:: A quite bearable lightness (06:22PM)
The Guardian on Gilbert & Sullivan: "a kind of late-Victorian Monty Python."
Second-rate productions can, undeniably, be tedious. Speech and music have to be seamless; timing is vital; the mechanism is as precise – and as likely to malfunction if done hamfistedly – as Rossini. The plot moves forward by way of the dialogue: do it badly and the show will grind to a halt. G&S can never work as a series of short, disconnected musical numbers; it is an integrated work of divine lunacy, propelled by an inner logic, or it is nothing.
:: Why not tax cuts? (01:19PM)
Larry Kudlow asks important questions:
President Obama thinks his "remoteness and detachment" are the problems. This is nonsense. Obama's tax hikes and spending explosion are what caused the populist tea-party revolt that was punctuated by Scott Brown's extraordinary victory.And that leads to the next question. Are the Republicans listening? Do they really understand why Scott Brown was victorious? If they do, why aren't members of the Republican leadership loudly campaigning for an end to tax hikes, just like Scott Brown?
The cornucopia of tax hikes currently on the table includes higher levies on capital gains, top earners, dividends, investment (via the payroll tax), carbon, millionaires, banks, stock transactions and estates (via the death tax). It's a long Democratic wish list of anti-growth policies, and Scott Brown's triumph should signal the end of it. But it won't happen unless GOP congressional leaders make a big deal about it.
Not optimistic about the old guard at this point.
:: Freedom hanging by a thread (12:06PM)
Words do matter.
It's going to take some time to deconstruct this lengthy masterpiece, but as you flip through the pages of the House bill, you will notice the word "regulation" appears 181 times. "Tax" is there 214 times. "Fees," 103 times. As we all know, nothing says "affordability" like higher taxes and fees.The word "shall" - as in "must" or "required to" - appears over 3,000 times.
:: The real stakes (10:21AM)
Mark Steyn on why the fight over health care really, really matters:
[All] the poor befuddled sober centrists who can’t understand why the Democrats keep passing incoherent 1,200-page bills every week are missing the point.If “health care” were about health care, the devil would be in the details. But it’s not about health or costs or coverage; it’s about getting over the river and burning the bridge. It doesn’t matter what form of governmentalized health care gets passed as long as it passes. Once it’s in place, it will be “reformed”, endlessly, but it will never be undone.
Right now, they can trade anything - abortion, death panels, whatever. The trick is to plant the seed and let the ratchet effect of Big Government take care of the rest.
On to the Senate.
:: Cao's cave-in (11:12PM)
So, the House Democrats got their health "reform" bill tonight but only by a narrow 220-215 vote. Thirty-nine Dems broke ranks.
One GOP member, Joseph Cao from Louisiana, voted for the monster bill (hmm, what deal did he make?). Amusingly, his entry in Wikipedia has been updated, defaced and then re-edited within moments. But here's what it looks like in Google's cache as of right now:
That's "Joseph Cao has no family. He was born of Satan and lost a soul the day he voted against republicans."
Gotta love the Internet.
:: Happy Halloween (10:19AM)
:: Obscene profits? Not so much (12:45PM)
AP fact check: Health insurer profits not so fat.
In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making "immoral" and "obscene" returns while "the bodies pile up."Ledgers tell a different reality. Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That's anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.
Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans.
Darn those pesky facts.
:: Creating new problems (09:46PM)
More reality: Obama's Doctor Shortage.
By drastically increasing demand while doing little to increase primary care physician supply, ObamaCare will turn health care into a consumer nightmare: longer wait times, shorter visits, higher prices, and decreased customer satisfaction. The U.S. will have to rely increasingly on nurse practitioners and physician assistants to meet patient demand. According to the WHO, the nurse-to-physician ratio in Canada and the U.K. are 5.3 and 5.6, respectively, compared to 3.6 in the U.S. And as fewer bright young people pursue medicine due to the profession's general malaise and oppressive bureaucratic regulations, we're likely to see an even greater physician shortage---not just in primary care, but in specialty care as well.A September survey by Investors Business Daily found that 45% of doctors would consider quitting if Congress passes its "comprehensive" health-care overhaul, largely because of the increased bureaucracy and liabilities and lower reimbursements. The U.S. is facing a John Galt-like protest from doctors. The Obama administration may soon be wondering: who is John Galt?
:: Tough guy? (06:08PM)
Mark Steyn: Who are the real “Untouchables”here?
So the troika of Dunn, Emanuel, and Axelrod were dispatched to the Sunday talk shows to lay down the law. We all know the lines from The Untouchables — “the Chicago way,” don’t bring a knife to a gun fight — and, given the “pay czar”’s instant contract-gutting of executive compensation and the demonization of the health insurers and much else, it’s easy to look on the 44th president as an old-style Cook County operator: You wanna do business in this town, you gotta do it through me. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the community organizer.The trouble is it isn’t tough, not where toughness counts. Who are the real “Untouchables” here? In Moscow, it’s Putin and his gang, contemptuously mocking U.S. officials even when (as with Secretary Clinton) they’re still on Russian soil. In Tehran, it’s Ahmadinejad and the mullahs openly nuclearizing as ever feebler warnings and woozier deadlines from the Great Powers come and go.
Even Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from the Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle.
:: Dust in Sydney (01:29PM)
Jeepers, those dust storms in Australia were worse than we first thought.
:: Ken Burns back in the spotlight (11:01AM)
Documentarian Ken Burns has a new film about America's national parks premiering shortly on PBS. Wildly successful, he draws plenty of criticism, apparently much of it from leftists who think he's too pro-American. That just makes me want to watch all the more, along with millions of others.
If he's assaulted critically -- for being too slow, too longwinded, too sentimental -- it's not because he hasn't thought deeply about the parks, their place in American history and the challenge of translating it all to film.The key difficulty of the project, Burns says, was "how to transcend beauty. This is not a travelogue, not a recommendation of which lodge to stay in. It's a history of the ideas and the individuals that made this uniquely American thing possible for the first time in human history: Land was set aside, not by kings or noblemen or the very rich, but for everybody for all time. That's what we celebrate, but how you wrestle that to the ground is full of peril." He's aware, for instance, "that beauty is itself anesthetizing."
So he's worked to capture more than just the spiritual and political impulses that made the parks possible, the paintings that made them famous, their stirring implications for democracy,
:: Nazgul, and more (05:01PM)
Interesting from Wired: 9 Facts About Tolkien's Nines.
:: Eight years and counting (02:39AM)
The memories of September 11th will never leave us. We will not forget the burning towers, and the last phone calls, and the smoke over Arlington. We will not forget the rescuers who ran toward danger, and the passengers who rushed the hijackers. We will not forget the men and women who went to work on a typical day and never came home. We will not forget the death of schoolchildren who were on a school trip.And we will never forget the servants of evil who plotted the attacks. And we will never forget those who rejoiced at our grief and our mourning.
- President George W. Bush, address to the FBI, September 10, 2003
Learn more:
• Pentagon Memorial Project
• Flight 93 National Memorial
• 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America
• Popular Mechanics - Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report
Ways to help:
• Fisher House Foundation
• Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust
• Wounded Warrior Project
:: Hero, not victim (09:39PM)
Lots of controversy over the past few days about the editorial judgement, or lack thereof, by the Associated Press for publishing a graphic photo of a fallen Marine in Afghanistan, against the stated wishes of both the family and the DoD.
Donald Sensing, veteran and minister, puts it in perspective.
The very real suffering of the troops deserves to be displayed and explained (but not, I think, this nakedly). Yet if the AP wishes to show its readers the anguish of war, being "fair and balanced" would lead it to present the heroism and profoundly stirring sacrificial spirit among our men and women in uniform. As is, this photo sadly continues the media's tradition of presenting our troops as victims.Lance Cpl Joshua Bernard fell in battle, but he was not a victim. He determined at the hazard of his life to be honorable in his young adulthood, to make sure of his duty, and to leave everything else for later, though later ever came. He gave over to hope his chance of lifelong happiness and the uncertainty of final success, and in mortal danger he relied only upon himself, his buddies and the Corps itself. He chose to risk death young as a free man rather than live long as one conquered. And when fearful lethality loomed he resolved to resist and suffer, rather than flee to save his life; he ran away not from danger but from dishonor. On the battlefield he stood steadfast, and in an instant, at the height of his resolve, he passed away from this life but not from our lives or the destinies of generations yet to come.
Such was the end of this man's life. We need not desire a more heroic spirit than his, although we do pray that others and their families suffer no such fate.
Lots more to ponder. Read the whole thing.
:: The Soviet archives speak (03:35PM)
Breathtaking history from 1983: Sen. Edward Kennedy's offer of aid and comfort to the USSR's General Secretary Andropov, behind the back of his own nation's president.
RIP? Maybe not.
Kennedy's message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.