Current Events - November 9, 2013

The Drift toward Despotism

Too many of our rulers and their enforcers reflexively see the citizenry as a threat

By Mark Steyn
At a time when over 4 million people have had their health insurance canceled, it’s good to know that some Americans can still access prompt medical treatment, even if they don’t want it. David Eckert was pulled over by police in Deming, N.M., for failing to come to a complete halt at a stop sign in the Walmart parking lot. He was asked to step out of the vehicle, and waited on the sidewalk. Officers decided that they didn’t like the tight clench of his buttocks, a subject on which New Mexico’s constabulary is apparently expert, and determined that it was because he had illegal drugs secreted therein. So they arrested him, and took him to Gila Regional Medical Center in neighboring Hidalgo County, where Mr. Eckert was forced to undergo two abdominal X-rays, two rectal probes, three enemas, and defecate thrice in front of medical staff and representatives of two law-enforcement agencies, before being sedated and subjected to a colonoscopy — all procedures performed against his will and without a valid warrant.
Alas, Mr. Eckert’s body proved to be a drug-free zone, and so, after twelve hours of detention, he was released. If you’re wondering where his lawyer was during all this, no attorney was present, as police had not charged Mr. Eckert with anything, so they’re apparently free to frolic and gambol up his rectum to their hearts’ content. Deming police chief Brandon Gigante says his officers did everything “by the book.” That’s the problem, in New Mexico and beyond: “the book.”
Getting into the spirit of things, Gila Regional Medical Center subsequently sent Mr. Eckert a bill for $6,000. It appears he had one of what the president calls those “bad apple” plans that doesn’t cover anal rape..
...Of course, even with millions of canceled health-care policies freeing up medical staff, it is unlikely that the authorities could ever give the full Deming PD treatment to the bulk of the populace. Perhaps that’s why Americans do not seem to get terribly exercised by these cases. There are over 300 million people, and the chances of Leo taking a fancy to one’s own posterior are relatively remote. Yet tyranny is always capricious, and the willingness of police and compliant doctors and nurses to go along with it ought to disturb a supposedly free people, no matter how comparatively rare it may seem.

Louisiana food stamp abusers will lose benefits over Wal-mart free for all

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and his administration took steps late Wednesday to strip food stamp benefits from those who loaded up their shopping carts knowing they had insufficient funds in their Electronic Benefits Transfer accounts during a system failure in October.
As a result of the temporary outage, over 12,000 transactions in Louisiana showed non-sufficient funds once the system got back online and retailers were able to process the purchases, according to The Advocate.

CNN Throws In the Towel; Moves Away from News

By John Nolte
CNN appears to be throwing in the towel, at least when it comes to being a cable news channel. With its ratings and reputation sinking, CNN announced Friday that the third-place network will be investing heavily in everything except serious news-gathering. This new focus will be towards "a variety of unscripted formats, including other travel shows, and 'immersive' nonfiction programs." This also includes documentary films like "Blackfish."
CNN still says that its "bread and butter" will always be breaking news. But it is in that arena that the network has been hit hardest. Once upon at time, even when Fox News dominated in the ratings, CNN would still come in first when big news broke. America was still turning to CNN when it mattered.
Today, Fox News not only dominates the everyday ratings but retains that domination during big news events, such as the Boston Marathon bombing and this week's off-year elections. Moreover, during big news, CNN is now losing to low-rated MSNBC. 

Clunker progressivism

By George F Will
...Now a study by Ted Gayer and Emily Parker, published by the Brookings Institution, a mildly liberal think tank, concludes: “The $2.85 billion in vouchers provided by the program had a small and short-lived impact on gross domestic product, essentially shifting roughly a few billion dollars forward from the subsequent two quarters following the program.”
Most of the 677,842 sales were simply taken from the near future. That many older vehicles were traded in — and, as required by law, destroyed. Gayer and Parker accept as reasonable an estimate that the cost per job created by the program was $1.4 million. Although the vouchers did not come close to covering the cost of the new cars, voucher recipients seem not to have reduced their other consumption. This, say Gayer and Parker, suggests that participants in the program “were not liquidity constrained,” which is a delicate way of saying “there was no change in other consumption patterns,” which is a polite way of saying that “cash for clunkers” merely caused people to purchase vehicles “slightly earlier than otherwise would have occurred.”

16 Year Old Take Down of Common Core

 By Allison Martinez
Patrick Richards is a sixteen year old student from Arkansas. His presentation on Common Core is well researched and devastating.
The first part of his presentation covers the copyright issue related to Common Core. Unlike past standards, Common Core is held under a public license rather than an open license. After taking on the license issue, Richards then moves the presentation to the question and answer session by Sandra Stotsky of Jason Zimba, the primary author of the Math Standards.
In that session, Zimba admits that the term “college ready” really means ready for a trade school or junior college, not a four-year institution. Zimba even admits that the University he teaches at would not accept a student who had completed only the Common Core math sequence.

Obama’s Republic of Lies

 By Roger Kimball
....Once again, Obama has managed to astonish me. I thought people would be rioting in the streets over this example of what Andy McCarthy rightly calls “massive fraud.” But, no.  His popularity has ticked down a bit more.  Some of his vulnerable Democrat colleagues are panicking a little as they prepare to face what is certain to be a hostile electorate.  But what will happen?
Probably nothing much. Which is too bad.  The other day, I went to a launch party for David Horowitz’s new book The Black Book of the American Left. In the course of his remarks, David made a point I have several times made in this space: ObamaCare is only incidentally about health care. At bottom, it is about control—more specifically, it is about the federal government’s control of the lives of its citizens.  That, indeed, is why the Internal Revenue Service has been enlisted to enforce the provision of this monstrous piece of legislation. This government agency, which was brought into being to collect taxes, has in intervening decades become an important instrument of governmental coercion. ObamaCare was custom-made for an agency like the modern IRS: meddlesome, bureaucratic, and minatory.
My friend Robert Bork was fond of quoting Justice Scalia’s mournful observation that “day by day, case by case, [the Supreme Court] is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.” People tend to think that revolutions are violent and dramatic occurrences.  Sometimes they are. But sometimes they happen almost by stealth, an imposition here, a regulation there, an ancient habit of probity or fair dealing quietly elided to make room for some new understanding of the relation between citizens and the state.

A Sorry Apology

President Obama wants to apologize without taking responsibility. That’s not how apologies work.

By John Dickerson
...While the president offered the right words, they were awfully late, as it has been weeks since people have been getting frightening letters saying their coverage would soon disappear. During that period—the weeks between when the worry began and this apology finally arrived—the president has tried various escape routes to get out of his original promise that if you had a plan you liked, you could keep it. It didn't work for him. All doors were locked. So, with no more room, and political pressure building, he offered his deepest sympathies.  Why does the wait matter? Because an apology’s proximity to a harm offers an important indication about a person's underlying motivations—whether he is feeling guilt, responsibility, and repentance, or whether he’s just doing what custom dictates.
...Not only did the president not meet the Daschle standard in this case, but he bubble-wrapped it with lots of explanations and rationalizations—his broken promise only affects 5 percent of the population, insurance companies are offering subpar plans, there’s churn in the market, and so on. All of this may be true, but when your apology sputters out at the end of a list of mitigating conditions, it lacks much punch. It seems grudging. So do the people going through this feel better? Probably not. Does it look like the president was trying to make himself look better? Yes, it does.

In fact, the president didn't want to spend much time on the apology at all. What he really wanted to do was put the underlying problem about the individual market in perspective. His larger task is reminding people of the reasons Obamacare was necessary in the first place. But trying to offer that kind of perspective and context isn’t the stuff of great apologies. Because, when you try to go back to first principles, you can sound professorial, distant, and like you're trying to shrink from the human cost of the screw-up.