Around the Web in 80 Minutes (9/22/09)

A little over a month ago, I posted an important and informative Listen & Learn of Steve Malzberg discussing the aptly labelled death panels, which was stealthily slipped into the Stimulus bill back in the spring.

Here’s a Reflections magazine article by Malzberg following up on that story.

Obama’s Death Panels
September 2009 Vol. I, No. 8

When Mr. Obama is then asked how we should deal with it, more of Mr. Obama the radical is exposed. “Well I think there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists.” (Can you say death panel?) “And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place,” he says. In sum, who is worth treating? Who is worth saving? Who shall live and who shall die?

“It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels,” says Mr. Obama. (We can’t let the people have a say in this, they will be too emotional and want to help their parents and grandparents and spouses as much as possible.) “And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.” Can you say death panel?

Speaking of health (s)care, here’s Dick Morris and Eileen McGann at NewsMax discuss the latest:

Young, Uninsured Turning Against Obamacare
Monday, September 21, 2009

The elderly were the first group to turn against President Barack Obama’s healthcare proposals, alienated by the plans to cut $500 billion cut from Medicare. The young and the uninsured may be the next to jump ship — out of worry over the huge premiums they’d have to pay.

Requiring everyone to buy insurance will impose a massive tax on all who now are uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office projects that it would force the middle-income uninsured to pay on average more than 15 percent of their income.

The poor will still have Medicaid. But for those earning more, the required premiums will be worse than any tax increase. For example, CBO estimates that when the program is fully implemented — by 2016 — an individual earning $32,400 a year would have to pay $4,100 in premiums before getting any subsidy. With deductibles and co-payments, he’d have to shell out $5,600 a year, or 17.3 percent of his income. A family of four, making $80,000 a year, would have to pay about $10,500 in premiums alone — with deductibles and co-payments, up to $15,000 or just under 20 percent of income.

Next, at American Spectator, author Dan Flynn takes on cryin’ lyin’ Nancy Pelosi, who had the chutzpah to compare Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” comment to President Hope&Change. Flynn argues, correctly, that the violence Wilson’s “rhetoric” reminded her of in the 1970’s was the violence of the left, who, as her reliable base, Pelosi has ignored and dismissed for three decades.

Still Lying 9.22.09

… The Bay Area was indeed a mecca of political violence during the 1970s. But the violence exclusively came from people whose outlook more closely resembled Nancy Pelosi’s, not Joe Wilson’s. In almost every case, the bombings and murders came from people or groups explicitly committed to violence, and not from peaceful protesters or from the right, à la the tea party or town meeting participants. […]

Compounding the outrageousness of Pelosi’s insinuation is that she projects the “frightening” rhetoric that fueled “a climate in which violence took place” in the Bay Area during the 1970s upon the very people at whom that rhetoric was initially targeted. Rather than condemn the violence of such groups as Weatherman and the Black Panthers, liberal Democrats instead assimilated them into their ranks.

Next, Andrew Klavan at Pajamas Media discusses these week’s biggest story essentially ignored by the mainstream media (last week it was ACORN, the week before the 9-12 D.C. Tea Party, and the week before that Van Jones):

September 21st, 2009
All Your Art Are Belong To Us

There is so very much to be disgusted by here that it’s hard to know what to gag on first. The NEA is the largest single funder of art in the country. They give away tens of millions of bucks in grants to artists and art organizations. Although the NEA wasn’t actually offering to give money to artists in return for their services to the all-powerful state, their very presence on the line creates the implied offer of access and favor. This in and of itself is deeply corrupt and potentially corrupting to artists in a difficult economy desperate for any means of support.

Oh, but that’s not the half of it. Go here and take a look at the legislation that authorized and created the NEA in the first place, its founding document as it were. Read its original principles and mission: how the arts are for all Americans, how the NEA is there to nurture freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry. In fact, just for fun, see if you can find a single proposition in this document that the NEA did not violate, corrupt and/or betray in the course of this phone call.

Then there’s the arrogance. Michael Skolnick, political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, says he’s speaking at the behest of the White House and the NEA when he tells the assembled artists, “You are the thought leaders. You are the ones that, if you create a piece of art or promote a piece of art, or create a campaign for a company, and tell our country and our young people sort of what to do and what to be into; and what’s cool and what’s not cool.”

Finally, here’s the latest at Real Clear Politics from the always thought-provoking and inspiring Thomas Sowell:

September 22, 2009
The Underdogs

… [N]obody told me that I couldn’t make it because I was poor and black, or that I ought to hate white people today because of what some other white people did to my ancestors in some other time.

Nobody sugar-coated the facts of racial discrimination. But Professor Sterling Brown of Howard University, who wrote with eloquent bitterness about racism, nevertheless said to me when I prepared to transfer to Harvard: “Don’t come back here and tell me you didn’t make it ‘cause white folks were mean.”

He burned my bridges behind me, the way they used to do with armies going into battle, so that they had no place to retreat to, and so had to fight to win.

One of the problems with trying to help underdogs, especially with government programs, is that they and everyone else start to think of them as underdogs, focusing on their problems rather than their opportunities. Thinking of themselves as underdogs can also dissipate their energies in resentments of others, rather than spending that energy making the most of their own possibilities.

Have a blessed day!