Guarino

Break for Five Weeks

I wish to let readers know that I will be taking a break from blogging at this site over the next five weeks or so.  I expect to resume around September 1.  I need to attend to a number of personal tasks and activities that will require some additional investment of time away from this blog.  Nothing bad... all good.

I will continue to be visiting other local sites; and will be posting comments there.

Sometime over the next couple of weeks I will also be developing a questionnaire for Greensboro City Council candidates, and sending it to them.  If I receive any responses, I will post them as soon as I can-- even during the "break" period.

I appreciate your reading.

Liberals to Conservatives: Shut Up!

Andrew Klavan has, as usual, some stimulating video commentary regarding the tendency of modern liberalism to stifle the speech of conservatives.  Great stuff.

Common Sense on Health Care

Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina gives a great floor speech on health care reform: (HT: Carolina Politics)

Professor Henry Louis Gates and the Police: An Opportunity for Guilford County Schools

A story appeared in the News and Record this morning that gave an account of a spat between Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard and local police.  The N&R wire story described Gates as the nation's "preeminent black scholar", or something like that.  He was reported to have been aggrieved because police had allegedly engaged in racial profiling against him.

Gates had been attempting to break into his own house, and apparently a neighbor called police.  In addition, an alarm apparently sounded.

A few thoughts come to mind:

1. I do not know upon what basis the news media designates Gates as the nation's preeminent black scholar.  It would seem to me that there are probably many black scholars across our vast nation, in various fields.  Was there some type of systematic, objective ranking that placed Gates at the top of this particular group?

2. The police were attempting to protect Gates' property.  Gates should have been grateful that the police responded and were trying to protect his property.  Instead, he is reported to have behaved in a disorderly way and protested.

3. The police could easily have been criticized if they had not responded to the call sufficiently.

4. With the nature of our local scene here in Greensboro, a comparable incident could easily have occurred here.

5. Gates' reported reaction was precisely the wrong way to respond to police.  When citizens interact with police as they are trying to do their job, it is very important to be cooperative, deferential and respectful.  The police represent civil authority, and bucking against them makes little sense.  A college professor and "scholar" who is advancing in years, of all people, should know that.

6. This episode reminds us of the need to teach young people; and represents an opportunity to derive a public schools curriculum locally that includes instruction on proper behavior and attitude toward police.  It is an important civic lesson that people should be respectful and cooperative when interacting with the police as they attempt to do their jobs; and that the police are trying to help citizens.  If those lessons are not imparted in the home, it is important they be shared in the schools at various stages of kids' education.  Guilford County Schools would do well to adopt such a curriculum if it does not already have one in place.  It would not require a lot of time; but is nonetheless justified because it is obvious that disordered relations with and attitudes toward police can be a huge problem.

Communist Party USA Finds Common Cause With Obama

'Nuff said.

What Drives the AMA on Health Care Reform

Yesterday I had reported here that the AMA has thrown its support in favor of one of the health care reform bills in the House.

Daniel Pamestrant, who is a physician, demonstrates why the AMA took this action:

So what does the Bill do?  For starters, it maintains the AMA’s monopoly on billing codes (known as Current Procedure Terminology or CPT codes).  As the AMA membership has shrunk to less than 15-20% of US physicians, it now earns far more money from selling those CPT codes to insurance companies than it does from membership dues.

This passage is particularly revealing.  The AMA no longer even remotely derives the major source of its revenues from membership dues. It does not represent but a relatively small minority of American physicians.  It makes huge amounts of money from selling coding guides to physician's offices and other health care-related facilities and organizations around the country.  The requirements for coding came from the federal government and Medicare, dating back, I believe, to the 1980's. 

And so, we see a cozy arrangement in which the government creates and maintains an organization's major source of support; and that organization, in turn, crawls into bed with that same government on major pieces of health care legislation.  Whether the arrangement benefits the nation as a whole is open to serious question.

More on Cronkite

Cliff Kincaid has a report over at AIM about Walter Cronkite.  It turns out there is much more to the story of his liberal, anti-Vietnam War biases and inclinations than I had known.  Check it out.

Adoration

Check out Obama's jocular presumptions regarding the support he has in the media; and also how these supporters respond to him: (HT: Conservative NC)

"Operation Dump the Developer"

Keith Brown announces a new initiative in the upcoming Greensboro City Council elections.

Ribar's response to local currency proposal

The News and Record published yesterday an op-ed piece by Signe Waller proposing a local currency. 

My gut told me it was a nutsy proposal, but I did not know all the reasons why.

Dave Ribar is a very smart blogger, and a university economist-- and I sometimes disagree with him politically.  On this issue, Dave lays out in a very cogent fashion all the reasons the local currency proposal should not happen.

AMA Support of Health Care Reform

After initially having made some noises suggesting it would oppose ObamaCare, the AMA Board of Trustees last week endorsed one of the House versions of health care reform.  This is a great example of why so many physicians refrain from joining the AMA.

This particular national organization elected to focus its concern on payment and reimbursement issues for physicians under Medicare, instead of considering the larger issues for physicians and, indeed, for the nation as a whole.  The AMA continues to be a huge disappointment.

Democrats in Committee Insisting on Using Tax Dollars for Abortion

Health care reform continues to be discussed and voted upon in various congressional committees.  The national Democrats seem insistent that any new insurance plans developed under health care reform will pay for abortion, even if it means using taxpayer dollars.

Discussion can be found here and here regarding developments in the Senate.

In addition, the Family Research Council reported the following regarding action in the House:

In the Ways and Means Committee, Reps. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Sam Johnson (R-Texas) offered life-related amendments to the Democrats' massive health care bill. Rep. Johnson's would have explicitly excluded abortion from the minimum benefits and mandates provided for in the bill, and Rep. Cantor's would have prevented taxpayers from being forced to subsidize abortions. Both amendments failed, further solidifying the Democrats' health care overhaul as one big abortion industry bailout.

Sotomayor, Precedent and Marriage

Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation hearings has placed legal precedent on a pedestal.  Of course, this would have the effect of protecting Roe and other decisions that led to liberal policy outcomes. 

Senator Charles Grassley of Illinois did a good job of questioning her about a little known Supreme Court precedent that dealt with the topic of marriage.  This decision apparently concluded that marriage is an area of law for the states to decide.  Grassley exposed in a graphic way her contradiction on the matter of how important precedent is:

 

The Death of Walter Cronkite

The predictable tributes to Walter Cronkite have begun with the stories covering the news of his death.  There is a flip side, however, to the MSM accounts. 

Cronkite served as anchor of the CBS evening news program during the time of the Vietnam War.  He had cultivated a reputation of trust, but the mainstream media was unfortunately undermining the American effort in Vietnam.  CBS News was a part of that.  The depictions of the war, and of our efforts, led to the American people turning against it.  At that time, the media acted as a monolith; and there was little alternative media for the daily consumption habits of the masses.

I had linked several years ago to an article written by Captain Donald Bishop, then an assistant professor at the Air Force Academy.  The article demonstrates the effect of media depictions during the Vietnam War.  It pays particular attention to the representations of the Tet Offensive-- which is considered to have been a turning point in terms of the withdrawal of support for the war across America.

So when we consider the career of Walter Cronkite, we need to consider the manner in which CBS News covered the Vietnam War, the effect that had, and the extent to which it reflected the political biases of those delivering the message.

Update: More commentary over at Sam Spagnola's blog.

Captures the moment...

(HT: WorldMagBlog)

The Ethics of Health Care Rationing

Bubba has a good post that discusses an article by Peter Singer that promotes the practice of health care rationing, presumably in anticipation of ObamaCare.

Peter Singer is supposedly a bioethicist-- but a more accurate label would be "bio-unethicist".  He is the guy who once said it was ethically permissible to kill babies who have disabling medical conditions.

In any event, Singer's article in the New York Times demonstrates why it is a bad idea for government to be sponsoring health care.  The costs are simply bound to become so high that rationing will become irresistible.  But it should be considered, according to our nation's founding principles, impermissible for the government to make life-or-death decisions about health care for citizens-- or to create other administrative bodies that do so. 

But that is almost the inevitable direction we take when we create programs like Medicare or the new public plan being proposed to achieve universal coverage.  We are creating a situation in which the government has to be attentive to the issue of costs, and ration through various means.

Following Greensboro-Area Politics Has its Amusements

It is difficult to overestimate the sense of diversion we all enjoy when we follow Greensboro-area politics.  Two stories yesterday highlighted that reality.

First, we learn that a Latin Kings gang leader is running for an at-large seat on the Greensboro City Council.

Second, Red Clay reports about a bill that Pricey Harrison has introduced in the state House.  Apparently, some cities make it illegal to hang a clothesline.  Now Pricey wants to make it illegal for the cities to prohibit hanging certain clotheslines.  You know, because of global warming and all that stuff.

And so, even though following our local politics can lead to what my relatives used to call "agita", it also has its compensations.

Last Chance to Have Private Health Insurance?

A couple of folks brought to my attention an editorial in Investors Business Daily regarding an obscure provision in the new House health care bill.  This provision makes it illegal to procure private health insurance if such a policy was not already owned at the time the law becomes effective,

There is probably no more revealing indicator of the true intentions of those advancing this legislation than this particular provision.   They want to box everyone into government-sponsored health insurance.  And they want to kill off private insurance.

But there are other reasons to oppose this effort.  The "individual mandate" to purchase health insurance is of dubious constitutionality according to the Federalist Society.  Senator Tom Coburn says health care reform would end up killing people because there would be lower survival rates treating conditions like heart disease and cancer.  And the head of the Congressional Budget Office says our fiscal problems would be worsened.

The AP reports that taxes on upper income taxpayers would shoot back up to pre-Reagan levels.  This would break an Obama campaign promise that taxes would only increase to 1990's levels.

The Wall Street Journal points out, correctly, that small business would be hit particularly hard by the House version.  And even CNN acknowledges that taxing the "rich" cannot possibly fund all the agenda items currently being pursued.  (ht: John)

Fortunately, we are beginning to see some pushback.  Jeff Sykes reports that conservative Democrats in the House say they have the votes to bottle the thing up in committee.  And House Republicans have developed a chart akin to that used so effectively during the early 1990's when ClintonCare was all the rage:

 

 

Habitual Felons in NC

There have been efforts afoot in the North Carolina legislature to water down our state's habitual felon law that causes repeat offenders to enjoy additional prison time.  In some cases, it has been maintained that the length of these sentences has been inappropriate.  And there is apparently a desire to save money on prison space.

Senate Majority leader Phil Berger said the following yesterday after a couple of bills on this topic passed the Senate:

“Protecting law-abiding citizens is the first obligation of government.  Today, Senate Democrats failed in their primary responsibility.  This is what you get from years of spending every dime in sight while ignoring the need for additional prison space.  Now instead of cutting waste and inefficiency in state government, Democrats chose to shorten prison sentences and give dangerous criminals an early return to North Carolina’s communities.”

Meanwhile, Tara Servatius reveals that the felon classes targeted by some of these efforts-- H and I-- include the crime of breaking and entering:

North Carolina's already lax laws on housebreaking have lead to North Carolina having the highest home break-in rate (the FBI calls it "burglary") of any state in the nation according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. This is because in North Carolina, for breaking and entering to count as a higher level "burglary" felony carrying far more time, the crime must occur at night when the victims are home. The penalty for most daytime break-ins is probation. Criminals know they can be convicted of breaking into homes at least four times without ever serving a day in prison, which has lead to a free-for-all on North Carolinians' property.

If anything, we need to toughen our breaking and entering laws. Currently, the only way for a prosecutor to put a repeat house-breaker away for a significant amount of time is to use the habitual felon law. It's frightening to ponder how much our already atrocious home break-in/burglary rate would rise if certain legislators and the state's newspapers succeed in gutting the habitual felon law.

In addition, we learned last year of the serious problems North Carolina has with our probation system.  We have been unable to adequately monitor those on probation.  The response of the Democrats in Raleigh is to increase the numbers on probation-- but will they be monitored aggressively?

It's beginning to feel a bit like 1960's New York.

Phil Berger is right.  Maintaining civic order is the first priority of local and state government.  Our criminal justice system needs to maximize crime control, and should not be tweaked just to satisfy liberal agenda items.

The Current State of Health Care Reform

One House committee has announced a bill this week for health care reform; and one key Senate committee passed its own version today.  Based on the content of these two pieces of legislation, here is what we can expect: (HT: Stormy)