On Pet Ownership

Here's a thought experiment for you: If an animal inhabits your home, and you regard that animal as a pet -- that is, a creature you choose to shelter and care for because you enjoy its presence -- does that make you a "pet owner"?

Be careful how you answer, because that term -- "pet owner" -- really doesn't sit well with a lot of animal lovers.

So I learned in the most recent issue of Best Friends magazine, published by the Best Friends Animal Society. Prompted by the editors, quite a few readers wrote in to opine on what they think of the term "pet owner," and the responses were striking.

"'Pet' implies that animals are not individuals unto themselves, and 'owning' an animal reinforces the practice of treating companion animals as nothing more than objects to be bought and sold," contends Russel of San Francisco. Other readers said they prefer "companion, pet parent or animal lover" to pet owner. (And one lady wrote in to say that she and her husband, who are "childfree," dress their cat, throw her birthday parties and "talk to her like she's a person and we refer to ourselves as Mama and Daddy." This should start to give you a flavor for Best Friends' readership.)

And far be it from me to pass judgment on these folks. In my own, less effusive way, I think of myself as an animal lover too, so I can't complain about anyone who dotes on critters like this. I always had a cat and/or dog growing up, my "childfree" wife and I have a cat of our own now, and I've always been keen on animals in general, either wild or domesticated.

But the antipathy for the notion of "pet ownership" gives me pause. Not because some of these folks come across as slightly batty or over the top. (I mean really: birthday parties?) Somewhere, somebody is missing an important point, and it doesn't bode well for the animals.

Amid the stories about dogs and cats up for adoption, the profile of Best Friends' idyllic shelter operation in Utah, and the indignant denunciations of "pet ownership," this particular issue contains an in-depth article on Chicago's ongoing efforts to crack down on perpetrators of animal cruelty. It's equal parts dreary and encouraging, because enforcement of the city's anti-abuse laws are up markedly, but enforcement is just proof that some people hurt, neglect or wantonly kill domesticated animals.

It's a crime I've never understood, or wanted to understand. Better to cowardly pretend it doesn't happen, rather than picture some dumb, defenseless creature suffering. I'm sure it's the sort of thing that keep Best Friends readers awake at night, and in all likelihood reinforces their contempt for the idea of "owning" pets, as if they're just "things" or "possessions." That notion crops up repeatedly in the letters to the editor; that the very term "pet" relegates animals to the status of "commodities" or other inanimate property.

One young lady, who insists that her toy poodle is her "child" and her "best friend" dismisses the notion of owning the dog as vastly insufficient to express their relationship: "She is not a book, a computer or a cell phone...she is my child, and I am her parent."

But what if all this (completely earnest, well-meaning) insistence on seeing animals as essentially furry humans is part of the problem? These folks attribute human qualities like loyalty, affection and intelligence to their cats and dogs, and love them all the more for it. But apparently they don't ask whether the abusers, in a dark and twisted way, do the very same thing. If the perpetrators of animal cruelty see their pets as merely "possessions," why would they harm or destroy them? To put it another way: When did it last occur to you to intentionally damage a book, a computer or a cell phone that you own?

Answer: It didn't. These are inanimate objects, and assuming we purchased them, they represent some sort of value to us. By and large, they don't evoke feelings either of love or joy, anger or hatred.

As humans, we save those feelings for other humans, because they are "individuals unto themselves," not lifeless things. They elicit feelings within us, both positive and negative, as we interact with them. And those of us who love animals experience something similar in our relationships with cats, dogs and other domesticated creatures, which is why we keep them among us.

But it's not a one-way street. Really loving someone, human or otherwise, creates the possibility of also feeling anger, or contempt, or even hatred for that same being. I, for instance, love my cat. But when she awakens me before dawn, yowling insistently for food, when I'd rather be asleep, I won't pretend I'm not angry with her, or at least annoyed. What (dare I say it) pet owner can't identify with this fleeting emotion? It can feel outrageous; the cat KNOWS I want to sleep. She KNOWS it's early. She KNOWS I'll feed her soon. She's doing this ANYWAY! BAD CAT!

Except, not. She doesn't know any of those things, in the human sense of the word, which implies a moral understanding of right and wrong. She's just hungry and wants breakfast. She's not doing something wrong because she has no conception of "wrong." She's not human enough for that, and never will be.

So, dressing your cat up and baking her a birthday cake is all well and good, in itself, because it's merely hyper-affectionate. No doubt such a cat, though occasionally mortified at wearing a little kitty tutu, is well cared for.

But if you can swing too far to one extreme, and lavish love and affection at a human level on a non-human animal, someone else can go the other way, and savage an equally unwitting animal for its apparent disobedience, or defiance, or ill behavior. An "unreasonable" dog that barks incessantly might be beaten, or left out in the rain, because the owner has mistaken the behavior for something willful or conscious.

In such a case, attributing human impulses to the poor animal creates the illusion that some sort of reprisal is justified. We as a society punish human criminals, not just to prevent future crime, but because it makes us feel good. The criminal knew he acted wrongly; our outrage demands a commensurate punishment.

We do not, as a society, punish animals for wrongdoing, because we understand they lack the moral capacity to understand the concept of punishment. At best, we punish them to teach them not to do bad things in the future.

That is as it should be. No creature should suffer in ignorance, feeling only pain without understanding the reason for it. But to the extent that we allow ourselves to see pets as embodiments of our own best traits, we also run the risk that someone will project their distinctly human moral failings onto some poor, helpless animal, and act accordingly.

Reflections on Tuscon

When I first heard that a gunman had killed six people in Tuscon last weekend, apparently as part of an attempt to assassinate an Arizona congresswoman, I had no intention of writing about it. The early news coverage was spotty, but the initial picture had all the familiar hallmarks of yet another senseless massacre, the kind that happens all too regularly in schools, offices and public places. To me, it was yet another reminder that the world is often a chaotic, tragic place, and that much of human existence is ruled by the random hand of fate. In short, it was not an event I wanted to dwell on.

But the response to the Arizona shootings from the media in general, and from the liberal commentariat in particular, was too polarizing to ignore. Within hours of the attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords that also resulted in six deaths, prominent left-wing pundits like Paul Krugman of The New York Times were announcing that the shooting was "probably political" (in Krugman's words) and that the shooter was acting on the "violent rhetoric" coming from conservative, anti-Obama politicians.

And even when the narrative of the attacks and the background of the shooter became better known, and when it became apparent that Jared Loughner in fact had no tangible connection to Rush Limbaugh or the Tea Party, or for that matter any discernible political motivations whatsoever, prominent opinion-shapers on the left refused to back peddle, insisting that a "climate of hate" (Krugman again) had somehow impelled Loughner to commit mass murder, even if he had no literal connection to any political movement or figure. In fact, even the mounting evidence that he was in fact mentally deranged has done little to dispel that foggy narrative.

It was a shameful episode: a case of naked political opportunism without the slightest whiff of factual evidence to back up the charge. Hopefully the reputations of those who engaged in the smear will be tarnished accordingly.

But no one needs me to catalog how unjustified the "blame conservatives" campaign was. The Internet is already full of repetitions, so I won't bother arguing what's already been proven, such as the complete lack of political motivation for the shooting evident in the mountain of reporting being done on Jared Loughner, based on his own Internet postings and eyewitness accounts of people who knew him for years. I won't bother demonstrating that the infamous map created by Sarah Palin's political action committee during the 2010 elections showing the Tuscon congressional district under a gunsight's cross hairs is standard election imagery employed by both Republicans and Democrats. I won't catalog the instances of liberal politicians using violent or martial (and harmless) metaphors equivalent to the right-wing "rhetoric" that allegedly led Loughner to kill six people.

I will, however, offer a few brief observations regarding last weekend's killings that I haven't heard elsewhere, and which I think bear noting. Make of them what you will.

The behavior of the Tuscon sheriff coordinating the response to the attack was completely unbecoming for a law enforcement official.

Within days of the shooting, Tuscon Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was neck-deep in the political controversy when he announced that "vitriol" coming from, specifically, Rush Limbaugh had something to do with Loughner's motivation for the shooting. That this particular opinion is stupid and baseless is too obvious to belabor further; but that it was announced by the chief law enforcement officer responsible for responding to the aftermath of the attack is disgusting.

As sheriff, this man's sole, and weighty, responsibility is to determine what happened at Saturday's attack, what laws were broken and by whom. It is one thing for a newspaper columnist to rashly assign blame for a killing for political purposes; it is something else entirely for a police official investigating the attack to do so. That Dupnik, a liberal and an avowed Rachel Maddow fan, couldn't refrain from interjecting his (completely groundless) opinion of the attack in the course of doing his very serious job is indicative that he is unfit for office. It is a reminder that government officials everywhere, whether elected or appointed, exercise considerable influence over the lives of the citizens they're supposed to serve, and that as such, they must be held accountable when they abuse their positions.

Many liberals have become hyper-sensitive to criticism after two years of defending Obama's unpopular legislative agenda.

For many of the left-wing commentators at The New York Times, the Washington Post and other bastions of liberal opinion, Loughner's rampage was just the latest in a growing list of politically tinged acts of violence supposedly fomented by the angry rhetoric emanating from the right. As proof, they invariably trot out the same set of examples to prove their point, including the 2009 murder of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington by an elderly anti-semite (which I wrote about at the time), the nut who flew a small plane into an IRS building last year, again killing an innocent employee, and not least, the vandalism of Rep. Gifford's Tuscon office last year, during the height of the health care reform drama.

Somehow, these events constitute a pattern of violence motivated by conservative outlets. Yet the pundits connecting the dots never seem to mention that the Holocaust shooter, James von Brun, was a rabid, unbalanced anti-semite, and that anti-semitism plays no discernible role in the conservative opposition to Obama (who is supposed to be a Muslim anyway, according to crypto-conservative conspiracy theorists); that the IRS attacker had a personal feud with the agency over his own taxes and that his rambling manifesto criticized George W. Bush without mention of Obama; or that the petty vandalism at Gifford's office pales in comparison to the bullet fired through Republican Congressman Eric Cantor's office window in Richmond, also during the health care frenzy.

Details, details.

The sad, unsatisfying truth is that a small minority of people commit acts of violence for a whole host of often inscrutable reasons, and innocent people from all parts of society are liable to find themselves in the cross hairs. Attempting to shoehorn these chaotic, often inexplicable crimes into a coherent pattern of politically motivated violence that just happens to impugn your opponents is the tactic of a charlatan who cannot or will not evaluate each episode objectively.

The Arizona shooter is part of the tragedy.

Lost amid all the blame games is the man actually behind the killings, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner. Opinion writers of whatever political persuasion tended to give him short shrift when weighing in on what the attack really meant. Sure he was "deranged" or "ill" and his actions were "monstrous," but that's about all we heard about him from the people trying hardest to sum up his actions. Almost all of them wanted to move on the "real" lesson; Loughner himself has been almost a bit actor. (The straight journalists who have documented so much of Loughner's life have, by contrast, unearthed an enormous amount about the man.)

To me, this is perhaps the least-discussed aspect of the attack. While I'm no mental health professional and don't wish to speculate on his condition, it seems apparent from much news coverage that Loughner suffers from some type of mental illness that impelled him to commit murder. According to Internet postings he was deeply paranoid about the government controlling the minds of citizens through "grammar." He sufficiently frightened students and faculty at a local community college with his violent, offputting classroom comments that he was eventually kicked out. He posed weird, dark questions to online forums. He had a history of petty, drug-related brushes with the law. People who knew him for years before Saturday's attack described him as increasingly isolated and angry.

In short, he appears to have had problems that required some sort of treatment. And now it's too late for that, and for him. Whether Loughner is found guilty of first degree murder as a completely sane defendant, or some lesser charge resulting from clinical insanity, his chances of a normal life have been completely destroyed at age 22. Whether he's executed, or imprisoned, or committed to a psychiatric facility, he'll never be part of mainstream society and all its opportunities again.

And after the obvious tragedy of the people he killed and the loss for their families, this strikes me as the real pity of the Tuscon attacks. Judging from his voluminous comments and postings online, Loughner was a deeply unhappy person, burdened by the stigma of rejection by women, by employers, by the Army that wouldn't have him (all on understandable grounds, given his apparent condition). He posted discussion threads on an online gaming forum like "Talk, Talk, Talking about Rejection" and "Does anyone have aggression 24/7?"

It all reads like an ill young person making vague signals that he needed help, in the wrong place, to the wrong people. The right treatment might have gotten his problems under control in time to avoid last weekend's atrocity. That he didn't get that treatment doesn't appear to be anyone's fault; it only compounds the tragedy that took six lives and irreparably wasted a seventh.

The Road to Hell is Paved with TSA Body Scanners

"How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"
~Dwight David Eisenhower

I haven't taken a commercial flight in approximately forever, but even I know there's quite a flap at airports these days due to the installation of new "body scanner" machines that reveal boarding passengers in varying degrees of nudity, depending on the sensitivity of the scanner. And apparently, passengers who are apprehensive about undergoing such a revealing procedure (and the accompanying X-rays) haven't been thrilled by the Transportation Safety Administration's alternative: a pat-down by a same-sex TSA employee that outdoes many first dates for physical intimacy. Not long ago, one such aggrieved passenger summed up the opposition to the new rules for boarding an aircraft with his now-famous rallying cry, "Don't touch my junk."

Hence the protests, the "opt-out" movements and the resulting arguments playing out on blogs and newspapers' opinion pages everywhere. Criticisms of the scanners and pat-downs have largely boiled down to two main strands: that the high-tech imaging still doesn't prevent would-be terrorists from bringing dangerous substances onto airplanes; and/or, that the new security measures are invasive of personal privacy and in violation of the Constitution.

I'm sympathetic to both arguments, particularly the latter (which was recently laid out quite articulately by George Washington U. Professor Jeffrey Rosen). But I'm also sympathetic to the more nuanced observation, made by the New York Times' Ross Douthat, that opposition to new security measures often depends on one's support for or opposition to whichever political party is currently setting the agenda on national security. After all, good policy is good policy, whoever occupies the White House.

But I posit that there is a much simpler, much more elemental way to view the whole controversy, one that doesn't depend on upholding constitutional principles or staying loyal to your narrow political affiliation. The scanners and pat-downs are a mistake, for the simple reason that they seek to reinforce the idea that the government can do something that is patently impossible: methodically eliminating every conceivable method of committing violence. The longer that fallacy is official TSA policy, the more severe will be the public consternation when the next terrorist strikes.

Airport security in America is an utterly reactive enterprise. The hijackers on the 9/11 flights used simple box cutters to take over their airplanes; so now the TSA throws a fit if you happen to have a nail clipper in your carry-on bag. A few months later, a would-be terrorist tried to smuggle a bomb onto a flight in his shoe; so ever since, passengers must remove their shoes and send them through X-ray scanners. A few years later, a group of terrorists almost succeeded in smuggling explosive chemicals onto multiple flights and blowing them up mid-air; so now all liquids are treated as contraband and severely restricted (as I learned first-hand when Scottish security at Glasgow airport wouldn't let me bring half a bottle of blue Gatorade on my flight home three summers ago).

And now, because a Nigerian terrorist tried to blow up a plane last Christmas with a bomb sewn into his underwear, the TSA wants to see (or feel) what's inside your underwear. Is this starting to feel like the old arcade game Whack-a-Mole to anyone else yet?

When a pattern emerges, there are only two possibilities: the pattern will continue, or it won't. Either the TSA will continue trying to ban whatever method of attack the last terrorist used, with ever-greater intrusions into the privacy of air passengers, or they will be forced to draw the line somewhere, and admit they can't stop every form of attack.

Or in other words, either body imaging scanners will give way to body cavity searches after some enterprising jihadist inserts a bomb in some private bodily orifice; or the government's dedicated travel safety agency will have to admit there are some lines it cannot cross, some forms of attack it cannot prevent, and that there are no absolute guarantees of safety it can make. Neither is a particularly appealing prospect, but in the long run, those are the only plausible outcomes.

If today's security lines and procedures make travelers irritable and cranky, just wait until the day when a terrorist uses a previously unheard of method to blow up an airplane that TSA cannot or will not defend against. Irritation will quickly turn to widespread fear if the agency has to concede that the government security blanket has holes that can't be patched.

Not that I favor some sort of laissez-faire approach that abandons airport security entirely. While there are limits to the scrutiny the government can or should apply to passengers as they board airplanes, I see no reason to make the terrorists' lives easier by removing metal detectors or other sensible, unobtrusive measures. But we as a society ought to be able to distinguish between metal detectors that might reveal a harmless belt buckle or wedding ring in the process of screening for guns and knives, versus X-ray machines that reveal (and potentially, save, and disseminate) low-grade centerfolds of law-abiding travelers who already have enough reasons to resent the experience of flying in coach.

Someone Buy This Man a Shovel

The most important thing I learned in 10th grade honors U.S. history wasn't the Marbury v. Madison Supreme Court ruling or the causes of the Civil War. It was the importance of always carrying a reliable bullshit shovel.

I will never forget the image of my teacher, the laconic, popular Mr. Chemerka, stopping the girl who would go on to become my graduating class's valedictorian in the middle of a long, vague, rambling attempt to answer a question that had caught her flat-footed. "Hold on a second," Mr. C interjected, "let me just get my bullshit shovel out." And, to much good-natured laughter (including from the future valedictorian), he pantomimed digging a hole with an imaginary spade.

And ever since, I've tried to apply the bullshit shovel test to every argument and opinion I run across, as a quick gauge of soundness and simple factual accuracy. Most of the time it works remarkably well, alerting me to certain statements and ideas that don't stand up to even cursory scrutiny. But when I read Tom Friedman's latest New York Times column today, I had a sea-captain-from-Jaws moment: "I think I'm going to need a bigger bullshit shovel."

In case you need a reminder, Tom Friedman writes a twice-weekly column for the Times lamenting the fact that he's not in charge of everything. He is obsessed with "green" technology, and he wishes the United States could be more like his idol, the People's Republic of China, so the federal government could impose his environmental vision on the country without little details like democratic governance getting in the way. When Obama was bailing out GM and Chrysler last year, Friedman wanted the money to come with strings, including a mandate that the companies converted all their models to hybrids, pronto. In 2008, he nearly wet himself when the Chinese put on a glamorous opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, without bothering to wonder why the Chinese have such a hard time staging simple elections. (I had words for him on that occasion.)

(If you're starting to wonder why I even read the man's work, you have a fair point. It's sort of a ritualistic self-flagellation exercise, and probably indicative of some deep-seated sense of guilt I'm trying to exorcise. Maybe my friends and family need to stage an intervention.)

Today's column might just plumb a new low for Tom, something I would have considered physically impossible since whenever I last read him. Concerned that a bipartisan Senate plan to impose prices on carbon-based forms of energy could fall apart because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would rather pass a bill pandering to Hispanic voters in his home state of Nevada, Friedman frets that America will lose out to China in the race to claim "the next great global industry ... energy technology."

If you're confused, here's the CliffsNotes explanation:

China already builds a lot of renewable energy equipment, such as solar panels, wind turbines and electric motors for hybrid cars: stuff that's in high demand in places like Europe, where renewable energy production is mandated by government and encouraged through heavy subsidies. Friedman wants American companies to build all that cool stuff, but right now they generally don't, because the U.S. government doesn't punish conventional sources of energy like oil and coal and because renewable energy isn't cost-effective without some sort of carbon tax or cap-and-trade system to make fossil fuels more expensive. No climate bill in the Senate means no shiny new "green industry" in Detroit or Pittsburgh.

Now here's where the bullshit shovel is so desperately needed. Observe that Friedman first declares that renewable energy technology is "the next great global industry." And then observe that he says America needs to handicap conventional, carbon-based energy in order "to start really shifting the economy to clean-power innovations." In other words, wind and solar are the next big money-making business proposition, the trend that's going to revitalize American industry and create American jobs, so we're missing out if we don't get on board. But first we need to make renewables the next big money-making business proposition.

This is setting the proverbial cart so far in front of the horse it's not even funny. Here's a little nugget from all those economics classes Tom Friedman apparently never took: if there's a big, money-making opportunity out there, capitalists will pounce on it, in all their greedy, self-interested glory. They don't wait around for a green light from the government. But that only works if the business opportunity in question makes sense and adheres to the laws of physics. Creating artificial demand for wind turbines by suppressing cheaper alternatives like coal is akin to creating more jobs in the ditch-digging business by outlawing bulldozers, or boosting the glass industry by throwing rocks through windows.

None of which is to say that some form of carbon-limiting scheme doesn't make sense. I have some major reservations about the current state of climate change science, but if in fact global warming is a serious threat, I'm all in favor of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through some sort of government-imposed system. That will almost certainly include switching from cheap, economical fuels to expensive power generated by wind and solar.

But to hear the Tom Friedmans of the world proclaim that making this costly transition will actually make money is laughable, or it would be if it wasn't so intellectually insulting. Chinese solar panel factories aren't booming because the Chinese economy is "going green." On the contrary, China is now the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, and 80 percent of the electricity powering China's industrial revolution comes from ... coal. (The U.S. generates about 45 percent of its power from coal, if you were wondering.)

China builds lots of wind turbines and solar panels because the cost of production in Chinese factories is much lower than in the U.S. or Europe. China builds lots of batteries for hybrid cars because it has a near monopoly on the "rare earth" elements needed to build them, and is willing to permit the tremendous environmental devastation involved in rare-earth mining (devastation that has shuttered almost all U.S. rare-earth mines). China recently surpassed the U.S. as the largest auto market in the world, and it's the fastest-growing market for big, gas-guzzling luxury cars from companies like BMW. In short, China is "green" in the same sense that Ben Affleck is a perennial Oscar contender.

Does Anyone Know Jimmy Carter's E-mail Address?

Because I have an article I'd really like to send him.

Last summer, when "tea party" protests of Obama's recently enacted health care legislation were still an emerging new phenomenon, the ex-president famously wrote off the protesters as crypto-racists unable to accept the fact of a black president. "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," Carter intoned.

And since then, the liberal thought-police at The New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere have largely echoed that sentiment, comparing Capitol Hill protesters demonstrating on the night of the health bill's final passage to Nazi storm troopers or angry, Jim Crow segregationists threatening to lynch southern blacks in the face of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s.

It's gotten to the point where even I, despite never participating in a "tea party" rally, and despite my utter indifference to Obama's race, started questioning myself. "Maybe I just think I object to the health care bill because it's unconstitutional, because it will make health care worse, because it smacks of heavy-handed government and economic illiteracy. Maybe I really object to it because deep down, I'm a huge racist, Nazi skinhead and just didn't know it..."

But then I read this article by Reason Magazine's Michael Moynihan, and I snapped back to reality. "Phew," I said. "Never mind. It really is just a horrible, ugly, misguided piece of legislation after all."

ObamaCare and My Cognitive Dissonance Moment

Liberals, rejoice; conservatives, despair: After what felt like an interminable, mind-numbing debate, Barack Obama's signature health reform bill is the law of the land. And sadly, we as a country are probably in for months and years of continuing debate, not to mention lawsuits challenging the law's constitutionality and entire political campaigns devoted to upholding or repealing the most significant piece of social engineering legislation of our time. What a dreary prospect.

It's been an exhausting national debate, not least because the various bills, the final law and the underlying issues are so complex and detailed. I've opposed the basic plan all along, on constitutional, philosophical and economic grounds. But now that it's passed, I'm not here to rehash those arguments yet again. Because, having followed the news coverage of congressional Democrats celebrating their legislative victory, I realized I have a much more basic problem with ObamaCare: It makes my head explode.

To elaborate on that a bit, I cannot reconcile the things I hear liberals say about this legislation with other things I hear liberals say about this legislation. For months now, I've been listening to Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, or another Washington Democrat make certain claims about health care and health reform. I hear those claims, and I say "Uh huh...," and then Obama, or Pelosi, or Senator Whoever immediately goes on to conclude something that makes me go "Huh?" It's gotten to the point where no amount of aspirin can cure the headache this causes me.

And so, rather than delving into the minutia of the law, I humbly submit the following list of basic claims about health care reform that I, personally, cannot hold in my mind simultaneously without suffering severe cognitive dissonance. Or a massive stroke.

1) "The present health insurance system is dysfunctional (uh huh...). We need to make sure everyone in this country has health insurance! (huh?)

So health insurance is outrageously expensive, maddening to access and bad at actually doing the things it's supposed to do? And this is a reason to expand it to an additional 30 million people? This isn't evidence that it's a bad system that we should have gotten rid of years ago? This doesn't cause Democrats to pause and ask, "Hey, maybe the reasons the current system sucks for the people who have health insurance are related to the reasons other people don't have insurance at all"?

2) "Our country is facing a serious fiscal crisis due to the unfunded liabilities created by government entitlement programs. (uh huh...). So we need to create a new, bigger entitlement program! (huh?)

I know, it sounds crazy, but I didn't say it. Obama said it: "Make no mistake: health care reform is entitlement reform."

Previous entitlement programs, mostly Social Security and Medicare, are threatening to bankrupt our government, so we need to cut them and put the money into a new entitlement program that's available to more people? Once again, the first part of the statement sounds reasonable: the federal government's current unfunded liabilities (that is, the value of the future benefits it has promised to pay but won't have the funds to afford) is $43 trillion. Toss in the national debt of $12.5 trillion, projected future deficits and some other liabilities, and our country is in a $62.3 trillion hole.

Yet somehow, the solution to entitlement spending is ... entitlement spending? Despite a proven track record of previous entitlement programs growing far beyond our capacity to pay for them? I can just hear the earnest, liberal policy wonk going: "But this time it'll work...!"

(And in case you were wondering just how much money $62.3 trillion is, the total value of everything produced by our entire economy in 2009 was $14.2 trillion. In individualized terms, that would be equivalent to a worker earning $50,000 with debts of $219,366.)

3) This one might be my favorite: "We're going to force insurers to cover people with expensive health problems at the same cost as everyone else (uh huh...), and health insurance is going to become more affordable." (huh?!?)

This, in essence, is what Obama's plan boils down to: Somehow we're going to make sure that the people who need medical care the most are going to get it, while still making sure that insurers stop ripping off the rest of us by keeping costs under control. Both halves of that goal are perfectly noble in and of themselves, but they are what logicians call "mutually exclusive." You can have one, or the other, but not both together. Say, did somebody mention something about baking a cake, eating the cake, and then still having the cake?

I think there might be a 4) and a 5) somewhere on this list, but for the sake of my own (mental) health, I should probably stop there. Besides, I've got a cake to bake.

I Never Thought I'd Say This...

...but for once in my life, I agree with Joe Biden.

After giving a little speech today at the White House signing ceremony for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the vice president turned to his boss, and said, into a live microphone, "Mr. President, this is a big fucking deal."

Chalk it up as yet another of Joe Biden's seemingly endless string of public gaffes (though it still doesn't top my all-time favorite).

Still, this one is worth noting, because today the veep got it right. When you enact a law that dramatically restructures 16 percent of the American economy, on a strict partisan vote, over the objections of public opinion polls everywhere, under the veil of a massive accounting gimmick and completely unrealistic policy assumptions, relying on a series of special deals for individual lawmakers, and you cement in place the worst aspects of a seriously dysfunctional health care system, and create the legal precedent that health care is an entitlement regardless of your ability to pay for it, it's a really big fucking deal.

You hit the nail on the head, Joe.

Bam!

Just in case anyone was in need of a refresher on why Obamacare is a horrendous idea that will only exacerbate the problems with the American medical system rather than solving them, here it is.

Apparently it takes Democrats in Congress 2,000 pages to further undermine our health care system, but a columnist at humble little Reason Magazine can debunk their plan in about 600 words. I don't know whether that's comforting or terrifying.

Suggested Reading

Last week, in need of some reading material to pass the relative tedium of riding a stationary bike in my local gym, I spied a back issue of The Atlantic, a magazine I never read. Plastered across the cover was the headline, "What Washington Doesn't Get About Health Care," above a photo of a pensive (or even confused-looking) Barack Obama. On a whim, I picked it up.

And never has a chance encounter with a piece of nonfiction writing paid greater dividends than did columnist David Goldhill's comprehensive, illustrative discourse on everything that is fundamentally wrong with our country's health care system, and how the so-called "reforms" being pushed by Democrats in Washington would effectively double-down on a bad bet by expanding the current system.

Goldhill asks the basic questions that never got answered when Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and other liberals in Congress started writing their thousand-page bills to revamp health insurance. "How often have you heard a politician say that millions of Americans 'have no health care,' when he or she meant they have no health insurance?" Goldhill inquires.

From that simple observation, he proceeds to demonstrate why modern health insurance is the problem, not the solution, to the hyper-expensive, often shoddy treatment Americans pay for every day. Liberals harp endlessly on the 40-million Americans without health insurance, and they constantly blame "the insurance industry" for the high costs and poor service experienced by the hundreds of millions who do have insurance.

But they never bother asking why no one likes their insurance. Goldhill does, and more importantly, he provides answers that go beyond facile charges of corporate greed. That someone can so coherently apply some basic Economics 101 to the multi-trillion dollar boondoggle that is American medicine, and explain the problems in plain language, is incredibly encouraging to someone such as myself, who's been arguing all along that paying for health care with health insurance makes utterly no sense.

And in case you're wondering, David Goldhill isn't some weird, right-wing fringe anarchist who blames government for every social problem. In fact, he is a self-declared Democrat with an obvious concern for our country's poorest citizens. But unlike Democrats in Congress, he brings a businessman's eye for rational, conceptual analysis, backed up with the data to make his case.

So, if you have 45 minutes and want a real explanation of the single largest problem facing this country, I implore you to give him a try. You won't regret it.

ObamaCare: An Offer You Can't Refuse

I happened to catch the president today on CNN, telling a townhall meeting of New Hampshire voters that the health care plan everybody loves to hate really isn't that controversial. New "exchanges" will allow the uninsured to buy health insurance, and new rules will bar insurance companies from denying coverage to those new customers, even if they have preexisting medical problems.

Sounds reasonable enough. And in return, the president assures us the government is simply going to "ask that everybody get health insurance." What a nice guy! How could we angry voters say no to a deal like that?

Except apparently, Obama's definition of "asking" differs from mine, because both health reform bills currently stuck in Congress require virtually everyone to buy health insurance, or face steadily escalating fines in coming years.

If this little nugget of coercion sounds familiar, you might be remembering it from the 2008 presidential campaign, when a candidate named Barack Obama criticized his chief Democratic rivals for supporting an "individual mandate" that would force all Americans to buy health insurance. According to candidate Obama, "A mandate means that in some fashion, everybody will be forced to buy health insurance. ... But I believe the problem is not that folks are trying to avoid getting health care. The problem is they can't afford it. And that's why my plan emphasizes lowering costs."

Flash forward a year, and President Obama has apparently had a change of heart, telling CBS news that "during the campaign I was opposed to this idea ... [but] I am now in favor of some sort of individual mandate as long as there's a hardship exemption."

I think it's fair to say that the term "flip-flop" will die with John Kerry, but still, that's quite a turnaround on an important issue. But hardly a surprise, since anyone remotely acquainted with basic economics can tell you that "universal" health insurance breaks down if you don't force healthy people to buy it and pay the insurance premiums that underwrite the medical costs of insuring the sick. Nobody right, left or center argues that simple fact.

Of course, quite a few conservatives and libertarians on the right argue that government has no business, or constitutional authority, to tell citizens to buy a stick of gum, let alone health insurance. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi neatly summed up the left's response to this objection recently when a reporter asked her if she believed the Constitution gives Congress the power to mandate health insurance, responding: "Are you serious? Are you serious?" Good comeback, Nance.

Since I'm already on record as opposing the mandate to buy insurance on constitutional grounds, and since Nancy Pelosi doesn't care what I think, I won't belabor the point further. However, the Obama-Pelosi mandate does entail one rather bizarre consequence that gets too little attention.

Health care, the president and his backers declare, should be a right for every American, and universal health insurance is the mechanism for upholding that right. But universal health insurance doesn't work without a universal mandate, so our participation in this plan will not be optional.

Ponder that for a moment. Because the rights enumerated in the Constitution -- the right to speak and worship freely, assemble peacefully, vote, etc. -- share an important similarity: in each case, the Constitution protects these rights by prohibiting the government from interfering with them. The Constitution says you can speak as you please, own a gun, and go to whatever church you want; but it makes no provision forcing you to do any of those things.

The newfound right to health insurance, if enacted, would become a first in our history: a right that cannot be refused. What you choose to do with every human right enshrined in the Constitution is your business; when it comes to Democratic health reform, you have the right to do what you're told.

Quick Hits

I'm sure I'll have more to say about the recent upset election in Massachusetts, but for now, I offer you a quick rundown of my favorite left-wing reactions to - and explanations for - the sudden threat to their plan for "reforming" health care.

From The New York Times' editorial writers: "To our minds, it is not remotely a verdict on Mr. Obama’s presidency, nor does it amount to a national referendum on health care reform..."

No argument here. I fail to see how a Senate election in which 49 states' voters were ineligible to take part could possibly constitute a "national referendum." Note to Times editors: It doesn't count if you win an argument that nobody's having.

From Times op-ed writer Timothy Egan: "In famously well-educated Massachusetts, it cannot be said that the voters were stupid."

You know, as opposed to all those stupid states whose votes shouldn't count.

From University of Maryland Political Communications Professor Trevor Parry-Giles: "Other things intrude, like the Christmas Day terror attack, Haiti, anxieties about the economy."

Yeah, sometimes when a natural disaster strikes in some foreign country and inflicts terrible loss of life, I suddenly change party affiliations right before a crucial Senate election. It's the darnedest thing.

From Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, D-R.I.: "The problem isn't our message. It's the messaging of the message that's the problem."

Translation: I don't want to be in Congress either!

Wrong on Rights

If, like me, you weren't quite able to drown your health care socialization sorrows in food and drink this holiday season, enjoy this small palate cleanser, courtesy of Reason.com's Jacob Sullum.

Amid the feckless rhetoric that has marked this fall's long, dispiriting slog toward some form of government health care "reform" ("Death panels!" "Evil insurance companies!"), it was rather refreshing to find a cogent, compact, philosophical challenge to the notion that health care is suddenly a "right" that "everyone" is entitled to. That assertion, as espoused by Barack Obama, Harry Reid, et al., represents the starting point for every left-wing argument in favor of government-run health insurance, and the key to understanding why mainstream liberals take genuine offense at the notion that the provision of medical care might have some connection with paying for said.

Without poaching on his argument too much, Sullum raises the basic objection that any opponent of government-provided health insurance ought to start with: That for much of human history, "health care" was non-existent. Only the technological advances and material prosperity achieved in the last few hundred years have made meaningful health care a possibility for some, let alone for all, of humanity. "Health care" would have meant nothing to a Stone Age mammoth hunter or a 15th Century Russian serf, because they lived in worlds incapable of providing it, at any price.

So how exactly, Sullum asks, can we assert a right to something that until relatively recently, did not exist? And if we can do that, what does this imply about our right to future goods that do not exist yet? Do I have a right to eternal life if scientists ever discover a way to achieve it? If so, do I have the right to force you to pay for it? Did I have these rights all along, without knowing it?

Anyway, read for yourself. It's a wonderful, if concise, commentary on the nature of "rights," and what constitutes a right. Two thousand years ago, men like Aristotle took great pains to weigh these questions and define their terms. Sadly, the men who rule us today do not burden themselves with such circumspection.

Roman Polanski, Empathy, and the Road to Moral Relativism

As a small-time journalist who forever struggles to write gripping, effective lead sentences that grab my readers' attention, I have to express my admiration for Kate Harding of Salon.com for what might be the plainest, most direct lead I've ever read: "Roman Polanski raped a child."

Strong stuff, that.

In a week filled with far too many tortuous defenses of the 76-year-old French-Polish director who was recently taken into Swiss custody on a 32-year-old conviction of unlawful sex with a minor, and far too many histrionic diatribes stating the obvious -- that raping a 13-year-old girl is wrong -- Harding managed to cut right to the chase with almost Spartan clarity. But if I may, I'd like to back up a few steps, and look at the Polanski case in a slightly broader context that I've yet to encounter anywhere else.

But first, as a brief refresher for anyone who hasn't already been bombarded by this story, a timeline of events.

In 1977, acclaimed director Roman Polanski reportedly drugged and raped a 13-year-old female model during a photo shoot for Vogue magazine in Los Angeles. Polanski was brought up on six very serious felony charges, but eventually plead guilty to one lesser offense (sex with a minor) in return for a brief stint in a California psychiatric ward, which effectively served as his prison sentence. When Polanski got wind that the judge in the case, possibly at the behest of an uninvolved prosecutor, was planning to vacate the plea bargain and sentence Polanski to hard prison time on the strength of the written confession he had already signed, the director fled the country and took refuge in France. As a man of considerable wealth, Polanski has lived quite comfortably in his French and other European homes ever since, and has continued his directing career.

California prosecutors have made on-and-off attempts to persuade other countries to apprehend Polanski and extradite him to the U.S., but until last week in Zurich, those attempts failed.

Since his arrest last week, a bevy of Hollywood and European filmmakers, actors and artists have rallied to Polanski's defense, even signing a petition demanding his immediate release. Meanwhile, the nature of his past crime has united public opinion elsewhere in a way few controversies could. Liberals and conservatives alike have been near-universal in their condemnation, and their approval that a wealthy man who committed a despicable act three decades ago is finally going to face the consequences that his political and professional allies have shielded him from for so long. Kate Harding is merely the most succinct of his many, many critics.

The outrage is not shocking, but it is the defenses Polanski's allies have proffered that I believe deserve some examination. Most -- such as his advanced age, the artistic quality of his movies, and the fact that he was never accused of a repeat offense after the 1977 incident -- are completely insipid and may be dismissed as such. I hope we do not live in such a debased age that elderly rapists who only victimized one person and made a bunch of cool movies receive a get-out-of-jail free card.

Another defense -- that Polanski's case was so badly mishandled by the justice system that it would be unfair to prosecute him -- holds some merit. The cornerstone of the American legal system is supposed to be that all defendants receive a fair and impartial trial, which Polanski manifestly did not. However, the fact that he unlawfully skipped the country when he believed himself the target of a looming mistrial, instead of fighting the sentence through the established appeals process, considerably undermines this argument.

The defense I find most significant, if not most convincing, was articulated by the French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, in his protest of the Polanski arrest, when he said he "strongly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them." (Side question: Could any country other than France be pompous enough to have a "minister of culture?")

By "ordeals," Mitterand is referring to the undeniable personal tragedies Roman Polanski has suffered. Born in France between the world wars to a partially Jewish family, he lost his mother to a Nazi concentration camp, and only barely escaped from occupied France himself. Two decades later, Polanski's beloved wife, Susan Tate, was brutally murdered by the Manson crime family. She was eight and a half months pregnant at the time.

Mitterand and his fellow Polanski defenders are asking the world, in effect, to empathize with Roman Polanski. He has suffered enough, they say; let go of this 32-year-old crime, which even the victim wishes to move on from, already.

But liberal pundits, many of whom I've disagreed with on prior issues, are having none of this empathy argument. The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson put it thusly:

"In general, I agree with the European view that Americans tend to be prudish and hypocritical about sex. But a grown man drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl? That's not remotely a close call. It's wrong in any moral universe -- and deserves harsher punishment than three decades of gilded exile."

After cataloging the protests of various European artists, whose shrill tone and hyperbole almost defy belief, the liberal New York Times editorialized:

"But hold on a moment. After being indicted in 1977, didn’t Mr. Polanski, now 76, confess to having sex with a 13-year-old girl after plying her with Quaaludes and Champagne? Didn’t he flee the United States when the plea bargaining seemed to fall apart, raising the prospect of prison time? Isn’t there a warrant for his arrest?"

Good for the Post and the Times and other bastions of liberal opinion for such unequivocal insistence on black-and-white justice. I would venture to say few defendants can boast as much personal tragedy and suffering as Mr. Polanski, but many of the usual champions of moral relativism are saying: "Tough. Justice is blind."

And yet, only a few short months ago, many of those same liberal voices -- including the Times and the Post -- were staunchly defending the school of judicial thought that does take account of defendants' and plaintiffs' life experiences, and does incline judges to side with those whose life experiences arouse empathy. Among the qualities President Obama listed as his criteria for nominating justices to the Supreme Court, consider the following:

"We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be ... poor, or African American, or gay, or disabled, or old."

While we're at it, why not add "or a Holocaust survivor, or the widow of a murdered spouse" to the list? Surely those experiences rank among the most difficult and painful of human conditions.

So I merely hope that all the liberal editorial writers and pundits who embraced "empathy" as a judicial philosophy only a few months ago will take a moment to reflect on the inconsistency of refusing to apply it to Roman Polanski. Perhaps a few of them will concede that their ardent desire to see justice done in this particular case without regard for murky notions of mitigating circumstances ought to be the mindset that every judge brings to every case, every day.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Tea Party Protest

In a week packed with grim and depressing news concerning a horrific murder at Yale and a string of ill-behaved celebrities making regrettable comments on national television, it is entirely possible that you didn't hear very much about the large, anti-Obama "tea party" rally that took place last Saturday in our nation's capital. Most major media outlets didn't exactly strain their personnel budgets to send extra reporters to the National Mall to chronicle something as boring as a demonstration against deficit spending and nationalized health care. (For the record, I was not in attendance myself; even I have better things to do on a Saturday.)

And so, unless you live in the Washington area, it's even less likely that you heard much about an interesting little aftershock to the tea party that surfaced a few days later. Republican Congressman Kevin Brady of Texas, a prominent organizer of the event, had the temerity to criticize the Washington Metrorail system for not providing more train service to accommodate demonstrators protesting excessive government spending. If you noticed a strange, sputtering noise late Wednesday afternoon, it was probably half a million Washington liberals collectively choking on fury mingled with glee when the story broke.

In a letter to Metro, Brady had this to say:

“These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration,” These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them.”

Washington liberals (perhaps it would be simpler and equally accurate to say "Washingtonians") promptly had a field day with this apparent hypocrisy concerning their subway system. Here's a tiny sample of the 690 or so comments on the Wall Street Journal's report of the story (all spellings quoted verbatim):

RealityCheck wrote: "... the Tea Party protesters were protesting against goverment spending and any sort of public good only to find out Public transit was lacking..IT’S NOT SARCASM IT’S IRONY"

MehNeh wrote: "Really teabaggers? Now you’re complaining that there wasn’t adequate government spending on public transit when you needed it? Grow up. Government isn’t some toy that you get to play with whenever you want and refuse to share with all the other kids."

urizon wrote: "It’s a typical right-wing tactic to defund a socialt service to the point where it becomes dysfunctional, and then complain about how government isn’t working."

And much, much more in the same vein. Meanwhile, every political conversation I've overheard in the past few days has followed the same basic script, tinged with the same barely contained joy that these so-called fiscal conservative protesters have inadvertently outed themselves as lovers of government who just won't pony up the tax dollars to pay for it.

But before you rush to join the hypocrisy-fest, I ask you only to consider a very quick thought experiment. Suppose for a moment that, after the protest, Rep. Brady had written a public letter to the Metro commissioner praising the excellent service Metro had provided for him and his fellow protesters, and thanking Metro for the extra train cars that were made available for the event.

Now try to imagine liberals' reaction.

Why, it would be ... wait for it ...

Almost exactly the same! Change a few words, and it would become "How DARE these so-called fiscal conservatives protest government spending and then turn around and sing the praises of a government service? Don't these idiots know where the money for Metro trains comes from!? What a bunch of hypocrites! They LOVE Metro, but they don't want to pay taxes to fund it!"

If you say something that invites intense criticism from opponents, and then you turn around and say the exact opposite, and receive the same exact criticism, that's when you know you just can't win. It's also when you know you're up against an opponent who decided you were wrong before you even opened your mouth.

The fact that the tea party rally was a protest against government spending on health insurance, not a protest of government spending on subways, evidently makes no difference to liberals who have suddenly lost their enthusiasm for mass protest movements. If you are unwilling to recognize the basic validity of opinions you do not share, why bother with facts?

Paging Dr. Adams

Arguing in defense of a troop of British garrison soldiers on trial for firing into a crowd of violent Bostonians in 1770, a young and ambitious lawyer named John Adams famously reminded a hostile colonial jury that "facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." The soldiers had, Adams argued, acted in self defense when a mob of hundreds of taunting dock workers and teenagers assaulted a sentry with clubs and pelted his comrades with ice and oyster shells. Despite populist anger throughout the colonies, and newspaper headlines decrying a "Boston Massacre," Adams won the case, and the soldiers went free.

Two and a half centuries later, facts are still stubborn things. Somebody kindly remind liberal Democrats crusading for public health care.

In the wake of August's town hall protests and Barack Obama's collapsing job approval polls, his core constituency is sounding a bit rattled, as if they can't quite comprehend the sudden outburst of anger provoked by Congress' attempt to pass a trillion-dollar health care overhaul this summer.

November 2008 was the month of murky nostrums about that most meaningless of political rallying cries, change. August 2009 was the month those vague promises of change crystallized into tangible alterations to our society. The transition was sobering, and bewildering, for Democrats who interpreted their electoral victory as a mandate to enact radical reforms, rather than a warning of what happens to dominant political parties that stray too far from the American mainstream.

None of which is to say health care reform has run aground and foundered. With so much of his dwindling political capital invested in this fight, I expect Obama and his congressional allies will salvage some sort of reform, probably in the form of new regulation for the insurance industry, and maybe more. But liberals' cornerstone reform, a publicly run insurance plan open to all, is in actual doubt for the first time since Obama came to office. Democrats everywhere are waking up in cold sweats from nightmares that it's 1994 all over again, when another young, charismatic Democratic president's campaign for public health insurance failed and ushered in 12 years of Republican congressional majorities.

So I suppose certain liberals can be forgiven if at the moment their defenses of ObamaCare sound a little strained. But what I will not under any circumstances forgive are arguments in favor of a gradual government takeover of an entire industry that rest on completely false premises.

So far, my favorite such argument is, hands-down, that presented last Wednesday by Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal's token liberal op-ed writer (who never answered my e-mail from last year). Health care must be provided by government, Frank bluntly asserts, because health is a "public good," not some sort of individual condition controlled by individuals. After pointing out that many of the present problems with health care in this country stem from government meddling and (incredibly) using that as an argument for more government meddling, Frank lectures his readers thusly:

"One reason government got involved is that our ancestors understood something that escapes those who brag so loudly about their prudence at today's town-hall meetings: That health care is not an individual commodity to be bought and enjoyed like other products. That the health of each of us depends on the health of the rest of us, as epidemics from the Middle Ages to this year's flu have demonstrated."

To quote Kim Jong Il: "Oh reary?"

Because a quick trip to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells a different story. Per the "National Vital Statistics Report" for 2007, the 10 leading causes of death in America were:
1) heart disease
2) malignant neoplasms (aka cancer)
3) cerebrovascular disease (which leads to stroke, and is often caused by hypertension)
4) chronic lower respiratory disease (usually associated with smoking)
5) accidents
6) Alzheimer's Disease
7) diabetes
8) influenza and pneumonia
9) nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis
10) septicemia

I can't help but notice that not until number 8 on the list do you encounter a cause of death that can spread from one person to another, as implied by Frank's unsupported claim that "the health of each of us depends on the health of the rest of us." I also can't help noticing that the major causes of death are largely linked to lifestyle choices, and have no interpersonal properties whatsoever. You can't exactly catch my heart disease, whether or not a politician in Washington decrees that you must pay my medical bills.

I know full well such observations won't change the minds of collectivists like Thomas Frank, whose stated objective is the creation of a new entitlement that permanently yokes our physical health to the tender mercies of government. But I'm chalking this one up as a small victory for stubborn facts nonetheless.

How the West was Lost

If you haven't heard, you may be forgiven for not knowing President Obama is on vacation in Martha's Vineyard at the moment, because it's neither newsworthy nor surprising. Whether you invoke the "elitist" card or not, Obama is a rich, progressive liberal, and everyone knows rich, progressive liberals like to vacation on exclusive New England beaches, among other posh locations. (And at $20 million, the resort the Obamas picked had better qualify as posh.)


What is worth noting is the token, middle-America destination Obama chose to breeze through prior to his real vacation in order to head off those inevitable charges of elitism and snobbery. As a sort of footnote to several "townhall" meetings in western states to discuss the inescapable health care debate, the first family made a quick stopover in the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone national parks. Quoth the LA Times:


"He'll spend the last week of August at a $20-million estate in one of the most private spots on the Vineyard. But this weekend, he'll balance out the imagery with a visit to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon."


Normally I might not even take note of the POTUS' comings and goings, but as it happens, I just spent the last week in one of those non-elite vacation spots: Yellowstone National Park, and its sister, Grand Teton. And having returned suffused with admiration and love for the natural splendor that is Yellowstone, I can't help bristling at the notion that the supposed leader of this country regards the 2,900 miles between the coasts as little more than a good photo op before his "real" vacation.


Now, I have nothing against Martha's Vineyard, which I've never visited. I have no doubt it's a lovely beach, as are most of the beaches between Maine and Florida. But no one goes to the Vineyard for surf and sun, which are available elsewhere for cheaper; they go because they can go, because they can afford tens of thousands of dollars for a week in the high season, or because they can afford tens of millions of dollars for some of the country's most sought-after real estate. They go to be amongst like-minded folk, mostly celebrities and movie stars and other millionaires.


You most definitely do not go to Yellowstone for those reasons. You go there to experience the last great unspoiled temperate wilderness left on earth. You go to see grizzly bears and bison and other beasts that once roamed a whole continent but have since retreated to this last holdout. You go to see glacier-crowned mountains that jut a mile and a half straight up into a clear, unpolluted blue sky. Martha's Vineyard, I imagine, makes you feel special; Yellowstone, I know, makes you feel lucky.


But after a brief lifetime of traveling west to places like Yellowstone at every opportunity, I've realized not many of my east-coast ilk share that feeling. I grew up outside New York City, and I now reside outside Washington, and I've known more than my share of smart, affluent, worldly people. I went to school with them, and I work with them. And almost without exception, nobody ever understood my desire to see America west of the Appalachians. Kids I knew who went out west did so to ski because the snow was good, and that was about it. A few social studies teachers seemed pleasantly surprised I'd been to some of the places in our textbook.

The adults I work with now mostly express a certain enthusiasm that I just spent a week in Wyoming, but with one exception, they yearn to lounge at the beach or cavort through bohemian Europe. When the Cosmopolitan in Chief jets off to Manhattan or Paris for "date night" with his First Lady, they gush in approval tinged with envy.


So it was difficult for me, taking in a sweeping Wyoming vista or learning about the rich, bloody, tragic history of the west at the (incredibly good) Buffalo Bill museum in Cody, to consider how little so many Americans care to explore their own patrimony and past. Between the coasts lies a whole continent, as diverse and awesome as any other, ranging from burning desert, to old-growth rain forest, to rolling savannah, to ice-capped mountain ranges.

And within that array of landscapes, a thousand different human cultures lived and died over the course of a hundred centuries, culminating in a final blaze of glory and cruelty and sadness when a European culture arrived like a landslide and wiped them all out. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody played a starring role in that fleeting moment of history between 1865 and 1885 or so, when whites warred with Indians on the Great Plains, and no lesser personage than a prince of Imperial Russia traveled halfway around the world to witness Cody's performance in a wild, unique human drama that will never come again.

When the frontiers were closed, and the wars all settled in favor of white America, Cody, that slaughterer of the buffalo herds and rare friend of many Indian tribes, took his Wild West shows to civilized, worldly Europe, for what now seems like an amazing purpose: to satisfy the veracious desire of Europeans to experience the Old West, as presented by the man most singly responsible for bringing it to an end. Can you imagine, in the year 2009, European audiences, from kings and queens and prime ministers on down, paying good money to experience American culture? For that matter, do the coastal Americans who all too often eschew the interior of their country in favor of foreign lands even acknowledge such a thing as "American culture?" Isn't it all just flyover country full of Wal-Marts and strip malls and rednecks?

Perhaps I shouldn't complain that more easterners don't go west. After all, certain parking lots in Yellowstone were already sufficiently crowded with RVs bearing licence plates from Utah and Minnesota and Alabama that the charm of the place was threatened. But the west is vast, above all else. There's room to spare, discoveries to make, history to feel and freedom to roam: the same qualities that brought settlers there in the first place.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I know I'll be back.

The Case Against Public Health Insurance, in Five Minutes or Your Money Back

Of the many problems of living within sight of the U.S. Capitol and the seat of federal power, perhaps the worst is the tendency for serious, philosophical public policy debates to turn into wonkish statistics battles and scare-mongering. And nowhere in this town of wonks, wags and pols is this phenomenon more egregious than the fight over health care reform, and whether to create a "public option" to reduce the ranks of the uninsured. Given that this argument concerns a fairly momentous crossroads for our country, it would be nice to hear the opposing sides make their cases in clear-cut, conceptual terms that everyone can understand and evaluate. Right?

But alas. Where we need simple, objective facts, we get bewildering, and often contradictory, statistics, which can be distorted in any number of ways. Where we need broad, guiding principles, we get anecdotal horror stories intended to curtail debate.

Liberal proponents trot out a sob story about some poor single mom in Iowa bankrupted by 80 jillion dollars in hospital bills because she didn't have insurance when a piano fell on her. Conservatives counter with the story of some poor old man in Canada who had to wait a decade for a routine hip replacement because his country's public health bureaucracy wouldn't approve the procedure. Then some pointy-headed accountants from the Congressional Budget Office butt in with their estimates of what government health care will cost if hospitals are reimbursed at the current Medicaid rates, or at Medicaid rates plus 8.95 percent, or...

And the problem is, none of these anecdotes are false. None of the statistics are bogus. But they exist as individual trees in a vast forest, forever obscuring our view of What Really Matters. We could use a Health Insurance 101 curriculum, to serve as a starting point and a reality check for the politicians in Congress who, even as you read this, are busy debating how much control the government should exert over your physical well-being. Since no such remedial class seems to exist, I humbly offer the following as food for thought.

What the hell is insurance, exactly? Anybody with an age in two digits and an IQ in three digits will haughtily tell you they know all about something so part and parcel of boring adulthood, but judging by the tenor of today's health insurance debate, I'm inclined to think many could use a refresher.

In plain economic terms, "insurance" is a means of lowering risk. You insure yourself against things you hope won't happen, such as car crashes, house fires and sudden death. Insurance allows people to protect themselves from unlikely, but unpredictable, events that could very well ruin them financially. And insurers provide this protection when they judge that the premiums their customers pay will outweigh the costs of cleaning up after the rare but disastrous events they promise to insure against.

This is why drivers pay hundreds of dollars per month for car insurance, and why people with beach-front property pay thousands of dollars per year for hurricane insurance: They know a crash or a storm is unlikely, but they acknowledge that such things do happen. Insurers apply the exact same analysis: They'd rather not have to pay a claim, but they know they will have to sometimes. When the crash or the storm doesn't happen, everyone's happy.

The key here is that insurance is something that both you and your insurer hope you'll never need. Drivers with car insurance don't run red lights at 120 miles per hour, because they know insurance won't do them much good if they're dead. Thus arises another important feature of insurance: It should encourage people to avoid doing stupid things. This is the reason good drivers pay less for car insurance, and why nonsmokers pay less for life insurance. Insurers reward their customers in return for acting responsibly and lowering the risk of events the insurer doesn't want to pay for.

Then there's health insurance, which throws these basic principles out the window. In most employer-sponsored plans, each participant pays the same monthly premium, regardless of their likely health care costs. And in the current government-run health insurance programs (i.e., Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP), beneficiaries receive coverage soley based on their age or economic status. In both cases, the insurer gives the insured no financial incentive to do the unpleasant things that minimize health costs, such as exercising, eating well or avoiding smoking. It should not be surprising that people respond by not doing these things. Meanwhile, health care costs explode.

So we have a health care system in which people ruin their health, because they have been given a blank check to do so. The negative effects of Marlboroughs, Big Macs and La-Z-Boy recliners are small, incremental, and difficult to see, so many Americans indulge in one or more of them with reckless abandon. When they need to see a doctor because of a lifestyle-related condition (think lung cancer, heart disease, Type II diabetes), they incur only a fraction of the cost, if they have insurance (with the notable exception of bogus policies that don't cover what they're supposed to cover).

Economically, this makes no sense. Consumers don't see the true costs of their purchases, because doctors, hospitals and pharmacies send the bills to a third party, the insurance company (or the government). Of course, many Americans understand the effects of smoking, junk food and sloth; they avoid these things, and thereby support their less-conscientious co-workers and neighbors. Insurance companies actually compete for healthy customers, because they offset the unhealthy customers, who pay the same rates but need lots of costly care.

Unfortunately, the healthy still need insurance, to do what insurance is supposed to do: avoid the costs of unpredictable disasters, such as getting run over by a bus and needing expensive surgery. In the process, they pick up the tab for the avoidable expenses regularly incurred by the people who eat too much, drink too much and smoke too much. This is nothing more than a legalized protection racket that preys on anyone who pays more in premiums than they receive in needed health care.

Somehow, health insurance has morphed from "protection against things I try to avoid anyway" to "the way I get someone else to pay for the consequences of my bad decisions." Remember this as liberals in Congress, along with our president, lobby to expand this perverse system further and put government more fully in charge of it.

Dude, Where's My Objectivity?

Last week, an 88-year-old anti-semite made headlines by walking into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with a rifle, apparently intent on violently protesting a museum dedicated to an event he maintains didn't happen, and ended up gunning down a black museum guard who challenged him at the door. Given the short-term memory of the media, I imagine the news cycle will linger on this ugly story for another day or two, and then move on to the next episode of public bloodshed, be it airline crash, school shooting or another such tragedy.

For me, the impact of the shooting will linger a bit longer, if for no other reason than its proximity to my office building in Washington. I pass the Holocaust Museum every morning and evening; the day after the attack, I saw the FBI trucks and agents fanned out around the taped-off building, presumably performing post-shooting ballistics analysis, to figure out exactly where each shot was fired, and more chillingly, perhaps checking for bombs (the shooter, James von Brunn, apparently had drawn up a list of other "targets" in the DC area shortly before his attack).

The natural reaction to this fizzled attempt at mass murder, the one I've heard most people express, is simple disgust: disgust at an angry, demented old man brimming with racial hatred taking the life of a young security guard with a wife and son, whom acquaintances roundly described as a class-act, and doing so in a place created to preserve the memory of millions of other victims of that same hatred.

But for a certain, enlightened, moralizing faction of the left-wing punditry, this isn't enough. Von Brunn's lunacy can't be abominated in isolation; rather, it must be seen in a larger context. For you see, this ugly episode is the product of the "hate" spewed by right-wing ideologues in the media. Sound like cheap political opportunism? Judge for yourself.

Intones the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson:

"What we don't know is whether all the blast-furnace rhetoric coming from the right is giving validation and encouragement to some confused, angry man or woman with a rifle or a truck full of fertilizer -- the next 'lone wolf,' preparing to howl."

Quoth The New York Times' Paul Krugman, who deviated from his usual columns extolling the virtues of Keynesian economics and massive government deficits with this sermon on political ethics:

"Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment."

Both these and other liberal pontificators have seized on a recent report from the Department of Homeland Security, warning that domestic terrorist groups motivated by neo-Nazism and other charming fringe dogmas pose a real threat. Further, DHS noted that the election of an African-American president is sure to rile this motley claque, potentially leading to more violence.

So along comes octogenarian loon von Brunn, hot on the heels of the murder of noted Kansas abortionist George Tiller only a few weeks ago, and now the Paul Krugmans of the world are connecting the dots and tracing them back to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other perfidious sources of murder-inducing rhetoric. Writing in this week's Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank (who failed to return my e-mail to him on an unrelated column) even goes so far as to suggest that "maybe [certain pro-lifers] deserved some of the blame for [Tiller's] murder," because they had the audacity to protest and condemn his practice of performing late-term abortions that almost no other doctor in the country will touch, thereby inciting a crazed gunman to take him out.

That such arguments imply a bizarre transfer of responsibility for acts of violence from the people who actually commit them to the politically influential right-wing media outlets that Krugman, et al, detest is bad enough. But there is a larger issue at play here: namely, the left's utter myopia regarding extremist, irrational language creeping into political discourse. And as if he knew all about my humble little blog and wanted to give me a helping hand, Times columnist Frank Rich kindly bloviated on this very issue last Sunday, perfectly demonstrating the one-way street that he and his ilk apparently live on. In regard to an obscure Michigan Republican party figure who has criticized Obama as a fascist, Rich huffily announced:

"He didn’t seem to grasp that 'fascism' is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find 'bad' because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler."

Really, Frank? We shouldn't "slur" a sitting president by likening him to Hitler? Then where exactly were you when liberal protesters routinely toted "Bush = Hitler" placards at anti-war rallies? For that matter, where were any of these champions of fair-minded, dispassionate political discourse for the last eight years, when Bush was accused of letting 9/11 happen to serve as a pretext for war in the Middle East, or when Bush was accused of botching the post-Katrina rescue operations in New Orleans because he "doesn't like black people"? Or how about the 10 billion other mindless rants spewed by the left blaming Bush for anything that happened to make them unhappy?

I didn't vote for George Bush. Nor do I listen to a minute of Rush Limbaugh, or watch a minute of Fox News, largely because I don't care for sensationalized news; but last I checked, none of these blowhards has harmed anybody, or called for the harming of anyone. Meanwhile, liberal audiences guffaw at Wanda Sykes' cheerful hope for Rush's kidneys to fail, rap artists glorify urban gang violence, and liberals in Congress drag bankers into show-trials and browbeat them on national television for supposedly wrecking the economy to arouse populist anger. The Times doesn't bat an eye. Apparently all speech is free, but only right-wing speech can be condemned as hateful or inflammatory.

The left's sudden rediscovery that nasty political rhetoric is, well, nasty, reminds me distinctly of the last time we had a Democrat in the White House whom Republicans dared to attack. I will never forget watching a clip of Alec Baldwin on the Conan O'Brien show in 1998, at the height of the impeachment frenzy resulting from Bill Clinton's dalliance with a White House intern. Working himself into a genuine lather, warm, fuzzy liberal Baldwin ranted in regard to Republican Henry Hyde, the Representative who led the impeachment hearings in the House:

"If we were living in another country, what we, all of us together, would go down to Washington and stone Henry Hyde to death, stone him to death, stone him to death! Then we would go to their house and we'd kill the family, kill the children."

Not to be outdone, alleged comedian Chris Rock announced, in 1999, "If Clinton would pardon me, I would whip [Independent Counsel Ken] Starr's ass right now. I will get a crew from Brooklyn and we will stomp him."

Apparently, liberals are authorized to call for acts of violence against specific politicians; they are permitted to traffic in nonsensical conspiracy theories and histrionic accusations of sitting presidents; and when their party wins an election, they acquire the moral authority to abjure these self-same antics as "hateful." Thus can an unhinged old man's act of violence be hung around the neck of anyone who dares to oppose the new administration's agenda. A new syllogism is emerging: "If you're not part of the Obama solution, you're part of the problem."

iPod, Real Headphones Obviate Need for Bus Suicide

When it comes to technological gizmos, I'm not much of an enthusiast. I have a computer with Internet because modern life is too inconvenient to navigate without one; I have a cellphone, grudgingly, because it's the cheapest way I can make and get the calls I need; and I will sooner take up scrimshaw than shackle myself with a goddamned Blackberry or iPhone like every other DC office chattel who cherishes these electronic yokes.

But when Apple came out with its teeny, tiny iPod shuffle a couple years ago, I caved. Something the size of a matchbook that can hold a dozen albums worth of music? For $79? Where do I sign up?

So I put in my order before the new shuffle even came out. And for a while, I loved the novelty of so much music in such a handy little device. But then physical reality reasserted itself.

Because the ear pieces that come standard with an iPod almost negate the very concept of music as a pleasurable experience. They emit a tinny, buzzy tone, with no bass, and not very much treble either. Apparently Apple developed them to produce frequencies that only dogs can hear, except when you turn the volume up all the way, when they become all too audible to human ears. I heard that when water-boarding was outlawed at Guantanamo, the CIA switched over to interrogating terrorists by forcing them to listen to Kelly Clarkson on a maxed out iPod Touch with standard Apple ear buds.

And -- here the fault is mine -- I have never owned a decent pair of real headphones to pair with something like my oh-so-carryable iPod. This was a glaring oversight on my part, which I only very recently rectified with a pair of low-end Sony studio-quality phones, for the princely sum of $25. And suddenly, my iPod is worth owning. Not a moment too soon, either; if I hadn't dropped that $25 at Best Buy and dug my iPod out of storage this morning, I would not be here right now now to tell you about it. I would have killed myself while waiting for the 8:14 express bus to work this morning.

I ride the same bus to and from work every day, especially now that I've moved to an apartment located conveniently across the street from the bus stop. Because this is an express line with only a handful of buses during morning and evening rush hour, you tend to see the same faces every day. And mostly these faces belong to placid, mild-mannered commuters such as myself, who really like the fact that the bus requires half the time that the Metro ride would take, for about ten cents extra. We are mostly a quiet, unobtrusive lot. We smile and nod to one another; the more gregarious even carry on quiet conversations. In short, a bunch of decent office-bound creatures trying to get to and from our boring jobs as humanely as possible.

All of us, except one strident, shrill, oblivious wretch of a middle-aged woman who sometimes rides my bus. Without putting too fine a point on it, I hate this woman with unabashed passion. She is, without question, the most horrid human being I encounter in my day-to-day life, bar none.

She is the sort of person who must complain, loudly, about EVERYTHING, to ANYBODY who happens to be within earshot, myself included. If I encounter her at the bus stop in the summer, she tries to bitch to me about how hot it is; in the winter, how cold it is. She has demanded of me no fewer than 11 million times, in her harsh, nasal voice, "Are you waiting for the 11Y!?" You would think, after seeing me get on the 11Y bus 11 million times after seeing me waiting at a bus stop that says "11Y" she might put two and two together, but apparently she is too oblivious and self-centered to remember another human being for more than three consecutive seconds. On one of these occasions, after I affirmed that, Yes, just like every other 10,999,999 times you've asked me this, I am in fact waiting for the 11Y, she had the temerity to intone, in her sniveling, needy way, "It should come soon, right?" To which I calmly responded, "I'm sorry, but how in the name of Zeus' butthole do I know where, in this city of 45,000 motor vehicles, when accidents and presidential motorcades routinely stop traffic, the bus is?"

Last Friday after work, this woman, whom for convenience' sale I'll call Satan, clambered on to my bus just as I was thinking "Yes, Satan must have gotten the 5:05 today!" And for five solid minutes, she proceeded to badger the driver, and every single passenger, as to "Which bus this is." As in, "Is this the 5:05, or the 5:25, or the 5:40?" Never mind that this was the 5:25, right on time. Never mind that this woman rides these buses every day of her hideous life and should know the schedule. Never mind that the schedule is conveniently posted online. Never mind that SHE'S ALREADY ON THE BUS, WHICH IS ALL THAT MATTERS! For reasons of her own obsessive edification, Satan must know, NOW, which particular bus she is on, and she will not rest until she has withered the soul of every single occupant with her insipid prattle.

Suffice to say, this is not the sort of person whom Anton Chigurh would have offered a coin flip before deciding whether to kill her with his cattle gun.

So you can well imagine my reaction this morning, when who should saunter up to the stop, but Satan in all her frazzled, Monday morning glory. And when she proceeded to commence telling a fellow rider about some infraction that some occupant of her condo building had committed in the building's laundry room, in painstaking detail (among her other charming qualities, this woman despises everyone), I started reaching for my cyanide pill. On a beautiful Monday morning such as this, with the sun shining, the cool breeze blowing, and a long day of cubicle time ahead of me, this outpouring of petty, strident bile was just too much to bear. I was just putting the finishing mental touches on my epitaph, when I remembered: "My headphones! My iPod! Salvation!" Moments later, the soothing, dulcet tones of "Anything But This" blared in my ears, obliterating all other sound. And so I could go on living.

Thank you, Apple. Thank you, Sony.

And lest anyone think the hot, blinding rage Satan inspires in me is just a sign of what a crank I am, I received the following e-mail from my girlfriend, who rides the bus every morning with me, while I was writing this:

"That lady is horrible. Having had to listen/observe her nonsense for 25 minutes, I can say that I hate her. I left my stupid Ipod in my drawer here and I'm still mad at myself for it."