In yesterday's Wall Street Journal Philip Howard makes the case for tort reform, and explains why it's not happening:

Eliminating defensive medicine could save upwards of $200 billion in health-care costs annually. .  .

A few thousand trial lawyers are blocking reform that would benefit 300 million Americans.  This it not just your normal special interest politics. It is a scandal--it is as if international-trade policy was being crafted in order to get fees for customs agents. . . .

Trial lawyers also suggest they alone are the bulwark against ineffective care, citing a 1999 study by the Institute of Medicine that 'over 98,000 people are killed every year by preventable medical errors.'  But the same study found that distrust of the justice system contributes to these errors by chilling interaction between doctors and patients  Trails lawyers haven't reduced the errors. They've caused the fear.

Howard recommends pilot program to create special medical courts. If they work, they could be expanded.

I have been perusing National Affairs, and am, for the most part, impressed.  (The social science is quite sharp, as are the critiques of modern social science, but the political analysis is more predictable).  Anyway, W. Bradford Wilcox's "The Evolution of Divorce is well done.  He shows how marriage has changed since the introduction of "No fault divorce" in the lat 1960s and early 1970s.  Although the divorce rate has declined, it is still much higher than it used to be.  In addition, for more and more people marriage is now mostly about finding a "soul-mate" rather than about finding some with whom to make a life.  Finally, and most interesting to me just now, is that more an more people are simply not getting married, even though they are having children.

There is a large class divide on this issue: "According to a 2007 Child Trends study, only 7% of mothers with a college degree had a child outside of marriage, compared to more than 50% of mothers who had not gone to college."  Nowadays, a USA Today story notes, nearly 40% of babies born in the US are born outside of wedlock.

Here's my question.  Might something like common law marriage be reintroduced through the back-door by civil suits that develop a customary law regarding the obligations of fathers and mothers for their children, regardless of their official marital status, and/ or governments with an interest in forcing fathers to pay to support the children they helped to create (and perhaps their mothers too)?

You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she always returns.

In public policy, the trick is to mix intelligence with money; a higher ratio of intelligence is usually efficient and preferable, but all too often the entire apparatus comes to a halt when the mixture is too lean in money.  The real challenge now is to improve our understanding of policy enough to sustain a higher ratio of intelligence to money.

From philosophy professor Hans Jonas's wonderful memoir, an episode about Leo Strauss to ponder: 

On a fall day--it must have been in 1934--we went for a walk in Hyde Park.  We'd walked along in silence for quite a while.  Suddenly he turned to me and said, "I feel terrible."  I said, "Me too."  And why?  It was Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, and both of us were not in the synagogue but were walking through Hyde Park.  That was telling.  For him much more than for me....  But for Strauss it was a source of torment.  "I've done the equivalent of committing murder or breaking a loyalty oath or a sinning against something."  This "I feel terrible" came straight from his soul. [p. 49]

Both major parties lost in popular votes, but the Social Democrat virtually collapsed when the seats were distributed.  The somewhat libertarian-like FDP rose, to produce a 70's-like coalition with the Christian Democrats (no, it's not the German version of our religious right; it's hard to make comparisons with the US).  I like this display of the results, and here is another graphic depiction--just click on the tabs in the box on the Bundestagswahl.  Ignorance of German is no problem.  (It's interesting that the more liberal paper emphasizes the popular vote, the more conservative one the number of seats won, the decisive element.)

For an explanation auf englisch try the NY Times.

Each German party has its own color (as each has its particular flag).  Only recently has American politics spoken in terms of a "red" and a "blue" party.  Obama's big selling point was his 2004 convention emphasis on a "red, white, and blue America."  But we reject not only European social policy but its class-based politics as well.  That's the tired politics that put the Social Democrats at their record low level and may bring down our Democrat socialists as well.

UPDATE:  This report notes the fall of the conservative CSU and the rise of the FDP in Bavaria, changing the direction of the governing coalition. 

Several people have already commented on President Obama's speech at the United Nations yesterday.  Reading over his speech, I was struck by his comment that "No balance of power among nations will hold."  Well, duh!  That is, and has always been true.  But, and here's where I suspect my analysis parts company with the President's, there still is no better way to maintain peace.  Balance of power, however imperfect, is the best tool available in the world we're given.  For over two centuries, radicals have disliked that solution, and sought to find another answer.  Perhaps some day they'll find it. Color me skeptical.

Wherefore this quest for a new and different world?  I think it might be connected to science. The President noted that "The technology we harness can light the path to peace, or forever darken it. The energy we use can sustain our planet, or destroy it. What happens to the hope of a single child - anywhere - can enrich our world, or impoverish it."  Modern science has made life easier (and longer) in countless ways.  But it has also increased the power of our arms exponentially.

If war is, like death and disease, an inescapable part of the human condition, then science is a mixed blessing at best.  Perhaps Thomas Jefferson put it best in an 1812 letter to John Adams: "if science produces no better fruits than tyranny, murder, rapine and destitution of national morality, I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest and estimable, as our neighboring savages are."  The presumption that deep progress, progress that fundamentally changes what it is to be human, is possible, is, perhaps, essential to modern liberalism.  The alternative, of balance of power as much as possibe and war sometimes, is, for many, too terrible to contemplate.

NY Times headline:  "General Denies Rift With Obama Over Afghan Strategy"  That would be General McChrystal of course.  These stories denying resignation talk don't look good.

Sarah speaks before an international business group in Hong Kong.  A couple Americans stomped out, a European praised the speech as "brilliant."  Here's one account, here another.  Excerpts.  She delivered a 75-minute defense of "common sense conservatism," for example:  "We engage with a hope that Beijing becomes a responsible stakeholder, but we must take steps in the event that it goes in a different direction."

Today I heard Francis Fukuyama (of SAIS and "end of history" fame) present the second of a four-part series summarizing his most recent tour d'horizon book, to be published next year.  In a little over an hour he presented an extraordinary summary of the origins of the modern state in China and India, and how they reflect religion (or its absence) and kinship groups.  The first lecture, on evolutionary biology, can be found here.  Later ones will be posted as well.

On a visit to Johns Hopkins University today I learned how a student defended himself and his housemates and killed the intruder with a Samurai sword, hacking off his hand.  Better than savoring a John Belushi skit.  Given that Maryland authorities had considered prosecuting the exposers of ACORN antics, it is not surprising that they are still considering charges against the undergraduate student. 

Here's a sample Belushi Samurai clip.

The President wants a civil tone on healthcare and other issues.  But, for the umpteenth time, I ask when has a President, addressing Congress, ever called his political opponents liars?  This is unprecedented, I believe, and has demeaned the presidency and coarsened the debate.  Obama's genius, displayed in The Audacity of Hope, is making himself look moderate when in fact he is a radical.

I've been reading books on gnosticism so these commentaries by a former Bush speechwriter named Matt Latimer struck me as more than wise-guy talk.  One observation from his WaPo piece: 

The crumbling of the conservative movement, though, is not merely a story of past events to be dissected. Thousands marched in Washington last weekend to protest the Obama administration's expansion of the role of the federal government. This is an important debate. But the message on such serious issues is undercut when conservatives are lumped together with those bashing Obama as a secret Muslim and questioning his citizenship. Indeed, one of the organizers of the "birther" movement is a former personnel vetter at the Pentagon.

He also has this book excerpt, which seems naive in some respects but telling in others.  You decide.

The last Administration did not treat speechwriting with the seriousness it deserves, as this current Administration thinks that speech is all (a gnostic heresy).  Just try reading former head speechwriter Michael Gerson's columns in the WaPo, and you'll get the picture.  But such bigotry of low expectations starts from the top.  Whether they were Bush's rhetorical shortcomings or Cheney's impolitic manner, both undermined the Administration's ability to lead and thus its obligation to govern by consent.  Both men have many virtues, but it is wrong to overlook the weaknesses that paved the way for the incumbent.

UPDATE:  See Ross Douthat's NYT column for another take on Latimer and, more important, Bush's presidency; some obvious points on Bush as master of his own disasters but worth keeping in mind. 

UPDATE #2:  Latimer's former boss, WSJ columnist Bill McGurn, strikes back. 

It seems that every time I check in to the Hyatt Embarcadero to visit my peeps at Pacific Research Institute there is some kind of environmental conference going on. Thursday this past week was no exception: there in the lobby were two young ladies dressed up as "orange roughies," a colorful Pacific ocean species that is, as you might guess, bright orange. I've seen lots of them scuba diving in California waters over the years. Lo and behold, yesterday morning the two orange roughie gals turned up in the San Francisco Chronicle's news story about the release of a new "interim" report from the Obama Administration's Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force.

The news story, and the underlying report, are an excellent case study in the weary, used-up character of contemporary environmentalism, and a good indicator of why the public is increasingly bored with environmental issues according to the polls. The head of NOAA, Jane Lubchenco, said, "Today is a historic day for our oceans." Really? All because the government put out another report? That must be some kind of powerful report.   Maybe it has magic spells?

No; rather it contains the usual administrative-state cliches. "The draft report," says the Chron story, "recommended several broad strategies, including improving coordination among local, state, and federal agencies." [Smacking forehead now] Why hasn't anyone thought of that before? Or this: "Boosting water ocean water quality through more sustainable land practices." Genius! The Obama Task Force will now take the report on the road on a "multi-city tour" around America, after which no doubt there will be released a final report to replace this interim one.

This is typical of modern government groupies, thinking their banal cliches represent original thinking because their sentiments are so pure. Lubchenco added the usual coda of the anointed by saying, "For the first time our nation is saying loudly and clearly that healthy oceans matter." For. The. First. Time. Really??

No one seems to recall that the Bush Administration had its own Commission on Ocean Policy (actually set in motion by Congress in legislation passed in the year 2000) that held extensive hearings around the U.S. and issued its own very detailed 522 page report (not counting the appendices) in 2004 entitled An Ocean Blueprint for the 21st Century, containing hundreds of specific policy recommendations, including, naturally, "better coordination" between government agencies. I wonder how many of these were followed up? I'm sure there have been lots of great interagency meetings in Washington. Wouldn't you think we might build on this first before reinventing the wheel? Why have all those "coordination" meetings all over again?

This new effort also shows what cheap dates environmentalists have become. Even though the new Obama effort is still in the "interim" stage, and none of the miracle "coordination" has happened yet, the Chron reports that "Environmental groups, many of which have long fought for a national ocean policy, were thrilled at the administration's quick progress." Yup, a few more reports and no doubt the planet will be transformed back into Eden. And the orange roughie gals can recycle their costumes for San Francisco's Halloween parade.

Kristol played a crucial role in the development of the modern conservative movement.  More on this later.  Condolences to his family, which includes Ashbrook Board Member William Kristol.  AEI's obituary is here.

UPDATE: NY Times obituary is here.  Some lines:

Yet underlying the invective was an innate skepticism, even a quality of moderation and self-mockery, which was often belied by his single-mindedness. This stalwart defender of free enterprise could manage only two cheers for capitalism. "Extremism in defense of liberty," he declared, taking issue with Barry Goldwater, "is always a vice because extremism is but another name for fanaticism." And the two major intellectual influences on him, he said, were Lionel Trilling, "a skeptical liberal," and Leo Strauss, "a skeptical conservative." 

On September 17, 1787 the delegates signed off on the Constitution, sending it to the States to be ratified,  Here's a brief quiz on the text of what they sent.

1.  What provisions of the Constitution may not be amended?

T or F:

2.  The Constitution refers to the national government as "republican."

3.  The Constitution prohibited women and blacks from holding national office.

4.  The Constitution refers to Jesus Christ.

5.  The Constitution sets age and citizenship requirements for the major federal offices--congress, executive, and judiciary.

Answers, with brief commentary, will appear below late tomorrow in the Comments section. 

Michelle Malkin reminds us that last year the NY Times started to investigate Acorn, but Stephanie Strom, the reporter, dropped the story after receiving some rather unpleasant phone calls from the Obama campaign.  (A short version is here).  Perhaps the Times and other representatives of the old establishment media will finally return to the story.

Were I in the Lefty community-organizing community, and if I believed that America was a fundamentally unjust place, where the rich and the powerful tend to have their way and the poor tend to get the short end of the stick rather more here than elsewhere, I would have a rather large chip on my shoulder.  That chip might lead me to feel entitled to bend or break the law, just as I had been taught to think that most rich people do.  In short, I would not be surprised to find a great deal of corruption in Acorn and other like groups.

Wapo claims:  "Supermarket prices are plunging as the global downturn drives down the cost of staples such as wheat, corn and milk and grocers fight for the wallets of penny-pinching consumers"

Works for me.  True for you? 

Much ink has already been spilled over Yale University Press's descision not to publish the now famous Danish Cartoons.  In the latest commentary on the affiar, James Kirchick notes that Yale's decision grew from fear of violence:

I believe deeply in the principles of the First Amendment and academic freedom," said Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and a member of Yale's governing board, in which capacity he advised the Press not to publish the cartoons. "But in this instance Yale Press was confronted with a clear threat of violence and loss of life."

Zakaria's comment raises a question that ought to be addressed head on.  It seems to me that Zakaria gets it backward.  In normal circumstances, a responsible member of Yale's board ought to make safety a central concern.  But protecting the free press is precisly the kind of thing for which it is worth taking risks.

When this controversy started, one commentator at National Review (I cannot recall who it was) pointed out that, as a general rule, in polite society one ought not to mock another's religion, and one should shun those who do.  Similarly, newspapers ought not to publish such cartoons, as a rule. The trouble with this controversy, is that it creates the case that is the exception to the general rule.  When the right to mock someone's belief is the issue, the right thing to do changes.  In this case, in other words, courage meets prudence.

(It might be this piece by Andrew Stuttaford that I am recalling. Stuttaford also gives some background into the origns of the controversy. The cartoons were done deliberately, to prove a point about free speech, and not simply to anger Muslims).

Now that we again have a Democrat in the White House, Lefty intellectuals are finally admitting that President Bush did not do anything out of the ordinary. Many have noted that President Obama is doing many of the same things as his predecessor.  Today's NY Times, for example, notes that President Obama feels free to disregard laws that he thinks are unconstitutional limitations on the President's power.  In particular:

The Justice Department has declared that President Obama can disregard a law forbidding State Department officials from attending United Nations meetings led by representatives of nations considered to be sponsors of terrorism.

There are powers that clearly are subject to legislation, and there are powers that clearly belong to the executive on his own.  And then there are powers about which there is argument between the two branches.  In this last case, both branches often push their claim until one of them blinks. Old story.

Meanwhile, Garry Wills reminds us that the modern chief executive wields extraordinary powers, which Bush did not invent.

But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. . . . Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941-2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.

Some of the unhappiness we have seen in our politics grows from a frustration with the modern state.  During the Bush Presidency, many found it convenient to blame all that on Bush.  Now that Obama is President perhaps we'll start to see a more reasonable discussion about the nature and purpose of executive power and of the modern American state. (H/t Commentary's Contentions).

Hat tip to Instapundit who is right, when Jon Stewart covers it, the story has legs.

Conservative ire about White House "czars" covering various policy areas (health, environment, recovery, etc.) misses the big point.  Nixon appointed such "czars"--but clearly with the intention of centralizing power over bureaucracies he regarded as lawless, constitutionally dubious, and opposed to his policies.  That is altogether legitimate.

Obama's czars would also police policy as he understands it.  The issue is not that such appointments are "undemocratic"--that is, not subject to Senate confirmation--but that they represent a further growth of the bureaucracy, not a limitation of it.   For the distinction, see John Marini's classic account of the growth of bureaucratic government.  This is another example of conservative politicos' failure to hit the central issue, the return to self-government.

As predicted, the House just voted, 240-179,a "resolution of disapproval" of Congressman Joe Wilson, with 12 Dems opposing, 7 Reps supporting.  The Politico provided a copy of the rules he violated; you can call someone a nitwit but not a liar. 

My question remains:  When has a President, addressing Congress, ever accused someone in the chamber of lying, as Obama clearly did?  I have been asking various scholars of the Presidency, who haven't come up with anything. 

Of course FDR compared conservative Republicans to fascists in his 1944 SOU (see the sixth paragraph from the end), which puts him in an entirely different league of malefactors.

On this note consider the wise thoughts of this scholar of the presidency, on Harry Truman:

"One would be hardpressed to find a more egregious example of presidential demagoguery than Truman's remark about Thomas Dewey and the Republican party ("[T]he Republicans have joined up with this Communist-inspired Third Party to beat the Democrats") or his claim that the Republicans were the instruments of "powerful reactionary forces" intent on reducing the Bill of Rights to a "scrap of paper" (247). To make sure that his postwar audience fully grasped the horror of the situation, Truman drew parallels with Hitler's rise to power in Germany. His rhetoric infuriated the Republicans and paved the way for McCarthyism during Truman's second term."

Hayward claims to be an objective historian. It is pretty clear he is just another Reagan hater. Hayward calls Reagan's ideas loopy. He thinks Reagan's presidency succeeded by luck. The fall of the Soviet Union had nothing to do with Reagan. Reagan was a simpleton and could not distinguish fantasy from reality. On and on it goes. By contrast, Hayward elevates Carter in his book. If Hayward were an historian, he might try to tell the story of Reagan without constantly using demeaning adjectives, slanted perspectives and mischaracterizations of Reagan's supporters. If you hate Reagan and want to feel vindicated, this book is for you. If you liked Reagan at all or just want an unbiased history of the Reagan Presidency, look elsewhere. Save your money and your time and avoid this book.

I'm wondering if he has me confused with this book instead?  You'd think the difference in the author's name might be a tipoff, no?

All graduating Ashbrook Scholars are required to write a thesis as part of their participation in the Ashbrook Scholar Program. Over the past few weeks I have recorded three separate podcasts with the authors of the theses that were given the Charles Parton Award for best thesis this past spring.  These three students graciously agreed to spend some time talking with me about their theses.

I commend each of these students again for their impressive work.    

The links below will take you to a PDF file of each thesis.  To listen to the podcasts, go here. 

Lauren Arnold's thesis, "Rule in The Tempest: The Political Teachings of Shakespeare's Last Play," was of particular interest to me as my love of Shakespeare's work is no secret.  She does an excellent job in the podcast of explaining the political complexities of the play.

Colleen Carper wrote her thesis on British code-breaking efforts during WWII and her thesis is entitled "Bletchley's Secret War: British Code Breaking in the Battle of the Atlantic."  Ms. Carper clearly made herself an expert on the subject, as you will hear in the podcast.

Michael Sabo worked with an old friend of mine, Ken Masugi, on his thesis, "The Higher Law Background of the Constitution: Justice Clarence Thomas and Constitutional Interpretation."  He did an excellent job of explaining Thomas's method of interpreting the Constitution and I applaud him for his efforts.

How can people say, on one hand, that we can't to know the intent of the framers or ratifiers of the constitution, but also say we can know a particular crime was motivated by hate?

As we continue to discuss how to reform our health care regulations and hand-outs, it seems to me that we ought to step back and think about what, exactly, we are trying to achieve.  As I understand it, the goal ought to be to encourage responsibility.  For President Obama, and most others on the Left, "responsibility" seems to mean that the better off should be responsible and help pay for the health care of the less fortunate.  Fair enough. The only trouble is the responsibility requires liberty.  The effort to be responsible in this sense cuts against the goal of increasing the responsibility of citizens, which, as I understand it, ought to be the chief concern.  A responsible person pays his own bills, just as responsible parents provide for their own families. 

The goal of reforms, in other words, ought to be to encourage people to pay for as much of their own health care as possible.  Admittedly, the "as possible" line might be fairly low. That does not, however, mean it does not exist.  When someone's tires get old, we don't expect auto insurance to pay for new tires. Similarly, we don't expect insurance to pay for oil changes.  Or, turning to our houses, we don't expect the government or insurance to pay for a new boiler (unless we have special policies for that).  Why should health care be different?  Why should we not expect citizens to pay for regular check-ups?  Why should we not expect people to save money for the almost inevitable health problems that crop up in our lives. To be sure, some people will need help at lower priceline than others--that's what charity is for. But that does not change the underlying idea that the goal ought to be to encourage citizens to be as responsible as possible for their own health care.

If, however, those problems are very serious, and start to require lots and lots of money, that's when insurance ought to kick in.  Health savings accounts, combined with high-deductible policies, were an effort to move in that direction. That's why the Left fought it.  They disagree with the principle involved. The Left believes that health care is a right, and, therefore, that it ought to be provided, virtually from the first dollar.  As we discuss reform, thoseof us who disagree ought to challenge that principle.  I suspect that most Americans, when the question of principle is raised, would not agree with the Left (even if most Americans tend to like the hand-outs they get).

Peter Boyer at The New Yorker reacted to last night's presidential speech with a short essay that upbraided Republicans for turning the term "public option" into "the most effective weapon against reform." This response, hysterical on the part of the zealots and cynical on the part of the vested interests, is completely at odds with the option's humble aspirations and limited potential, since it "was conceived as a means of accommodating moderates, bringing market forces to bear on the problem of cost by creating a new entity to compete with private insurers."

Who, exactly, conceived the public option in these humble terms? Not Jacob Hacker, the prominent health policy expert at UC Berkeley, and not Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America's Future. According to Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect, Hacker and Hickey were the driving force behind the successful effort to sell the public option to liberal activists and the leading Democratic candidates in 2007 as a way to surmount the political impediment posed by the "hard reality" that large numbers of Americans are not willing "to be put into one big health plan run by the government." The point was to assure the Democrats' single-payer advocates that the public option was "a kind of stealth single-payer," one that "would someday magically turn into single-payer." The new public option was designed, not merely to compete with private insurers, but to win that competition in a rout and "become the dominant player" in the health insurance market.

Neither is Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic playing small ball. He recently urged liberals not to let the best be the enemy of the good on health care policy. Even if only part of the whole wish list can be enacted now, those parts will make possible the enactment of the rest down the road, he advised: "It's not as if it will be impossible to scale up these reforms later on. If Congress passes and the president signs a bill putting in place the key institutional elements of reform now, they can always revisit, and strengthen, the measure later. During the 1980s, Henry Waxman almost single-handedly expanded Medicaid to its current levels by gradually making more people eligible and securing the funding to pay for them. All he needed was the institutional structure--the program, the rules, and the basic funding stream--on which to build the new coverage. The fact that Waxman is a chief architect for this year's program ought to give liberals confidence that, once again, these reforms needn't represent the upper limit of what might be achieved over the next few years. They are a start, and a very good start, but not a finish."

Pres. Obama's characteristically self-effacing pronouncement - he "will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than improve it" - has nothing to say to legislators or citizens who believe it is better governance to abandon a plan that is flawed in ways so fundamental that no improvements could possibly mitigate the damage it will do. There is precedent. Democrats four years ago did not exert themselves to find ways to improve George Bush's Social Security plans. Instead, they decided that it was good politics and good enough governance to kill it, rather than haggle over details about private retirement accounts or formulas for curtailing the growth of benefits to more prosperous Social Security recipients. Indeed, seven years after Pres. Bill Clinton had made the urgent need to "save Social Security first" the focus of a State of the Union address, the Democratic consensus became that there was nothing to save Social Security from, that the program's finances were in splendid shape for as many decades into the future as any sane person could care about.

Republicans today are similarly averse to entering negotiations that require them to jettison, as a condition for a place at the table, their fundamental belief about American health policy: The bigger cause for the shortcomings of the American health care system is not the good things government should be doing but isn't, but rather the many things it is already doing - some badly, and others that it ought not to be undertaking at all. Before discussing the next increment of government regulation and spending, say Republicans, let's optimize the government's current massive and maladroit intervention into the financing of medical care.

As it happens, Rich Lowry of National Review provides several recommendations along these lines today:

1. Modify tax policy to eliminate the disincentives for individual purchase of health insurance and health care.
2. Eliminate regulatory barriers that prevent small businesses from cooperatively pooling and self-insuring their health risks by liberalizing the rules that govern voluntary health care purchasing cooperatives.
3. Eliminate laws that prevent interstate purchase of health insurance by individuals and businesses.
4. Eliminate rules that prevent individuals and group purchasers from tailoring health insurance plans to their needs, including federal and state benefit mandates and community rating requirements.
5. Eliminate artificial restrictions on the supply of health care services and products, such as the overregulation of drugs and medical devices, as well as state and federal restrictions on who may provide medical services and how they must be delivered.
6. Improve the availability of provider and procedure-specific cost and quality data for use by individual health consumers.
7. Reform the jackpot malpractice liability system that delivers windfall punitive damage awards to small numbers of injured patients while it raises malpractice insurance costs for doctors and incentivizes the practice of defensive medicine.

So, Mr. President, should Republicans waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill these proposals than improve them?

WaPo editorialist Dana Milbank's "Republicans Behaving Badly" gives ample evidence of who the malefactor-in-chief is.  Here's the speech.

To his credit, Milbank notes, among other Democrat "provocations," the chamber of medical horrors showcased by the visitors in the First Lady's box. "Obama wasn't subtle in his effort to make his foes look cruel."

But Milbank distorts the misbehavior by some Republicans by omitting Obama's charge that unnamed "prominent politicians" are spreading "a lie, plain and simple" about the vaunted death panels. Can anyone provide another instance of a President addressing Congress and calling his opponents liars? See political theorist Tim Burns, via Powerline.

Moreover, Milbank errs in referring to last night's occasion as "a sacred ritual of American democracy"--this was not a constitutionally mandated State of the Union address but rather a rare partisan occasion (try naming a couple others) for a President to push pet legislation. Such a political appropriation of the elected branches of government merits a political response.

"In my life, I had sought out other parts of the world--Patagonia, Assam, the Yangtze; I had not realized that the dramatic desert I had imagined Patagonia to be was visible on my way from Sedona to Santa Fe, that the rolling hills of West Virginia were reminiscent of Assam and that my sight of the Mississippi recalled other great rivers. I'm glad I saw the rest of the world before I drove across America. I have traveled so often in other countries and am so accustomed to other landscapes, I sometimes felt on my trip that I was seeing America, coast to coast, with the eyes of a foreigner, feeling overwhelmed, humbled and grateful.

"A trip abroad, any trip, ends like a movie--the curtain drops and then you're home, shut off. But this was different from any trip I'd ever taken. In the 3,380 miles I'd driven, in all that wonder, there wasn't a moment when I felt I didn't belong; not a day when I didn't rejoice in the knowledge that I was part of this beauty; not a moment of alienation or danger, no roadblocks, no sign of officialdom, never a second of feeling I was somewhere distant--but always the reassurance that I was home, where I belonged, in the most beautiful country I'd ever seen."

William M. Chace writes a thoughtful article on the decline of English as a college major and, more generally, as a coherent discipline. First the numbers.  In one generation (1970-2003), the number of students majoring in English dropped almost in half, from 7.6% to 3.9%, reflecting a general decline in the number of humanities majors (business is apparently now the most popular major).  Chace offers several reasons for this, but the main one is this:

the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

I would add, they have distanced themselves from the young people who might be interested in using books to think about life and its questions.  Among many other interesting arguments and observations, Chace reports that Harvard University recently replaced its survey of English literature for undergraduates with four new "affinity groups" - "Arrivals," "Poets," "Diffusions," and "Shakespeares."  Sounds inspiring.  And clear. (Incidentally, I had heard that Shakespeare didn't exist, but not that there were several of him.) The idea is that the content of the old survey will "trickle down" to students, but if no one takes thought that it happen, how likely is that?  To his credit, Chace cautiously defends the idea of a tradition of English literature, and even intimates that those in the field ought to have a "sense of duty" towards the works of English or American literature.  "Without such traditions," he concludes, "civil societies have no moral compass to guide them."  It will be interesting to see how (or whether) the profession responds.

Congratulations to this month's winners of a No Left Turns mug! The winners are as follows:

Douglas Anderson
Susan Benedict
Robert Ingle
Susan Ely
April Portillo

Thanks to all who entered. An email has been sent to the winners. If you are listed as a winner and did not receive an email, contact Ben Kunkel. If you didn't win this month, enter September's drawing.

At the end of her denunciation Democratic party arrogance, Obama admirer Camille Paglia  observes: 

     [A]ffluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled. 

Paglia's earlier reference to Bob Dylan as one true freedom-lover reminds us of his autobiography, Chronicles.  Among Dylan's shrewd observations (about Thucydides as well as his contemporaries) is his criticism of Machiavelli's maxim that it is better to be feared than to be loved:  No, the person who is the most loved can also be the most feared.  Dylan also declares that his favorite politician from the sixties was Barry Goldwater. 

A far greater poet of freedom with a funny voice was Winston Churchill.  Those in the San Francisco area should make it to the Churchill Centre conference this weekend, featuring, among others, Justice Clarence Thomas and Hillsdale College President and Churchill scholar Larry Arnn.

A few days ago, the NY Times ran a story about the latest bright idea from Wall Street:

The bankers plan to buy "life settlements," life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash -- $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to "securitize" these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

Basically, it's the same thing that Wall Street applied to risky mortgages, and that worked out so well.  This time, however, the key variable is not the likelihood of people repaying their mortgages, but rather their lifespan: "The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return -- though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money."

Is it unreasonable to worry that death panels will have new fans if these bonds become as popular as the mortgage backed securities were?  And will Wall Street cease to invest in advances in medicine that prolong life.  Or perhaps the backers of these bonds are already banking that those very things will be the inevitable result of moves currently being made in Washington.

"Since 'The Age of Reagan' will probably find more readers among conservatives than liberals, this is the message they ought to take to heart -- that being like Reagan can mean more than simply checking off a list of ideological boxes, or delivering a really impressive speech. It can mean marrying principle to practicality, tolerating fractiousness within one's own coalition and dealing with the political landscape as it actually exists, rather than as you would prefer it to be. (And in Hayward's account of the flailing Reagan-era Democratic Party, conservatives can find an object lesson in what happens if you don't.)

Kudos to the Superintendent of Medina City Schools (just South of Cleveland) for leaving it up to parents to decide whether their kids should listen to Tuesday's address. Also impressive is his emphasis on the Constitution. Good for him.

Dear Parents of Medina City Schools,

In case you haven't heard, President Obama intends to address the children of our great nation on Tuesday, September 8th at noon. As a district we will not be airing President Obama's speech or utilizing the supporting documents for the speech. While we believe his intentions are good, we will leave it to you, the parents, to determine if you wish to have your children view President Obama's speech.

While we sincerely respect the position of President of the United States, as an educational institution we must also respect the rights of a parent to make decisions for their children when it comes to politics. Many parents have called the District both in favor and against the speech being broadcast live to students. In order to minimize any controversy and the potential disruption of the educational process, we decided to leave it to parents to discuss or watch the speech with their children on their own time. Should you make the decision to view the speech with your child you can access it via an archived webcast at www.whitehouse.gov or www.ed.gov.

The Medina City School District will teach your children to think critically and think for themselves. We will also teach children how to sift through all of the information that is available to them (political or not), decide between fact and fiction, and then understand the process for making an educated decision based on quality information. We will also continue to make sure that our students know and understand the branches of government and the Constitution of the United States. We believe that once they truly understand the Constitution they will then be able to make good political decisions on their own.

Thanks for your understanding on this matter and thank you for your ongoing support of the Medina City School District!

Sincerely,
Randy Stepp
Superintendent
Medina City Schools

President Obama appears to believe that civil society ought not to be truly independent of government.  His latest effort in this direction is his recent phone call lobbying the arts community to use their talents to help the President and his party pass health care legislation.  It is similar to his call to America's Rabbis to use their pulpits to lobby for the same legislation.  (And his reaction agaist civil soceity in action at the town halls might reflect the same beliefs. Community organizing ought not to be done independently, and the middle class ought not to be asserting its own ideas an interests  Only ogranizing on behalf of the Progressive agenda is letitimate). This effort is unprecedented:

As a former National Endowment for the Humanities official told me, "Nowhere, as far as I know, has there been even the suspicion that federal agencies under any administration have been enlisted by the administration to further specific legislation or legislative goals. And that's what happened. [They said,] 'We want to make art that will specifically advance Obama's agenda.' "

Given the importance of the US government in funding the arts, this is a big step (The fear of precisely such leverage is one of the main things that leads conservatives to oppose government funding for arts.  Once the government pays for something, it will, inevitably, attach strings). Of course, as Michael Lewis notes during the Obama campaign, America's artists became more politicized than they had been in quite some time.  As Lewis notes, great art can have a moral agenda, but when it descends to regular partisan politics, it usually turns into kitsch.  Presumably, the President thought he could use his following in the arts community to help push his preferred legislation through Congress. 

The President here continues a trend that David Billet noted in a recent issue of Commentary by examining President Obama's desire to reduce the tax deduction on charitable contributions. Billet disagrees with this post of mine from last year.  I suggested that there is no reason to give wealthy people a tax deduction when they write a large check to Harvard to get their son into the school.  Billet notes that altering the status quo for charitable contributions would risk undermining civil society in general.  The argument gives me pause, suggesting it would be very difficult to alter the law in one way without changing much else.  More to the point, Billet connects this with a larger effort of Lefty groups to use the levers of power to direct civil society. Nothing should simply be free of government control, and free to do whatever it wants in American society, it seems. It must always be pushed to support another agenda:

The most notable campaign against the philanthropic status quo has been waged by the California-based Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit that seeks greater "racial and economic justice" by attempting to force greater minority representation in government, commerce, and higher education, mostly by publicly shaming or suing companies into doing the right thing. (The institute's name is a play on the practice by banks of "redlining" poor neighborhoods as bad credit risks; "most of our money," its director has boasted, comes not from donations but "from lawsuits.")

After a Greenlining study found that a mere 3 percent of private grant money in California went to minority-led causes, the group waged a concerted campaign on behalf of state legislation to require foundations  with assets over $250 million to disclose the race, gender, and ethnicity of board members, staff, business contacts, and individual grantees (at one point sexual orientation was also included), and to report the amount and percentage of grants to organizations in which 50 percent or more of board members and staff were minorities.

I suspect that President Obama is sympatetic with that agenda.  Any pool of money that can be used to further his agenda, which he regards as the national agenda, ought to be co-opted. In short, the President thinks America is a community of 300,000,000, and he wishes to organize it as if we were a republic the size of ancient Sparta.

Anxiety is now pervasive. Trust in government rose when Obama took office. It has fallen back to historic lows. Fifty-nine percent of Americans now think the country is headed in the wrong direction."  Although everyone knows this to be true, and has known it to be true for about six weeks, I think now the White also knows.  And that fact is massive because everything they do from here on out will be with this in mind.  Now we will find out how clever these guys are, and/or whether Obama can persuade or his voice is nothing more than background music.  I am slo prepared to be surprised.  I think they are in a tight political bind, and it will get tighter, the squeeze will now come from the right, now from the left, and then again.  See George Will's call to get out of Afghanistan.