deluge of U.S. dollars, Castroite repression increased both in Cuba and in their Venezuelan colony.     

And speaking of Cuba’s colonies. When President Reagan was fighting tooth and nail to arm the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras in their desperate fight against the Soviet/Cuban colonization of their homeland, Senator Joe Biden was just as desperately fighting against the anti-communist freedom-fighters. 

Three different times (in 1984, 1986, 1987) Senator Joe Biden voted and lobbied AGAINST Reagan’s attempts to help the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras, who were being helped by many Bay-of-Pigs affiliated Cuban American heroes including (Che Guevara captor) Felix Rodriguez as volunteers. Years earlier Biden had distinguished himself by voting and lobbying AGAINST helping the anti-communist South Vietnamese against their Soviet-lavished mass-murdering enemies.

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Joe Biden Lands Endorsement Of The Nation’s Largest Teachers Union

America's reliably Leftist teachers again

The National Education Association threw its weight behind former Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday night, handing him another big endorsement from organized labor.

Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the president of the powerful teachers union, called Biden a “tireless advocate for public education” and “the partner that students and educators need now in the White House” in a statement announcing the union’s support.

“With so much at stake in this election, educators are determined to use their voice to propel Joe Biden to the White House,” Eskelsen Garcia said.

The NEA’s board of directors backed Biden in a Saturday evening vote, the union said, choosing him over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Biden’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination.

With more than 3 million members nationwide, the NEA is the country’s largest labor union, and its endorsement comes just days before another crucial round of primaries on Tuesday.

The union cited Biden’s engagement on education issues, including the “comprehensive plans” he released for K-12 and higher education, as the main reasons he won its endorsement.

The NEA, which endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary, has been among the most vocal critics of President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whom the union has called “the least qualified secretary of education in history.”

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Screw It America, I'm Beer Blogging

I Hate You, Coronavirus.  The coronavirus finally broke me a little bit on Thursday. I am forever grateful that I have you, my dear readers, to talk me off of the ledge from all of this madness.

A few days ago I wrote that I might just turn this into a beer blog if the news kept being about nothing but THE PLAGUE. I was mostly, but not entirely, joking.

I woke up Thursday to a series of texts that ended up canceling the trip I had scheduled to see my daughter and our family in Michigan.

An hour or so later, the NCAA issued a statement that canceled all Division I winter and spring championships, thus ending my child’s collegiate athletic career.

She is heartbroken, which makes me hate the panic-mongers even more.

As you are all aware, I have been writing about being personally responsible while dealing with this coronavirus scare. I’m still in a self-induced quarantine because I may have been exposed to someone who had the virus two weeks ago. I’m all for being cautious.

Canceling everything on Earth isn’t being cautious, it’s insane.

There is no end game to any of the cancelation madness. If there were, it would all make more sense. Put some metrics in place that would trigger the end of the postponements and cancellations. What we’ve seen in the last two days is all-out panic, which is never useful.

By the time Monday’s briefing rolls around there is a real possibility that most the public school districts in America will have canceled classes for an indefinite period of time. This is madness.

Give us some parameters. Give us an end game. Let us know when the STAY AWAY FROM EVERYONE is supposed to stop.

That’s all we want.

Have a great weekend, my friends.

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Unhappy Birthday: ObamaCare Turns 10

Back in 2010, Barack Obama boasted about his new healthcare plan, “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it. If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too. The only change you’ll see are falling costs as our reforms take hold.”

It all sounded too good to be true … because it was a BIG lie. And yet Obama and his fellow Democrats kept repeating that lie, along with the fiction that a massive government takeover of healthcare would somehow reduce the federal deficit.

In fact, ObamaCare’s bureaucracy is now eating up a higher percentage of national spending on health, premiums have skyrocketed (including those for employer-provided coverage), deductibles have increased, and patients have little say over which doctors they can see.

As Chris Talgo writes in The Hill, “Sadly, since Obamacare’s inception one decade ago, the vast majority of Americans are not better off in terms of their health insurance costs and health care access. Obamacare has failed miserably because it lacks free-market principles and is a one-size-fits all, centrally planned boondoggle.” Talgo adds, “In the next decade, and for decades to come, the American health care system would function much more optimally if patients, not bureaucrats, were allowed to take control of their health care decisions.”

It’s no wonder that more Americans than ever before are without health insurance.

Even the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services assert that despite ObamaCare’s promises to provide affordable health insurance, the law failed to control costs. As a result, “These data show how Obamacare created an entirely new class of uninsured individuals, among those with middle to higher incomes who don’t qualify for government subsidies and can’t afford coverage because of skyrocketing premiums.”

And what about those tired complaints from Democrats that ObamaCare would’ve been just fine had it not been for Republican interference, and that it’s President Donald Trump’s fault for tinkering with an engine that was running smoothly?

Actually, the ObamaCare engine wouldn’t start from day one — because it was nothing more than a bunch of bad parts thrown together under the hood of a shiny car.

The editors at Issues & Insight write, “None of Obamacare’s failings can be blamed on Republican attempts to sabotage the law. Double-digit premiums were the norm long before President Donald Trump entered the White House. Most of the heavily subsidized non-profit ‘co-op’ plans — which were supposed to keep premiums in check — had already failed. The Republicans’ repeal of the individual mandate had no impact on enrollment. Nor did expanding ‘short-term’ insurance plans that bypass Obamacare’s massive and costly regulatory regime.”

After such an epic failure, we might rightly expect Democrats to hang their collective heads in shame. After all, every single aspect of ObamaCare turned out to be the opposite of what they promised. But Democrats have no shame.

And let’s be honest: ObamaCare was never really supposed to do anything other than begin the fundamental transformation of the world’s best healthcare system into a fully socialized one.

That’s why presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden is today spouting the same old lies. On the campaign trail this year, the former vice president promised, “If you like your health care plan, your employer-based plan, you can keep it. If in fact you have private insurance, you can keep it.”

What’s the old saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Indeed, shame on all of us if we buy into the Democrats’ BIG lie once again.

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Blinded by Hate

Everyone on the Left seems so angry about everything all the time

It has been interesting watching the primaries and caucuses of the Democrat Party. It’s come down to two old angry white men.

Bernie Sanders seems to be mad all the time, waving his hands and yelling about how evil the country is. So, to save it, he’s going to tear it all down and start over.

Joe Biden is pretty angry too, which is surprising because just two weeks ago they were preparing his campaign’s obituary. None the less, he seems to go ballistic whenever someone asks a question he doesn’t want to hear. Whether it’s a young woman, senior citizen, or construction worker, Joe flies off the handle and resorts to name-calling. I’m not a politician (thank you Jesus!) but that doesn’t seem like the best way to win over voters.

Everyone seems angry! Nancy Pelosi is angry because Donald Trump is president and, she says, civilization as we know it is in great peril! And here I thought global warming would destroy us. Adam Schiff never stopped being angry since the entire impeachment scam began. That’s probably why he told us in the Senate chamber we couldn’t trust voters to vote the way he wants, so Trump needed to be impeached.

Chuck Schumer stood outside the Supreme Court threatening two Supreme Court justices with violence if they vote the wrong way. You can slice and dice his words to try and defend him, but it was a threat. Fortunately, he’s a Democrat and there will be no consequences, just as Pelosi faced none after tearing up the State of the Union speech. Both are violations of written laws.

During the same rally outside the Supreme Court, activists ranted like lunatics about women having the right to choose what they do to their bodies. No mention was made of the really innocent victims — the preborn children.

What’s interesting is the case before the justices had nothing to do with eliminating abortion. It’s about doctors having access to a hospital in the event the abortion procedure goes badly. (I mean, worse than usual.) Aren’t progressives all about saving the woman’s life? Yet, they were all unhinged, screaming and yelling and waving signs saying abortion is a Catholic value. Who thought up that one?

The coronavirus is giving the Left more ammunition to attack the president. Trump is racist and xenophobic for stopping flights from China. However, in retrospect, it turns out to have been the right decision. A young Hispanic woman on the Denver City Council encouraged people with the virus to go to Trump rallies. No comment from the media.

These are just a few of the outrageous things happening in our country, fueled by the Left’s rage and anger at losing the 2016 election. The network talkingheads have spewed hate, fake news and garbage day after day after day for over three years now.

What are leftists offering Americans as a vision of the future if they are elected? There are no plans to make this country a place where we can live and thrive together. Hate, greed, and envy are not a winning message for normal voters in this country. You’ve overplayed your hand, Democrats. We know who you really are!

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Watch Why People Are 'Fleeing California' – It Ain't Pretty

Yes, those lumps of clothes really are people sleeping on the streets. Cable car rides are often ruined by the unmistakable whiff of sun-soaked urine. Small business owners – which employ 40% of the workforce – are held down by masochistic regulators. And people are getting the hell out of California.

They're fleeing. A new Prager University video called "Fleeing California"  – which will probably be censored by one of the tech giants in 3...2...1 –  highlights the lowlights of California and explains why so many are heading for Texas.

Besides pointing out that California's Leftist 'progressive' politics have created this current quality-of-life calamity, the educational nonprofit, headed by radio host and public intellectual Dennis Prager, points out a litany of reasons why middle-class Americans, fledgling business owners, and others simply can't make a go of it in the Golden State.

Roughly 30% of all people on public assistance are in the state of California.

About 20% are below the poverty line.

To get a median priced apartment a person/s would have to make $48 an hour.

The state is home to now up to 49% of the nation's homeless.

Regulator compliance costs $135,000 per business at the cost of 3.8 million jobs.

Those are the low-lights. The good news is that people are seeking freedom, according to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who is interviewed in the 14-minute video.

The problem for the people currently living in Texas and Tennessee, another hot spot for fleeing Californians, is that they'll bring their Golden State sensibilities with them. Then where will people flee?

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IN BRIEF

NOT A CHECK: Federal Reserve to inject $1.5 trillion into markets to offset economic impact of coronavirus (National Review)

COMMUNIST DISINFORMATION: China government spokesman says U.S. military may have brought virus to China (Reuters)

A RELUCTANT DECISION: NRA cancels annual meeting (The Washington Free Beacon)

PRIME MINISTER IN ISOLATION FOR TWO WEEKS: Justin Trudeau's wife tests positive for new coronavirus (AP)

RETALIATION: U.S. launches strikes in Iraq against Iranian-backed militias after attack that killed coalition troops (The Washington Post)

OH, BY THE WAY: Buried from Trump Tower meeting: translator telling FBI "no collusion" (RealClearInvestigations)

SEVEN MONTHS TOO LATE: 1619 Project leader admits she got it wrong (Washington Examiner)

BORROWING DENIED: Had enough? Taxed-enough-already Californians turn down higher taxes, debt (AP)

PRECAUTIONS: President Trump announces 30-day ban on travel from Europe over coronavirus threat (National Review)

FOR THE RECORD: Ilhan Omar reveals she married the man she denied having affair with (The Daily Wire)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Joe Biden Appears to Forget What Office He's Running for (Again) During Victory Speech

In a choice between senility or socialism, Democrat primary voters appear to be falling in line behind the former. I guess that's a good thing. But, questions about Joe Biden cognitive decline have been raised for a long time now, and it's hard to understand how the Democratic Party settled on Crazy Joe as their safe choice for runnig against Donald Trump.

In the past few weeks alone, we've seen Joe Biden forget where he is, what he's running for, who his wife and sister are, Barack Obama's name, and the words to the Declaration of Independence. The gaffes just keep piling up.

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume believes that Biden is  "is losing his memory and is getting senile," and he is certainly not alone in that assessment.

On Tuesday night, Biden won big once again, but there was a moment during his victory speech that was concerning.

“These are all people been working like the devil to try to get us elected as the, uh…so I want to thank you,” he said. Did Biden forget what office he's running for... again? It sure looks that way.

Joe Biden: "These are all people been working like the devil to try to get us elected as the, uh, so I want to thank you" Did Biden again forget which office he is running for???

Last month he told a group of people that he was running for the U.S. Senate

How does one watch this and not be concerned? Especially when you consider the other recent gaffes that call into question Biden's cognitive health.

Worse yet, there was a another moment when Biden appeared to slur his speech while saying "education."

This is the guy Democrats are likely gonna have run against President Trump. Good luck with that.

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'Moderate' Joe Biden has moved way to the left

by Jeff Jacoby

FOR MUCH of the past year, the broad storyline of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign has been that Democrats are united in a fierce determination to oust President Trump, but divided over how best to do so. To the "progressive" camp, the Trump presidency represents a crisis that can be halted and reversed only with the boldest, most sweeping changes in US policy. The "moderate" camp, by contrast, believes that the only way to beat Trump is with a candidate who can appeal to more than just hardcore Democrats — who can reach independents and even some centrist Republicans with a program that eschews radical excess, appeals to the sober mainstream, and holds out the promise, in a famous phrase from American presidential history, of a return to normalcy.

The nomination battle has effectively come down to a two-man race: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders occupies the progressive lane, and former Vice President Joe Biden is running in the moderate lane. No one doubts Sanders's leftist credentials. But is Biden really a moderate?

To hear some leftists tell it, Biden is not only moderate, but intolerably so. When, at one progressive conference, he was described as seeking "middle ground" on climate policy, Democratic firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was contemptuous: "I will be damned if the same politicians who refused to act come back today and say we need a middle-of-the-road approach to save our lives."

Biden may seem hopelessly accommodationist to those on the Democratic Party's leftmost fringe. But in reality, he is running on a platform far more progressive — i.e., far less moderate — than any Democratic presidential nominee in history.

One of Biden's foremost selling points is the eight years he spent as vice president in the last Democratic administration. In St. Louis over the weekend, he spooneristically proclaimed himself an "O'Biden-Bama Democrat." If Biden wins the nomination, he can count on robust support from Obama, perhaps the most beloved figure within the Democratic Party today.

Yet on issue after issue, Biden has veered sharply from Obama's path.

On health insurance, for example, Obama rejected a public option as part of the Affordable Care Act and repeatedly stressed the importance of maintaining private coverage. But Biden favors a public option open to everyone, including the majority of Americans with employer-sponsored health coverage.

Biden supports government-funded health care even for unauthoritzed immigrants, something Obama never came close to proposing. He supports a sharp increase in US refugee admissions, and a path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants. When Obama ran for the White House in 2008, by contrast, it was as an enforcement-first hardliner. He cracked down so hard on those who crossed the border illegally, he was known for much of his presidency as the "deporter-in-chief."

No Democratic presidential nominee ever endorsed anything like the radical Green New Deal, with its price tag in the tens of trillions of dollars and its goal of eliminating the use of all fossil fuels. But Biden does. No Democratic nominee ever called for a national minimum wage of $15 an hour. But Biden does. The former vice president has moved emphatically leftward on abortion, on the death penalty, on free trade. By any understanding of "moderate" as that term was used when Obama or Bill Clinton was president, Biden is no moderate.

What Biden is today is what he has always been: a liberal Democrat. But as his party has shifted left in a hyperpolarized era, Biden has shifted with it. Many of the positions he takes that are described as centrist today, observed Axios in January, "would have been liberal dreams during the Bill Clinton years and still out of reach in the Obama era." On policy, Biden is a moderate primarily in the sense that he embraces positions that most Democrats no longer fight over.

All of which means that even if Biden wins the Democratic nomination, progressive Democrats will have reason to rejoice. Their party's standard-bearer will be someone whose platform skews further to the left than any major party platform in US history. Sanders may not end up on the November ballot, but it will unmistakably reflect his influence. For he and his band of progressives have pushed their party to the left with such success that even the "moderate" in the race would be the most liberal Democrat ever nominated for president.

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Supreme Court Allows Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ Program to Stay in Place

The nation’s highest court on Wednesday ruled that the White House’s "Remain in Mexico" program, also known as Migrant Protection Protocols, can remain effective for the entire southern border while a legal challenge continues on. (Photo: Getty Images)

The Supreme Court delivered a win for the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, blocking a federal court injunction that would have limited a program that requires asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico.

The nation’s highest court on Wednesday ruled that the White House’s “Remain in Mexico” program, also known as Migrant Protection Protocols, can remain effective for the entire southern border while a legal challenge continues on. The decision allows the administration to continue fully implementing an initiative that, it contends, has monumentally helped control the border crisis.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier in March declared that it would block the Migrant Protection Protocols in Arizona and California—two states within its jurisdiction—on March 12 unless the Supreme Court weighed in.

The Supreme Court justices did intervene with just one day left, granting the administration’s application for a stay.

The White House immediately celebrated the ruling.

“We are gratified that the Supreme Court granted a stay, which prevents a district court injunction from impairing the security of our borders and the integrity of our immigration system,” a Department of Justice spokesperson said Wednesday.

“The Migrant Protection Protocols, implemented pursuant to express authority granted by Congress decades ago, have been critical to restoring the government’s ability to manage the Southwest border and to work cooperatively with the Mexican government to address illegal immigration,” the spokesperson continued.

Remain in Mexico, which was launched in January 2019, has become President Donald Trump’s most effective tool at controlling the U.S immigration crisis. The program requires most non-Mexican nationals who claim asylum at the U.S. southern border to wait in Mexico for the entirety of their court proceedings.

Since its inception, Migrant Protection Protocols has sent around 60,000 asylum-seekers across the border to wait in Mexico, mostly eliminating the possibility for them to be released into the interior of the U.S.

The decision on Wednesday marks the latest back-and-forth between the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals—which has proven hostile to Trump’s immigration agenda—blocked the Remain in Mexico program for the entire southern border in February. However, the court immediately suspended that order after the Trump administration filed an emergency motion requesting a stay.

The appeals court then declared this month it would block it in Arizona and California, but the nation’s highest court—once again—put a stop to that order Wednesday.

However, the legality of the program itself has not been ruled on by the Supreme Court. The order on Wednesday simply allows it to remain in place as the legal challenge against it runs through the court system.

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British Budget 2020 summary

The Chancellor of the Exchequer announced a range of policies to support business, bolster the NHS and prepare for Britain's long-term future

Addressing the coronavirus crisis, he said that this British parliament had a great tradition of rising above party in times of peril: he was sure that the House and the country were ready to act “in the national interest”. We would, he said, get through this together. The British people were worried but not daunted. This was well said and all the more effective for being obviously true.

Then he got to the substance of the Government’s plan for coping with the economic effects of the pestilence – even while making it clear that this was not going to be an excuse for putting all the Government’s election promises on indefinite hold. This was clever too. A plague Budget would have looked like an excuse for a cop-out on the difficult future and it would have added to the alarming sense of national emergency.

So first there were the measures to mitigate the damage of the virus and the Government’s own advice to stay at home. These were serious. The first priority had to be the protection of small businesses which were most likely to go under. The immediate problems for them were the new Government edict that they must pay statutory sick pay from the first day of  any enforced absence by staff. The cost of that, he announced, would be directly met by the Government: the Treasury would refund employers 14 days of sick pay for their self-isolating staff. For the self-employed and those in the gig economy whose livelihoods would simply vanish if they were forced to stay at home, there was help too.

The minimum income base for Universal Credit would be suspended and payment of the benefit would be accelerated. There was an even more stupendous development for the owners of small high street businesses whose business rates would be suspended for the duration of the present emergency. There would also be loans – a new Business Interruption Loan Scheme – for those damaged by loss of customer demand. Between them, these measures could save a good many small enterprises and family firms.

Of course there was to be more money for the NHS and for research into the virus itself. But perhaps of more immediate effect for the availability of treatment to patients was the reform of the pensions tax taper. By increasing the threshold, the Chancellor said, he would be taking 98 per cent of consultants and GPs out of the taper altogether. This should have a quite miraculous effect on the imminent retirement plans of so many senior doctors and thus provide a significant improvement in the staffing levels of primary care services.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

FOR THE RECORD: Here's why coronavirus stats are fake news (CNSNews.com)

VULNERABLE OLD MEN: Next Democrat debate to be held without an audience (CBS News)

ACRIMONY: Saudi Arabia throws down gauntlet to Russia, raises crude oil supply to record high (The Daily Wire)

SEEMS LEGIT: Hunter Biden to skip deposition in paternity case, citing coronavirus and pregnant wife (Washington Examiner)

"A REAL LEADER": President Trump endorses Tommy Tuberville over Jeff Sessions in Alabama Senate runoff (National Review)

POLICY: ObamaCare at 10: A massive failure (Issues & Insights)

POLICY: Why social-justice investing is a load of politicized hypocrisy (The Federalist)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Paul Krugman Is Selling Snake Oil

Arguing with Zombies is the title of a new book by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Although the “book” is actually a collection of his newspaper columns, the title gives us real insight into the thinking behind those columns.

Who are the Zombies? And why argue with them?

Zombies are economists who believe that every tax cut pays for itself with increased revenue. They believe that social insurance has created an army of welfare addicts who would rather live off the dole than support themselves. They hate the poor. They are closet racists. They do the bidding of billionaire puppet masters who pay their salaries and fund their research. Their goal in life is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Where do you find these zombies? You can’t. They don’t exist. Like the creatures of fiction, they are the product of a vivid imagination. Krugman delights in creating straw men. He verbally beats them about the head and shoulders and then walks away thinking he has won the Golden Gloves.

But wait a minute. Aren’t there serious public policy issues over which economists disagree? Isn’t Krugman outside the mainstream on many of them? And on some issues, hasn’t Krugman’s been embarrassingly wrong?

The answers are: yes, yes and yes. But you won’t learn about any of that by reading Krugman’s columns. Or by reading his book.

What you will learn is that Krugman hates Republicans and hates economists who advise them. His specialty in trade is the argument ad hominem. He doesn’t just disagree with people; he psychoanalyses them. He attacks their character, their motives, their honesty and their morality.

But why attack Republicans? If we accept Krugman at his word, he cares about income inequality, racism and the lack of progress for people at the bottom of the income ladder. Republican politicians have very little control over any of that.

In virtually every large city in the country, minority families are all too often forced to send their children to the worst schools. They live in the worst housing. They endure the worst environmental hazards. And in virtually every case, these cities are being run by Democrats!

Of the two parties, Democrats are far more hostile to the science of economics than Republicans. The fact that so many Democrats are socialists shows how little regard they have for anything economists think.

The typical delegate to the Democratic National Convention thinks that if a price is too low, government should raise it and nothing bad will happen. If a price is too high, government should lower it and nothing bad will happen. With the right minimum wage, everyone would be upper-middle class. With the right rent control, everyone would be living in luxury housing.

As the saying goes, if you want to save souls, you need to go where the sinners are. But Krugman isn’t into saving souls. Like a fire and brimstone preacher, he’s into consigning the righteous to eternal damnation for minor peccadillos.

Although the Times bills Krugman as a Nobel Prize winner, what you get from a typical Krugman column is not economics. It’s propaganda. All too often, he highlights some facts and suppresses others – arriving at an analysis that no real economist would consider fair-minded. For example:

Reading Krugman on the Republican tax reform, you would never know that the Obama administration also favored a large cut in the corporate income tax; or that the purpose was to encourage capital to stay in this country rather than go abroad; or that since the tax bill was passed $1 trillion has been repatriated back to this country by U.S. firms.

Reading Krugman on corporate taxation, you would never know that both theory and evidence suggest that workers, rather than rich people, bear the burden of the income tax and that corporate taxes actually suppress worker wages both in this country and abroad.

Reading Krugman on Social Security and Medicare reform, you would never know that the U.S. government has an unfunded liability of $239 trillion – a figure that is more than ten times the size of our economy – or that 19 Nobel Prize winners have signed a petition asking the federal government to accurately account for this debt.

 Reading Krugman on income inequality, you would never know that OECD statistics show that the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world or that tax reform made the tax code even more progressive than it was.

 Reading Krugman on the minimum wage you would never know that the original purpose of this Progressive Era reform was to keep white Aryan males from having to compete with blacks, women and immigrants in the labor market.

Withholding material facts that readers have every right to know about is intellectual dishonesty. lf we were in a court of law it would be called fraud.

Here are a few more things you won’t learn from Krugman’s new book.

Paul Krugman is an unreconstructed Keynesian. He believes that federal government deficits have a strong impact on the economy but that monetary policy is weak and ineffective. In 2013, Krugman announced that Keynesianism and monetarism were being put to the test. If Keynesianism was correct, an increase in the payroll tax and restrained federal spending should have slowed the economy down that year. But if monetarism was correct, monetary expansion should have kept the economy right on humming.

The monetarists (especially the market monetarists) won that contest in spades.

Also, in 2013, we had another disastrous test of Krugman’s view of the world. That’s when North Carolina reduced benefits for the unemployed. Although Krugman’s  textbook says that unemployment (UI) benefits reduce employment by giving people incentives not to work, in the New York Times he advanced a weird Keynesian argument that UI benefits actually increase employment. When the unemployed spend their benefits they stimulate the economy, he wrote. Based on that analysis, he claimed that North Carolina was conducting a “war on the unemployed.”

It didn’t take long for these predictions to be completely discredited. Following the cut in UI benefits, more North Carolinians went back to work.

Although there are so many examples to choose from, I nominate the following candidate for Krugman economics at its worst.

Krugman has said over and over again, in column after column, that the Republican tax reform is a failure because companies are using their tax cut gains to buy back stock rather than to create jobs.

This error in reasoning would get an “F” in a freshman economics class and would probably get you kicked out of graduate school if you made it that far.

When companies buy back their own stock, the money doesn’t disappear. It goes out of one pocket and into another. In the new pocket it’s just as available to create jobs as it was before. When new funds enter the capital market they tend to find their way to the companies that have the best prospects for investment and job creation.

That’s the way it should be.

Finally, if you are thinking that Krugman has never met a Republican, you might be inclined to cut him some slack.

But it turns out Krugman actually worked in the White House during the Reagan administration. That means he knows the tax cuts weren’t devised by economists whose motivation was to make the rich richer. He knows his fellow economic advisors to the president weren’t puppets, doing the bidding of billionaires. He knows they weren’t closet racists. He knows they didn’t hate the poor. He knows . . . . well . . . he knows it all.

SOURCE 

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Three Reasons Joe Biden Will Never Be President

Joe Biden was sworn into the United States Senate on Jan. 3, 1973. He remained in the Senate until Jan. 15, 2009 -- a span of 36 years. If history is any guide, that alone is a disqualifier in Biden's quest for the White House.

What does 36 years in the Senate say about a politician? It says he is a senator -- not a president.

So the first reason Biden will not become president is that no one who served 36 years in the Senate has ever become president. No one who served 30 years in the Senate has ever become president. No one who served 25 years in the Senate has ever become president. No one who served 20 years in the Senate has ever become president. No one who served 15 years in the Senate has ever become president.

It's not for lack of trying. Bob Dole, who was sworn into the Senate on Jan. 3, 1969, ran for president 27 years later, in 1996. He quit the Senate during the campaign to show his determination to become president. But his long years in the chamber, plus his age -- he was 73 at the time and the subject of endless suggestions that he was too old to be president -- were a deal-killer for voters.

Others tried, too. In 2008, John McCain ran for president after 21 years in the Senate. It didn't work. In 2004, John Kerry ran for president after 19 years in the Senate. That didn't work, either.

A long career in the Senate is simply not a foundation for a successful run for the White House. The most recent political figure to realize that was Barack Obama, who was sworn into the Senate in 2005 and two years later was running for the presidency -- and to get out of the Senate.

OK, put aside the Senate, Biden's supporters would say. What about his eight years as vice president? Certainly that could be the basis for a successful presidential run. But the second reason Biden will not become president is that the record of vice presidents on that score is not encouraging.

Fourteen vice presidents have become president. Of those, eight became president upon the death of the president. Of that group, some were later elected to the White House, but they were running for the office as the sitting president.

Others, like George H.W. Bush, became president by succeeding the president they served. They won the presidency as the sitting vice president. When Bush did that, in 1988, it had not been done since 1836. It has not been done since.

In any event, that is not Biden's situation. He served eight years as vice president, but did not run to succeed President Obama. Now, he is running as a private citizen.

Only one president has gone from the vice presidency to private life and then to the presidency. Richard Nixon served as vice president in the 1950s, narrowly lost the 1960 presidential election, and then came back to win the presidency in 1968. That is Biden's hope -- that a vice president can leave office and then, after a period outside government, return to win the White House.

Perhaps. But Nixon, who spent less than three years in the Senate, became vice president a few days after turning 40, and was sworn in as president at 56 -- more than two decades younger than Biden, who will be 78 on Inauguration Day 2021.

Finally, the third reason Biden will not be president is the "14-Year Rule." The idea of former George W. Bush speechwriter John McConnell, and popularized by writer Jonathan Rauch, it basically says that politicians have a strict sell-by date. "No one gets elected president who needs longer than 14 years to get from his or her first gubernatorial or Senate victory to either the presidency or the vice presidency," Rauch wrote. That has been true for a century.

Biden didn't even get close. It took him 36 years to get from his first Senate victory to the vice presidency. If he wins the presidency now, it would be 47 years from that first Senate swearing-in until Inauguration Day.

Of course, it's possible the 14-Year Rule, the Too Long in the Senate Rule, and the How Vice Presidents Become President Rule might all be wrong in Biden's case. If so, he can frame this headline and hang it somewhere in the White House. But don't bet on it.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Dems' dilemma: What to do with Joe?

 

A conservative political pundit believes many in the Democratic Party are deeply concerned about Joe Biden's fitness to be president and may take an extraordinary step if he's nominated.

A resurgent Biden scored victories from Texas to Massachusetts on Super Tuesday, revitalizing a presidential bid that was teetering on the edge of disaster just days earlier. The Associated Press reports that his victories were powered by Democratic voters who broke his way just days before casting their ballots, resulting in "a wave of late momentum that scrambled the race in a matter of hours."

'Just sad' to listen to Biden

It's no secret that the former vice president has been described as a "gaff machine" over the years. But in recent weeks on the campaign trail, Biden has perhaps brought it to new level – referring to "Super Thursday" instead of "Super Tuesday," stating that 150 million Americans have been killed by "gun violence" since 2007, describing himself as "a candidate for the United States Senate," and bungling an opportunity to recite the preamble to the Declaration of Independence by referring to the "Creator" as "the thing."

Sandy Rios is director of governmental affairs at American Family Association. During a recent appearance on American Family Radio, she presented a possible scenario for a Biden candidacy moving forward.

Sandy Rios"Many people believe – and I'm one of them – that if they can just manipulate things so that Joe wins the nomination … and if they prevent Bernie Sanders from getting it, they will appoint someone like Hillary Clinton as his vice president," she offered. "And then Joe will be sort of pulled aside and he won't really be running things."

She's convinced Biden doesn't have the capacity to meet the rigors of the office. "I think it's pretty obvious that he is not capable anymore – there are just too many mistakes. It's hard to listen to … it's not even funny anymore, it's just sad."

Rios adds: "Honestly, I am not sure what the [Democratic] establishment is going to do about Joe Biden, given his inability to articulate [and] to remember. His stumbling and bumbling are going to become even more apparent on the campaign trail."

SOURCE 

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Fighting Regulatory Dark Matter

If you’ve spent enough time in a public school or listening to cable news, you are probably convinced to some extent that regulations exist to protect the American citizenry, whether physically or financially. However, if you’ve been paying attention to reality, you will recognize that it is quite the opposite. The regulatory state has been weaponized against everyday Americans.

Thankfully, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), under the leadership of Acting Administrator Russ Vought, is seeking to curb the bureaucratic bullying that happens all too often across the country.

They are seeking to codify two executive orders by the Trump administration that promote transparency. It would limit the use of so-called “guidance documents” in bringing enforcement actions against American citizens. It would also ensure that victims of bureaucratic bullying are given the opportunity to see said documents, be warned beforehand, and have greater standing to challenge any action brought against them.

This is not a result of paranoia about the vast power of the state. This is happening to working men, women, and families across the country to this day.

Andy Johnson owns a small farm in Wyoming with his family. He wanted to build a pond for his four daughters’ horses to drink and graze on their land. Andy and his wife Katie worked with Wyoming engineers to dig out this pond, fill it with filtered water, and create a habitat for various wildlife.

This all seems like a rather idyllic picture of the quintessential American dream. That was, until two years later, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) came knocking on their door. They notified the Johnsons that they were in violation of the Clean Water Act - despite clear documentation from the state of Wyoming indicating that they weren’t. The EPA, with its arsenal and all, assured the Johnsons they would be fined $16 million if they did not comply and destroy the pond.

Sadly, the Johnsons do not find themselves alone in this predicament. As documented by Conservative Partnership Institute’s Rachel Bovard, there are a number of similar cases all over America:

In 2007, Mike and Chantell Sackett were threatened by the EPA with $75,000 a day in fines for trying to build a house on their own property, across the road and 500 feet away from Priest Lake in Idaho.

Charles Johnson, a Massachusetts cranberry farmer, spent millions of dollars fighting the agency for 22 years for the right to farm his own land. He finally settled in 2012, at the age of 80.

Kevin Lunny lost his family’s oyster company in California when the Department of the Interior granted itself limitless discretion to reissue the required permit and argued that Lunny didn’t have the right to sue.

In Alaska, the Army Corps of Engineers denied Richard Schok the ability to expand his pipe fabrication business when they claimed that permafrost — the subsurface layer of soil that remains frozen throughout the year — was actually a wetland.

There are real victims and real consequences to this bureaucratic bullying. Lifelong unelected bureaucrats are setting traps for the American people and not even giving them the chance to comply or fight back. This is not about protecting anyone or anything.

For too long the federal regulatory state has been giving too much leeway to operate as it pleases anyway. The Trump administration is fighting back and giving the public an opportunity to talk about how this issue can be resolved. OMB has a public comment period open until March 22nd for the public to make their voices heard.

It is time to significantly roll back the regulatory state and put more power and freedom in the hands of everyday Americans. Families trying to find a better way to water their horses are not criminals. It’s time to give folks like them the upper hand.

SOURCE 

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The Politics of a 'Fear Pandemic'

Democrats are hoping that the COVID-19 threat will be Trump's "Hurricane Katrina." 

Democrat Party leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi are in a quandary. They have to decide which of the headline tragedies today make for better political fodder — do they keep feeding the coronavirus fears, or do they put that on pause and politicize the Milwaukee murders in order to advance their gun-confiscation agenda?

Yes, their political modus operandi is just that causticly crass.

It follows the model perfected by Barack Obama and his then-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who openly declared, “You don’t ever want a good crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” And that is exactly what they did in 2008, when Obama used a pandemic of financial fear as his ticket to the presidency. At the time, even Bill Clinton admitted that the Democrats were responsible for that crisis because they resisted “efforts by Republicans in the Congress … to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Clinton himself had loosened up those standards 10 years earlier, with disastrous financial consequences but fortuitous political consequences.

My point is not to relitigate how the Democrats used that “fear pandemic” to ensure Obama’s election but to say they are experts at converting tragedy into political triumph. Their current “Hate Trump” platform is constructed on their perennial political foundation of fear, anger, and division.

At this point in the 2020 election cycle, Democrats are scrambling for any “opportunity to do things you think you could not do before” to enable them defeat Donald Trump, especially if they can’t dispense with Bernie Sanders frontrunner status. COVID-19, the scientific term for coronavirus, is providing them an election-year crisis that they won’t let go to waste, especially if it becomes a significant domestic health threat. They see the potential to convert coronavirus into Trump’s “Hurricane Katrina.”

In January, I wrote a comprehensive analysis, “The Flu and You,” putting the potential for a COVID-19 flu pandemic into perspective and offering helpful links on preparedness and response. At that time, the Trump administration was taking significant steps to prevent a viral spread in the U.S.

Monday of this week, reflecting concern about the economic impact of coronavirus, there was a 3.5% equities-market selloff — a bellwether indicator of economic concerns. For the record, there are other factors – equities are likely due a 10-15% correction, and the possibility that Bernie Sanders could somehow win the 2020 presidential election is cause for a lot of concern among businesses and consumers. Responding to the selloff, Nate Jackson provided an update on COVID-19, noting how Schumer and Pelosi had their coronavirus crisis/fear machine at full throttle. Pelosi claims the Trump administration’s request for $2.5 billion in funding was “long overdue and completely inadequate.” Schumer declared that Trump is “asleep at the wheel.”

On Tuesday, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, an official at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), promoted a panic narrative that ran contrary to the Trump administration’s measured concern and effort to encourage calm. Messonnier, who is the sister of former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (one of the coup co-conspirators), told Leftmedia reporters that the pandemic potential is “bad” and the “disruption to everyday life may be severe.” She declared, “It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen.”

Let me be clear: Messonnier could be right. COVID-19 is estimated to be much more lethal than the .1% fatality rate of typical flu bugs, which have killed more than 60,000 Americans in a single year.

But her comments were irresponsible and played right into the Demos’ panic narrative — and another market selloff of 3.2%. The selloff continued into Wednesday and is not over. By undermining consumer and business confidence, and thus the equities markets, Democrats are playing politics with the wealth and job stability of all working Americans and their families. Democrats are quietly high-fiving each other in Capitol Hill cloakrooms, knowing that what is bad for America workers is bad for Trump’s reelection prospects.

Messonnier’s dire warnings necessitated an executive press conference Wednesday evening with President Trump and his key administration officials.

Trump announced the appointment of Vice President Mike Pence and HHS Secretary Alex Azar to head the White House coronavirus-containment task force. Trump assured the public, “Whatever happens, we’re totally prepared,” adding the infection rates in the U.S. “may get a little bigger, [or] it may not get bigger at all. … Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.” Of note regarding the “reliability” of reports from China’s communist regime that they are containing the epidemic, Trump said: “If you can count on the reports coming out of China, the spread has gone down.”

Asked if he thought threat had been politically “weaponized” by the CDC and Messonnier, he responded: “No, I don’t think the CDC is at all. … They’re professional. I think they’re beyond that. They want this to go away, they want to do it with as little disruption, and they don’t want to lose life.”

Secretary Azar reiterated Trump’s confidence, but was clear that the threat could shift quickly: “The immediate risk to the American public has been and continues to be low. At the same time, what every one of our experts and leaders have been saying for more than a month now remains true. The degree of risk has the potential to change quickly and we can expect to see more cases in the United States.”

The CDC’s Deputy Director, Dr. Anne Schuchat, added, “We do expect more cases [and] now is the time for businesses, health care systems, universities, and schools to look at their pandemic preparedness plans, dust them off, and make sure that they’re ready.”

For his part, Mike Pence outlined the administration’s response thus far and plans moving forward: “[President Trump] declared a public health emergency. He suspended travel to the United States from China. He initiated quarantine efforts for American citizens returning, and he established the White House Coronavirus Task Force, which has literally met every single day. President Trump has directed me to lead a whole of government approach to address the coronavirus in this country. And I promise you: We will continue to bring the full resources of the federal government to bear to protect the American people… We’re all in this together. This is not the time for partisanship. This president will always put the health and safety of America first.”

As I noted in my COVID-19 analysis last month, for the most current information on the viral threat in the U.S., visit the CDC’s page, “What You Should Know,” which provides updates, preventive measures, travel advice, etc. You can review the CDC’s national pandemic-response plan and basic citizen flu-prevention measures.

And finally, as I noted in “The REAL Pandemic Threat” back in 2006, “Clearly, there are significant pandemic threats posed by viral infections that mutate into much more contagious forms and can spread regionally, nationally, and internationally, causing significant loss of life. The primary defense against such contagions is the capacity to shelter in place. What originates in China or Africa one week can be in your suburb the next.”

For that reason, we developed a comprehensive resource page on Disaster Preparedness Planning, including a Two-Step Individual Readiness Plan and a section on how to shelter in place. We encourage you to visit each of these pages, because national preparedness begins with individual preparedness, and individual preparedness is the firewall against a “fear pandemic.”

Update Elizabeth Warren, a master at politicizing everything, is demanding that funding for the border wall be diverted to combat COVID-19 nationally. But the fact is, our porous southern border is a signifiant entry point for the virus, particularly if there is an outbreak in Central America, sending caravans of “pandemic refugees” north. But more to the point, recently there has been a significant increase of Chinese nationals crossing our the southern border.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

VIGILANCE: Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Paul Gosar self-quarantine after exposure to coronavirus patient at CPAC (National Review)

DEPOSE NO MORE: Kamala Harris's ironic endorsement of Joe Biden (Washington Examiner)

"THE RELATIONSHIP IS A VERY GOOD ONE": Trump announces Mark Meadows to replace Mick Mulvaney as White House chief of staff (Fox News)

2020 VISION: Record GOP voting enthusiasm breaks pattern, topping Democrats (Washington Examiner)

"DONE OUR DUTY"? Christopher Steele refuses to cooperate with John Durham review (Washington Examiner)

NINTH CIRCUS: "Remain in Mexico" program blocked by Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California and Arizona (The Daily Caller)

WHO'D A THUNK IT? Major crimes in New York City unexpectedly surge after bail-reform law (Hot Air)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Museum Director on Super Tuesday: 'I Hope Every Single One ... That Votes Republican Dies Today'

That Leftist hatred is both deep and wide

As Texans headed to the polls on Super Tuesday, a museum director posted a message on Facebook expressing the hope that every person voting Republican would die that day. This threat comes amid a spate of politically-motivated violence, including a truck driver attempting to run down Republicans registering voters, a man sucker-punching a boy at a voting booth, and a man threatening Trump supporters with a cane sword.

"I hope every single one of you pieces of sh*t that votes republican, dies today," Melonnie Hicks, director of the Pioneer City Museum in Sweetwater, Texas, posted on Facebook.

The museum's board of directors will hold an emergency meeting after the horrifying statement, KTAB-TV/Big Country Homepage reported. Hicks reportedly apologized but has since deleted both the original post and the apology follow-up post.

Even so, screenshots of the Facebook post have gone viral on social media.

It remains unknown if Hicks is still the director of the museum. The museum has refused to respond to multiple requests for comment from KTAB-TV. The Pioneer City County Museum even took down its Facebook page, and its latest Tweet came last month.

The museum's board of directors will hold an emergency meeting at the Sweetwater Police Department at 5:30 p.m. on Friday to discuss the issue.

Sweetwater City Manager David Vela told KTAB-TV he believes Hicks' Facebook message is reprehensible, especially for a city leader. The city funds a portion of the museum's building.

SOURCE 

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Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, wall construction credited with halting illegal immigration

During the 2016 campaign, President Trump ran on cracking down on illegal immigration. After years of border security being largely ignored, Trump made it a central issue. After three years in office, it is clear that he is getting results.

So far, over 120 miles of border wall have been built, and hundreds of more miles of wall are expected to be built this year.  Just last week, Mark Morgan, who leads US Customs and Border Protection, told Congress that one section of border wall had reduced the number of illegal border crossings there by more than 80 percent.

In addition, the administration’s Remain in Mexico policy that keeps asylum claimants in Mexico pending hearings is credited with slowing down migration as illegal border crossings continue to drop. This policy requires asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their immigration court dates; previously, asylum seekers were allowed to wait in the U.S., but many simply disappeared and never reappeared for their court dates.

Thanks to the new policy, in January, the most recent month for which we have official numbers, the number of people apprehended or found to be inadmissible on the Southern border fell to 36,679. In May of last year, that number peaked at 144,116, but it has been declining ever since.

Americans for Limited Government’s Frank McCaffrey has reported from respite centers, bus stops and businesses along migrant routes on both the U.S. and Mexican sides of the border attesting that migrant traffic has slowed as the Remain in Mexico policy took effect.

The two policies, the wall and Remain in Mexico, are the heart of the administration’s success in combating illegal immigration but remain in constant legal wrangling thanks to lawsuits by left-wing organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and others who are suing to stop the wall and the successful Remain in Mexico policy.

Late last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals put a hold on the Remain in Mexico policy before staying the injunction allowing enforcement to continue. But should the Ninth Circuit overturn the policy, the Supreme Court will likely end up ruling on this case, too. Previously, it has reversed rulings preventing the wall from being constructed using reprogrammed military construction funds, another case sure to come up again.

In the meantime, the Trump administration not only is Trump working to discourage illegal immigration, he is also hiring more immigration judges to deal with the backlog of immigration cases. Immigration judges matter because they decide issues such as whether immigrants should be deported and whether asylum seekers are granted asylum. At last report, there were 466 immigration judges, which is the most since at least 2010. By comparison, there were 289 immigration judges in FY 2016.

Nor do Trump’s efforts to fight illegal immigration stop at our borders. He has also struck deals with El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico to reduce the number of people arriving at our border. Mexico has been particularly helpful deploying troops to its border to halt the massive caravans of migrants that have strained our immigration system in recent years.

As the old saying goes, charity begins at home. No doubt many of the people seeking asylum do have rough lives in their home countries, but asylum should be limited to those fleeing repressive regimes, not extended to those just looking for a better job or a better neighborhood. As it is, in many parts of our country, we do not have an adequate supply of housing for American citizens; our public schools, too often, struggle to turn out graduates who are functionally literate; and our national debt continues to grow. So we cannot afford to just roll out the welcome mat for anyone who shows up at the border. Every year, we give billions of dollars in foreign aid, but we must not forget that the primary job of the American government is to look out for the interests of the American people. And finally we have a President who is doing just that. It’s about time.

SOURCE 

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Ted Cruz Slams Dems: ‘Party of the Rich’ Who ‘Sip Their Lattes, Look Down on Working Class Americans’

Senator Ted Cruz slammed the Democratic Party during his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday, accusing them of being the party of everything they claim they don’t represent.

"Today the Democrats are the party of the rich. Today, the Democrats are the party of Hollywood celebrities and Silicon Valley billionaires and Wall Street titans. They sip their lattes and they look down on working-class Americans.

“And, on the other hand, working men and women, the working men and women here, union members – blue-collar union members used to form the heart of the Democratic Party. FDR Democrats, who became Reagan Democrats. And, right now today, they’re Trump Democrats.”

The Democratic Party has two billionaires running for president, and the rest, save for Pete Buttigieg, are millionaires.

SOURCE 

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White House Talks Up Economic, Environmental Renewal to Replace Urban Blight

Entrepreneurs have been unleashed inside blighted communities to bring economic opportunity where it is needed most, thanks to President Donald Trump’s deregulation and revitalization initiatives, administration officials said Friday.

Scott Turner, executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, discussed such progress with Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, during a conference of conservative activists near Washington.

Turner, a former pro football player, told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that opportunity zones created during the Trump administration are bringing “stakeholders” back into “stressed communities” for the first time in decades.

“Poverty has no color, poverty has no party,” Turner said. “Poverty affects all of us and when you’re in poverty, you don’t care about party.”

A total of 8,764 opportunity zones have been identified in economically depressed areas throughout the country, according to government figures. Opportunity zones, created as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that Trump signed into law in December 2017, give investors tax benefits in exchange for providing capital in such neighborhoods.

The zones have both an economic and social impact, Turner said, in places where 35 million Americans live.

“Opportunity zones are bringing long-term sustainability,” he said. “Our vision is for generational impact on our country. Conversations are changing around the table with families, and when conversations change, this brings generational change.”

Laurence Jones, a Fox News Channel contributor and talk radio host, moderated the exchange on the CPAC stage.

Jones asked Wheeler, the EPA administrator, to comment on the Trump administration’s progress in providing regulatory relief to economically stagnant areas.

“We had a lot of regulations stopping opportunity throughout the country,” Wheeler said. “President Trump cares about the forgotten Americans. We have invested in cleanup efforts at brownfield sites, and when we clean up these then the private sector comes in. We have also taken out 51 regulations, saving the American people $6.5 billion.”

The EPA’s Brownfields Program offers grants and other assistance to communities that want to clean up and restore contaminated areas.

“We don’t want blighted blocks and blighted city buildings,” Wheeler said. “We want to make sure environmental standards are met and these [sites] are being redeveloped and repurposed.”

Wheeler also discussed a new program under the Clean Air Act that works to the benefit of communities that have had difficulty coming into compliance with EPA standards.

“We moved 38 communities from nonobtainment [of environmental standards] to obtainment,” he said. “We are lifting regulations so they can attract new business.”

The environment “is cleaner today than it has ever been,” the EPA chief said.

Air pollution, for instance, is 74% lower than in 1970, he said.

Turner credited Wheeler and Trump for progress on both environmental and economic fronts.

“People need to understand this is a business-minded administration and business-minded EPA leader,” Turner said. “He’s clearing the way for businesses to come into areas where they haven’t been.”

Jones said he has crisscrossed the country to inform minority communities that “the calvary is coming” under the Trump administration, offering new opportunities so local residents can achieve their potential.

Wheeler also took the opportunity to highlight the Trump administration’s efforts to bring greater transparency and accountability to the EPA’s regulatory practices, saying:

EPA guidance documents will be available to the public for the first time. We are also bringing transparency to science, which is something the media beats me up for. But if we use a scientific study to justify a regulation, that has to be made available to the public. The American public needs to see what their tax dollars are buying.

CPAC, the largest annual national gathering of conservative activists, runs Thursday through Saturday at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside Washington.

SOURCE 

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Snopes Amateurs Take on The Patriot Post

The self-proclaimed “fact checker” website Snopes has long been known among conservatives as a biased leftist rag. Yet the site still enjoys some measure of authoritativeness that greatly exceeds its professionalism.

It wasn’t long ago that Snopes was embroiled in a kerfuffle over its multiple “fact checks” of the satirical Babylon Bee. That was utterly laughable, and yet Snopes doubled down.

Well, we recently discovered that Snopes has done equally credible (which is to say not at all credible) “fact checks” on your humble Patriot Post team. Sort of.

“Patriot Post” has been tagged four times by the site, and not one of the four is even remotely accurate. One story debunks an article from another website that Snopes says was also published by “the equally unreliable PatriotPost.us.” Snopes flags three other stories it claims “originated solely with the Patriot Post, which is part of a network of fake news sites that deal in political clickbait trolling and falsely label themselves as ‘satire.’”

If you read further, however, Snopes sort of clarifies that the actual offending site is “PotatriotPost.com,” a seemingly now-defunct satirical website aimed and making fun of conservative sites like ours. Its header said “Patriot Post,” but the amateurs at Snopes made no effort to distinguish this cut-rate satire site from our legitimate enterprise by the same name.

The one story we found that actually did have to do with our content fared no better.

In August last year, we published a meme riffing on the popular and mostly in-jest conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide. It was clearly labeled “PatriotParody.US,” and we have never seriously written anything claiming the Clintons had something to do with Epstein’s demise. Yet in order to “fact check” our humor meme, Snopes (or its source) deliberately cropped the part of the image that made this clear, and then the site used an incorrect link to our site to locate the original meme.

Snopes does conclude, “Although the meme may have circulated online without this context, it originated on a page labeled ‘humor’ and thus should not be viewed as a statement of fact.” It’s rating: “Labeled Satire.” Well that’s a relief.

We don’t point this out to complain that Snopes was unfair to us. We do, however, expect a purportedly reputable fact checker to go through the rigors of actually getting it right when debunking fake news. Instead, Snopes published falsehoods about our website because its primary mission is advancing leftist propaganda.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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'Berning' Down America

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” —Ronald Reagan

“In many US states, a single high-school history class is the only civics instruction that future voters ever receive. Eight states don’t even make the study of American history a graduation requirement.” —from a column, “Public schools are teaching our children to hate America,” by Mary Kay Linge

Bernie Sanders is what you get when orchestrated ignorance, a cultivated contempt for America, and “an everyone gets a trophy just for showing up” sense of self-entitlement reaches critical mass. On Monday night, the leading Democrat candidate for president released a plan calling for a cornucopia of big-government “solutions” to the nation’s problems that demonstrates exactly that. It is a paean to the idea that there are sufficient numbers of intellectually challenged Americans who believe that massive giveaways are “free” or can be paid for by extracting large sums of money from “greedy” fellow Americans who have “more than their fair share.”

Why did Sanders release the plan? Perhaps it’s because he is as ignorant as many of his followers. Asked how he’d pay for his program, Sanders insists he “can’t rattle off to you every nickel and every dime.” Tuesday’s chaotic debate proved no better, as Sanders had difficulty answering a number of other questions as well.

Yet who’s kidding whom? For legions of “Bernie Bros,” who see the 78-year-old socialist/Marxist as more of a televangelist than a presidential candidate, details are largely irrelevant.

Even more irrelevant? These same followers — who support a plan that envisions raising money by precipitating lawsuits against the fossil-fuel industry, eviscerating the military, massively expanding the power of the IRS, and simply seizing wealth for the sake of “social justice” — somehow presume that behavior is static. In short, they think no matter how much money one extracts from the private sector, people will continue to work, take risks, create new businesses, and live their lives as if nothing has changed.

It doesn’t get more ignorant than that, yet that ignorance is hardly surprising. “Feel the Bern” is a triumph of emotionalism over intellectual curiosity.

And no one champions that useful-idiot dynamic more than Sanders himself. Sanders remains an apologist for one of the most repressive regimes on the planet. “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba, but, you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad,” Sanders told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who had played a 1985 clip of Sanders extolling Castro’s virtues. “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did?” Sanders continued. “He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”

For older Americans, idiotic tradeoffs have a familiar ring, akin to the apologist assertions that murderous dictators like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were not all bad, because Mussolini made the trains run on time and Hitler restored the pride of a German populace devastated by WWI. In that vein, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had the perfect response to Sanders’s assertion: “It really makes a difference when those you murder at the firing squad can read & write.”

Sanders’s affection for totalitarian societies isn’t limited to Cuba. The man who honeymooned in the Soviet Union also praised it for providing a “whole variety of programs for the young people, and cultural programs which go far beyond what we do in this country.” He added, “We went to a theater in Yaroslavl which was absolutely beautiful — had three separate stages.”

Columnist Katya Sedgwick, who grew up in the then-Soviet Socialist State of Ukraine, gave the proper context to such an assertion. “My generation of Soviets came of age knowing that the USSR was built on tyranny and lies,” she writes. “We are the most cynical generation in Russian history. Once the country crumbled, our lives spun out of control. As a result, Russian speakers my age suffered through high rates of substance abuse, low life expectancies, and through-the-floor birth rates. On the plus side, we grew up with gaudy chandeliers in public places.”

The same kind of cynicism is the life blood of Sanders’s campaign. Columnist Jake Novak illuminates a number of factors that drive it, all of which involve the alienation of younger Americans, besieged by student debt, even as they underwrite Social Security and Medicare skewed toward older Americans, and remain largely ignored by the establishment members of both parties.

Novak also explains that Democrats have brought Sanders’s popularity down upon themselves, courtesy of their assertions that President Trump is a white supremacist and an agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Think about it: if you really believe the president is a traitor and supporting violent plots against non-white Americans, is this really the time to support mainstream Democrat or Republican candidates?” he writes. “Sanders may be a career politician, but he’s never been a mainstream politician. His persona and political brand fits much better into the current Democratic narrative that we’re living in desperate times.”

Desperation is an emotion, and there is little doubt that emotionalism has transcended intellectual rigor in modern-day America. We are a nation where absurd concepts such as “triggering,” “microaggressions,” “intersectionalism,"and "my truth” have supplanted logic and reason as the common currency of younger generations so cynical, many believe the entire planet has only a dozen years left until climate apocalypse ends humanity itself.

Thus an entire reordering of society, a.k.a. “fundamental transformation” — with retribution as a possible part of the “social justice” mix — is the only way forward.

The searing irony is impossible to ignore. “Democrats have for decades (since JFK) admired godless socialism,” columnist Kevin McCullough explains, even as he further notes that the party “lied about what it all means — especially during election cycles — knowing that middle of the road Americans wouldn’t quite be able to stomach it.”

Enter Sanders, who has unmasked the subterfuge to the utter horror of establishment Democrats and their mainstream-media allies, who are appalled by Sanders’s honesty.

Why? By any reasonable standard, every Democrat still in the presidential race is a radical leftist in a party that has reached “peak progressivism,” as Victor Davis Hanson puts it. Thus it’s hardly surprising that a genuine socialist/Marxist would resonate more than his less honest competitors.

Yet Sanders represents something else as well. For decades, this nation has done a terrible job passing American exceptionalism down to the next generation, and at some point that failure reaches critical mass.

Can Sanders win the nomination? If Sanders maintains his front-runner status, Democrats will likely engender chaos — maybe even a brokered convention — in trying to prevent it. If Sanders still prevails? The 2020 election will be all about revolution or repudiation.

Here’s hoping for repudiation — on a massive scale. A constitutional republic is a terrible thing to waste.

SOURCE 

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What Bernie Sanders Isn’t Telling You About Canadian Health Care

All Americans, regardless of political party, want access to timely, high-quality health care. The question is how to get there. Do we harness the power and innovation of the private sector, or do we hand it to the government and hope for the best?

Canada has chosen the latter route, and at one of the most recent debates among Democratic presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders once again touted its government-run health care system as a model for America.

Alas, Sanders’ sanitized version of Canadian health care doesn’t remotely fit the facts.

No more out-of-pocket expenses? In reality, Canadians’ out-of-pocket health costs are nearly identical to what Americans pay—a difference of roughly $15 per month. In return, Canadians pay up to 50% more in taxes than Americans, with government health costs alone accounting for $9,000 in additional taxes per year. This comes to roughly $50 in additional taxes per dollar saved in out-of-pocket costs.

Keep in mind these are only the beginning of the financial hits from “Medicare for All.” Canada’s public system does not cover many large health costs, from pharmaceuticals to nursing homes to dental and vision.

As a result, public health spending in Canada accounts for only 70% of total health spending. In contrast, Medicare for All proposals promise 100% coverage. This suggests the financial burdens on Americans, and distortions to care, would be far greater than what Canadians already suffer.

Canada’s limited coverage may surprise Americans, but the key is understanding what “universal” means in “universal care.”

Universal systems mean everybody is forced to join the public system. It emphatically does not mean everything is free. Indeed, out-of-pocket costs are actually significantly higher in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway than they are in America.

More serious than the financial burdens is what happens to quality of care in a government-run system.

Canada’s total health costs are about one-third cheaper than the U.S. as a percent of gross domestic product, but this is achieved by undesirable cost-control practices. For example, care is ruthlessly rationed, with waiting lists running into months or years.

The system also cuts corners by using older and cheaper drugs and skimping on modern equipment. Canada today has fewer MRI units per capita than Turkey or Latvia. Moreover, underinvestment in facilities and staff has reached the point where Canadians are being treated in hospital hallways.

Predictably, Canada’s emergency rooms are packed. In the province of Quebec, wait times average over four hours, leading many patients to just give up, go home, and hope for the best.

Seeing a specialist can take a shockingly long time. One doctor in Ontario called in a referral for a neurologist and was told there was a four-and-a-half year waiting list.

A 16-year-old boy in British Columbia waited three years for an urgent surgery, during which his condition worsened and he was left paraplegic. One Montreal man finally got the call for his long-delayed urgent surgery—but it came two months after he had died.

Canadians have found a way to escape the rationing, the long waits, and substandard equipment. They go to the U.S.

Every year, more than 50,000 Canadians fly to get their surgeries here because they can get high-quality care and fast treatment at a reasonable price. They willingly pay cash for care that, for the vast majority of Americans, is covered by insurance, private or public.

Far from being a model of government-run health care, Canada serves as a warning of the unintended consequences of socialized medicine: high taxes, long waits, staff shortages, and substandard drugs and equipment. Those suffering the most are the poor, who cannot afford to fly abroad for timely treatment.

Far from the feel-good rhetoric, socialized medicine in Canada has proved a bait-and-switch that has never lived up to the promise.

In Washington today, there are very sound proposals on the table to reduce U.S. health care costs. They include reforms to assure price transparency, increase competition, and repeal price-hiking mandates. That is the best way forward.

Canada’s system of socialized medicine has created high taxes and suffering patients. That’s not what Americans want or deserve.

SOURCE 

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The Endless Stalemate Ends  -- or does it?

The news that a peace agreement has been reached with the Taliban after 18 years of war has drawn some criticism of President Donald Trump from Patriots concerned about national security. We in our humble shop agree with Rep. Liz Cheney and former National Security Advisor John Bolton that this deal comes with risks.

That said, we also have long thought that Afghanistan had reached a point where there were no good options. As we also have noted, there was no clear idea of what victory looked like and how it would be achieved. Thus, the war effort became a mess that was largely passed off to Special Operations Command (SOCOM).

Even under George W. Bush, who was serious about winning, America pulled punches that should have been allowed to go full-force. Dalton Fury revealed in 2008 that requests to use modern GATOR mines were rejected during the Battle of Tora Bora. These mines would have self-destructed or gone inert within 40 days. But micromanaging from Washington allowed Osama bin Laden to make it into Pakistan, where he hid out for nearly a decade.

The betrayal of Patriots who served — like James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who played crucial roles in getting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to spill his guts — also raised questions about how serious those in Washington were about winning.

Yet we were supposed to let SOCOM send its highly trained operatives on numerous deployments to that region with no clue about how to win or what winning looked like? How numerous were those deployments? Here is one indicator: The first military casualty during President Trump's administration had been sent on 12 deployments.

We should not dismiss what was achieved: Afghanistan has a freely elected government. We have killed or captured a lot of the senior leadership of al-Qaida. We have not seen anything like another 9/11. We have trained an Afghan military that is capable of defending that country. We should be proud of what our troops, including those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, accomplished.

But we should also keep some things in mind. We have lessons to learn from this war. We should, as a country, resolve that when we do ask our troops to fight and risk being maimed or killed, they be allowed to win.

Whether this peace agreement will hold is an open question. Could the Taliban merely be using this as a chance to re-arm and gain strength to go after the Afghan government? We can't rule that out. If that should happen, then the Taliban must pay a fearsome price for breaking the deal.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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