Logos

GIVING YOUR LIFE

2011-10-18T08:06:00.001-04:00

Life Priceless

2011-09-27T20:55:00.002-04:00

Jesus wants the rose

2011-08-12T02:43:00.000-04:00

What would Jesus do?

2011-07-11T10:02:00.002-04:00

Jesus-like

2011-07-08T08:01:00.001-04:00

Vargas Llosa

2011-07-08T00:05:00.000-04:00

It is self-evident

2011-06-30T09:02:00.001-04:00

Ronald Regan 2

2011-06-22T20:56:00.001-04:00

Ronald Regan 1

2011-06-22T20:54:00.001-04:00

Life is a most wonderful gift

2011-05-28T14:18:00.000-04:00

SO RIGHT!!!!

2011-05-13T16:10:00.001-04:00

14 years old Trooper

2011-04-20T09:39:00.000-04:00

All these thugs are pathologic liers and claim that they want to help.

2011-03-26T14:35:00.002-04:00

Sad

2011-03-25T16:54:00.000-04:00

HUMAN RIGHTS FROM CONCEPTION TO DEATH

2011-02-22T07:47:00.002-05:00

Vulnerability

2010-12-30T23:51:00.001-05:00

The Christmas Story

2010-12-22T17:19:00.000-05:00

PRESERVE THE SANCTITY OF PATIENT-DOCTOR RELATIONSHIP

2010-10-29T19:48:00.001-04:00

Utopia

2010-10-21T09:17:00.001-04:00

Leftists, Progressives and Socialists
(Extracted from Human Events)
Walter E. Williams
Posted 10/20/2010 ET

One of the greatest sources of confusion and deception is the difference between leftists, progressives, socialists, communists and fascists. I thought about this as I caught a glimpse of the Oct. 2 "One Nation" march on Washington. The participants proudly marched with banners, signs and placards reading "Socialists," "Ohio U Democratic Socialists," "International Socialists Organization," "Socialist Party USA," "Build A Socialist Alternative" and other signs expressing support for socialism and communism. They had stands where they sold booklets under the titles of "Marxism and the State," "Communist Manifesto," "Four Marxist Classics," "The Road to Socialism" and similar titles.

The gathering had the support of the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union, stalwarts of the Democratic Party such as Al Sharpton and organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club, and the Children's Defense Fund.

What goes unappreciated is that socialists and communists have produced the greatest evil in mankind's history. You say, "Williams, what in the world are you talking about? Socialists, communists and their fellow travelers care about the little guy in his struggle for a fair shake! They're trying to promote social justice." Let's look at some of the history of socialism and communism.

Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, Nazi stands for National Socialist German Workers' Party. Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and in nations they captured. The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler's Socialist Workers' Party pale in comparison to the horrors committed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and their successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tse-tung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history's most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii's Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, "Death by Government." A wealth of information is provided at his website.

You say, "Williams, isn't it a bit unfair to lump the "One Nation" communists, socialists and their supporters with mass murderers such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung? After all, they expressed no such murderous goal." When Hitler, Stalin and Mao were campaigning for political power, you can bet they didn't campaign on the promise to murder millions of their own people, and probably the thought of doing so never crossed their minds. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice." It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, Russians and Chinese, like many of today's Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for a Hitler, a Stalin or Mao to take over. But as Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

While America's leftists, socialists and communists condemn Hitler, they give the world's most horrible murderers a pass. First, they make a false distinction between fascism, communism and socialism but more importantly, they sympathize with the socioeconomic goals of communism and socialism. The primary goal of communism and socialism is government ownership or control over the means of production. In the U.S., only a few people call for outright government ownership of the means of production. They might have learned that government ownership would mess things up. Instead, they've increasingly called for quasi-ownership through various forms of government regulation, oversight, taxation and subsidies. After all, if someone has the power to tell you how you may use your property, it's tantamount to his owing it.

I believe most Americans find the ideals and principles of socialism, communism and progressivism repugnant, but by our sanctioning greater government centralization and its control over our lives, we become their dupes or, as Lenin said, "useful idiots."

Dr. Williams is a nationally syndicated columnist, former chairman of the economics department at George Mason University, and author of More Liberty Means Less Government

BREAST IRONING HAS THE SAME CONTROLLING SPIRIT AS GENITAL MUTILATION

2010-07-30T00:20:00.002-04:00

The Secular solution is sexual education.
The Christian solution is a profound heart change that changes; predators as well as agressors and heals victims. It doesn't deny education.It changes the destructive aspects of the culture from its root and in a marvelous way enhances the intrinsic value of a human being.

Copy and paste

2010-05-26T16:36:00.000-04:00

Do you want to 'help the poor' Do it yourself with your own effort

2010-05-25T17:07:00.001-04:00

Imigration

2010-05-22T18:02:00.000-04:00

Chile's Blessing

2010-03-02T07:57:00.002-05:00

How Milton Friedman Saved Chile

Milton Friedman gave Chileans the intellectual wherewithal first to survive the quake, and now to build their lives anew.
By BRET STEPHENS

Milton Friedman has been dead for more than three years. But his spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile in the early morning hours of Saturday. Thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse.

Earthquake magnitudes are measured on a logarithmic scale. The earthquake that hit Northridge in 1994 measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. But its seismic-energy yield was only half that of the 7.0 quake that hit Haiti in January, which was the equivalent of 2,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs exploding all at once.

By contrast, Saturday's earthquake in Chile measured 8.8. That's nearly 500 times more powerful than Haiti's, or about one million Hiroshimas. Yet Chile's reported death toll—711 as of this writing—was a tiny fraction of the 230,000 believed to have perished in Haiti.

It's not by chance that Chileans were living in houses of brick—and Haitians in houses of straw—when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down. In 1973, the year the proto-Chavista government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile was an economic shambles. Inflation topped out at an annual rate of 1000%, foreign-currency reserves were totally depleted, and per capita GDP was roughly that of Peru and well below Argentina's.

What Chile did have was intellectual capital, thanks to an exchange program between its Catholic University and the economics department of the University of Chicago, then Friedman's academic home. Even before the 1973 coup, several of Chile's "Chicago Boys" had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on.
Read other columns by Bret Stephens.

In left-wing mythology—notably Naomi Klein's tedious 2007 screed "The Shock Doctrine"—the Chicago Boys weren't just strange bedfellows to Pinochet's dictatorship. They were complicit in its crimes. "If the pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?" wrote New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis in October 1975. In fact, Pinochet had been mostly indifferent to the Chicago Boys' advice until the continuing economic crisis forced him to look for some policy alternatives. In March 1975, he had a 45-minute meeting with Friedman and asked him to write a letter proposing some remedies. Friedman responded a month later with an eight-point proposal that largely mirrored the themes of the Chicago Boys.

For his trouble, Friedman would spend the rest of his life being defamed as an accomplice to evil: at his Nobel Prize ceremony the following year, he was met by protests and hecklers. Friedman himself couldn't decide whether to be amused or annoyed by the obloquies; he later wryly noted that he had given communist dictatorships the same advice he gave Pinochet, without raising leftist hackles.

As for Chile, Pinochet appointed a succession of Chicago Boys to senior economic posts. By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet's democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America's richest people. They have the continent's lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.

Chile also has some of the world's strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance. In the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, thousands of children were buried under schools also built according to code.

In "The Shock Doctrine," Ms. Klein titles one of her sub-chapters "The Myth of the Chilean Miracle." In her reading, the only thing Friedman and the Chicago Boys accomplished was to "hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence." Actual Chileans of all classes—living in the aftermath of an actual shock—may take a different view of Friedman, who helped give them the wherewithal first to survive the quake, and now to build their lives anew.

A Fascinating Human Being

2010-02-19T22:02:00.002-05:00

Life Among the 'Yakkity Yaks'
The renowned inventor on how the insights she gained from her own autism fueled her career.

By BARI WEISS

'Who do you think made the first stone spear?" asks Temple Grandin. "That wasn't the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Aspberger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn't even have a recording device to record this conversation on."

As many as one in 110 American children are affected by autism spectrum disorders, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed than girls. But what causes this developmental disorder, characterized by severe social disconnection and communication impairment, remains a mystery.
View the Top Stories This Week on OpinionJournal.com

Nevertheless, with aggressive early intervention and tremendous discipline many people with autism can lead productive, even remarkable, lives. And Ms. Grandin—doctor of animal science, ground-breaking cattle expert, easily the most famous autistic woman in the world—is one of them.

Earlier this month, HBO released a film about her to critical acclaim. Claire Danes captures her with such precision that Ms. Grandin tells me watching the movie feels like "a weird time machine" to the 1960s and '70s and that it shows "exactly how my mind works."

At the Manhattan screening I attended, Ms. Grandin was dressed in her trademark look—an embroidered cowboy shirt, in this case brown with a red neck kerchief—and was holding forth confidently, cracking self-deprecating jokes. Parents of children with autism thanked Ms Grandin for her books; she's the reason they can relate to their children. Teachers asked for specific recommendations: How can they capitalize on their autistic students' obsession with dinosaurs? A boy, perhaps 10 or 11, sought Ms. Grandin's advice on how to deal with the bullies that pick on his nonverbal brother.

Her cadence is unusual, staccato-like, and her pale blue eyes sometimes drift off into the distance. But she seems a different person from the young woman in the film, for whom being hugged, let alone schmoozing at a cocktail party, seemed physically painful. What's changed?

"The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less and less autistic," she says, "because you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave. It's like being in a play; I'm always in a play."

Her rehearsal began early and in earnest. Born in 1947, she did not speak until the age of four. All of the doctors recommended permanent institutionalization; her father agreed.

But her mother refused and hired a speech therapist and a nanny who spent many hours a week taking turns playing games with her daughter. She insisted that Temple practice proper etiquette, go to church, interact with adults at parties. "I'd be in an institution if it wasn't for her," Ms. Grandin says.

She has always thought socializing was boring, and she famously described herself as "an anthropologist on Mars" to neurologist Oliver Sacks when explaining her interactions with typical people. As a teenager, while her peers fixated on boys and pop culture, Ms. Grandin was consumed with scientific experiments.

Her first major invention, at 16, was a "squeeze machine"—a device she modeled on the squeeze chutes used to restrain cattle that she first saw on her aunt's ranch in Arizona. "I noticed that when the cattle got into the squeeze chutes they got calmer," she says, "so I built a plywood device I could get into that was similar, because I had these horrible, horrible anxiety attacks." The physical pressure calmed her tremendously.

These days, Ms. Grandin is known as much for her professional work—she revolutionized livestock handling equipment—as for her expertise on autism. "I've always thought of myself as a cattle handling specialist, a college professor first; autism is secondary," she says. But she does credit her autism for her unique ability to relate to cattle.

Ms. Grandin wondered what made the animals moo and balk. Kneeling down to see things from a cow's eye view, she took pictures from within the chutes.

She found cattle were highly sensitive to the same sensory stimulants that might set off a person with autism, but were inconsequential to the average handler. They were shockingly simple revelations: light and shadow would stress the animals, as would grated metal drains. Prodding and hollering from cowboys, intended to move cattle along, only alarmed them further.

Her designs reflected these insights. A curved, single-file chute mimicked the cattle's natural tendency to follow each other. She replaced slated walls with solid ones to prevent cattle from seeing the handlers and cut down on light and shadow.

Today, half of the cattle in this country pass through the slaughter systems that Ms. Grandin invented. She's a consultant to companies like McDonalds and Burger King. Yet—and she might well be the only person with these two associations—she's also been honored as a "visionary" by PETA for making slaughterhouses more humane.

When Ms. Grandin isn't teaching at Colorado State University, she's traveling the world lecturing or promoting her (10) books. Whether discussing animals or autism, though, she always comes back to the defining feature of her mind, the characteristic that allowed her to create such accurate equipment designs: she literally thinks in pictures.

Nancy Minshew, a professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh, conducted tests on her brain that showed a "gigantic, huge trunkline going back into the primary visual cortex," Ms. Grandin says. Translation for the layperson: "I basically have a gigantic graphics card."

So when Ms. Grandin says "Google me," as we sit down for a more intimate conversation after the film, she's not suggesting I look up the half-million references to her on the Web. She's challenging me to test her photo-realistic brain. "And don't pick something easy like house or car," she instructs.

Ok, how about love? "Herbie the Lovebug. My mother." God? "I've got this Hubble Space telescope poster of 100 galaxies." What about something even more abstract, like responsibility? "I see people that have done bad things with terrible consequences: Michael Vick. Tiger Woods. Bill Clinton."

People on the "spectrum" tend to be just as obsessed with things and the way things work as they are uninterested in social relationships. And, as Ms. Grandin observed, people interested in things make important advancements—particularly in engineering, science and technology.

Which is not to say she romanticizes this disorder. The politics around autism are fraught with landmines, and Ms. Grandin follows the issues very closely. She approaches them like the scientist she is: exacting, realistic, pragmatic. What sets Ms. Grandin apart is that she knows what autism feels like, and, unlike so many others with the disorder, she can articulate it.

Last week, the American Psychiatric Association unveiled its proposed revisions to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the bible of the field. Up for revision are Aspergers and autism. The association recommends scrapping both and replacing them with the umbrella label of "autism spectrum disorders."

"From a scientific standpoint, Aspergers and autism are one syndrome," Ms. Grandin says, reflecting the scholarly consensus. "Aspergers is part of the autism spectrum, not a separate disorder." But "the problem is you have a whole lot of people that have labels and identify with the label."

Perhaps more significantly, earlier this month Britain's esteemed medical journal, The Lancet, formally retracted its 1998 paper that linked vaccinations to autism. That paper, whose primary author was Dr. Andrew Wakefield, studied 12 children who exhibited autistic behaviors. The authors suggested they were caused by the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. The paper set off a firestorm, fueling the antivaccine movement perhaps best associated with the actress Jenny McCarthy, whose son is autistic.

"Scientifically, there's still some things to be done," Ms. Grandin says. Scientists need to study "the kids where they seem to have language and then they lose it at 18 months to two years of age." She adds: "I've talked to too many parents that have talked to me about regressions that I can't just pooh-pooh that off."

But, she adds emphatically, this does not mean parents should stop vaccinating. "We can't stop vaccinating because we're going to end up with all these childhood diseases. I mean, I grew up with iron lungs. . . . That was horrible, dreadful . . . We can't go back to that."

So what does she recommend? "If you have autism in the family history," or other auto-immune problems, "you still vaccinate. Delay it a bit, space them out." There is, she says, a "strong genetic basis" for autism, and she has a "very typical family history" that includes anxiety and depression on both sides of the family, intellectual giftedness, lots of food allergies and engineers ("my grandfather was an engineer who invented the automatic pilot for airplanes"). This is why, she says, "there tends to be a lot of autism around the tech centers . . . when you concentrate the geeks, you're concentrating the autism genetics."

Many talk of an autism epidemic—has there been a spike in autism lately? "You know the geeks have always been here. They used to call them geeks, nerds and dorks. Now they're getting labeled Aspbergers—there's just a point where it's just normal personality variation."

But, Ms. Grandin adds, "some of the severe autism has increased." As to what is causing it, she mentions the possibility of environmental toxins interacting with "susceptible genetics." A study released last week by researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that women over the age of 40 who give birth are twice as likely to have a child with autism as those under 25.

While she's adamant that there is no magic cure for this disorder, Ms. Grandin says she has seen some "very big improvements" with special diets, like wheat-free and diary-free. She says the low doses of antidepressants she's been on for over 30 years are "magic," and have saved her from constant panic attacks and anxiety.

Mostly, though, her advice is simple: It's about hard work. Young children need 20 or 30 hours a week of one-on-one time with a committed teacher or mentor. Money, Ms. Grandin says, should not be an obstacle. If you can't afford a professional teacher, find volunteers through your church or synagogue, she says. Parents need to teach 1950s-style social rules "like please and thank you, basic table manners, how to shop."

There have to be high expectations. She's worried about the "handicapped mentality" that she thinks is increasing. "When I see these kids with 150 IQ and their parents want to put them on Social Security [disability], it drives me nuts." These kids "will come up to the book table and start talking about 'my Aspergers.' Why don't you talk about becoming a chemist, or a computer programmer, or a botanist?"

She continues: "It's important to get these autistic kids out and exposed to stuff. You've got to fill up the database." Silicon Valley and the tech companies are like "heaven on earth for the geeks and the nerds. And I want to see more and more of these smart kids going into the tech industry and inventing things—that's what makes America great."

Ms. Grandin lives in a simple apartment in Fort Collins, Colo., and has used the profits from her books to put students through school. "Four PhDs I've already done, I'm working on my fifth right now. I have graduate students at Colorado State—some of them I let in the back door, like me: older, nontraditional students. And I've gotten them good jobs."

"You know what working at the slaughterhouses does to you? It makes you look at your own mortality."

"When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now," she says. Making the lives of others better, doing "something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple."

How about meaning, I ask. What's the picture for that word? "Ok, now I'm seeing a mother saying your book helped my kid go to college—that's meaning. Or my kid got a job because of one of your lectures—that's meaning. Or a rancher comes up and says that piece of equipment works really well—that's meaning. Concrete, real stuff. On. The. Ground.

The Robin Hood Syndrome

2010-02-16T07:50:00.000-05:00

The Fallacy of "Fairness" Taken from Townhall
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
If there is ever a contest to pick which word has done the most damage to people's thinking, and to actions to carry out that thinking, my nomination would be the word "fair." It is a word thrown around by far more people than have ever bothered to even try to define it.

This mushy vagueness may be a big handicap in logic but it is a big advantage in politics. All sorts of people, with very different notions about what is or is not fair, can be mobilized behind this nice-sounding word, in utter disregard of the fact that they mean very different things when they use that word.

Some years ago, for example, there was a big outcry that various mental tests used for college admissions or for employment were biased and "unfair" to many individuals or groups. Fortunately there was one voice of sanity-- David Riesman, I believe-- who said: "The tests are not unfair. LIFE is unfair and the tests measure the results."

If by "fair" you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair, anywhere or at any time. If you stop and think about it (however old-fashioned that may seem), it is hard even to conceive of how life could possibly be fair in that sense.

Even within the same family, among children born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, the first-borns on average have higher IQs than their brothers and sisters, and usually achieve more in life.

Unfairness is often blamed on somebody, even if only on "society." But whose fault is it if you were not the first born? Since some groups have more children than others, a higher percentage of the next generation will be first-borns in groups that have smaller families, so such groups have an advantage over other groups.

Despite all the sound and fury generated in controversies over whether different groups have different genetic potential, even if they all have identical genetic potential the outcomes can still differ if they have different birth rates.

Twins have average IQs several points lower than children born singly. Whether that is due to having to share resources in the womb or having to share parents' attention after birth, the fact is what it is-- and it certainly is not fair.

Many people fail to see the fundamental difference between saying that a particular thing-- whether a mental test or an institution-- is conveying a difference that already exists or is creating a difference that would not exist otherwise.

Creating a difference that would not exist otherwise is discrimination, and something can be done about that. But, in recent times, virtually any disparity in outcomes is almost automatically blamed on discrimination, despite the incredible range of other reasons for disparities between individuals and groups.

Nature's discrimination completely dwarfs man's discrimination. Geography alone makes equal chances virtually impossible. The geographic advantages of Western Europe over Eastern Europe-- in climate and navigable waterways, among other things-- have led to centuries of differences in income levels that were greater than income differences between blacks and whites in America today.

Just the fact that the lay of the land is different in different parts of Europe meant that it was easier for the Roman legions to invade Western Europe. This meant that Western Europeans had the advantages of the most advanced civilization in Europe at that time. Moreover, because Roman letters were used in Western Europe, the languages of that region had written versions centuries before the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe did.

The difference between literacy and illiteracy is a huge difference, and it remained huge for centuries. Was it the Slavs' fault that the Romans did not want to climb over so many mountains to get to them?

To those living in Western Europe in the days of the Roman Empire, the idea of being conquered, and many slaughtered, by the Romans probably had no great appeal. But their descendants would benefit from their bad luck. And that doesn't seem fair either.

Copyright © 2010 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

The Fallacy of "Fairness": Part II
Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
A recent flap in a Berkeley high school reveals what a farce "fairness" can be. Because this is ultra-liberal Berkeley, perhaps we should not be surprised that a proposal has been made to eliminate four jobs as science teachers and use the money saved for programs to help low achievers.

In Berkeley, as in many other communities across the country, black and Latino students are not performing as well as Asian and white students. In fact, the racial gap in academic achievement at Berkeley High School is the highest in California-- no doubt a special source of embarrassment in politically correct Berkeley.

According to the principal, "Our community at Berkeley High School has failed the African-Americans." Therefore "We need to bring everybody up-- that's what this plan is about."

Surely no one, not even in Berkeley, seriously believes that you will "bring everybody up" by eliminating science teachers. This is a proposal to redistribute money from science to social work, by providing every student with advisors on note-taking, time management and other learning skills.

The point is to close educational gaps among groups, or at least go on record as trying. As with most equalization crusades, whether in education or in the economy, it is about equalizing downward, by lowering those at the top. "Fairness" strikes again!

This is not just a crazy idea by one principal in Berkeley. It is a crazy idea taught in schools of education across the country. A professor of education at the University of San Francisco has weighed in on the controversy at Berkeley, supporting the idea of "projects designed to narrow the achievement gap."

In keeping with the rhetoric of the prevailing ideology, our education professor refers to "privileged" parents and "privileged" children who want to "forestall any progress toward equity."

In the language of the politically correct, achievement is equated with privilege. Such verbal sleight of hand evades the question whether individuals' own priorities and efforts affect outcomes, whether in education or in other endeavors. No need to look at empirical evidence when a clever phrase can take that whole question off the table.

This verbal sleight of hand is not confined to education. A study of incomes of various groups in Toronto concluded that Canadians of Japanese ancestry were the most "privileged" group in that city. That is, people of Japanese ancestry there had higher incomes than members of other minorities and higher than that of the white majority in Toronto.

What makes the "privileged" label a particularly bad joke in this case is a history of blatant discrimination against the Japanese in Canada in years past, including a longer internment during World War II than that of Japanese Americans. But, to some on the left, the very concept of achievement must be banished by all means necessary, regardless of the facts.

Achievement by overcoming obstacles is a special threat to the left's vision of the world, and so must be magically transformed into privilege through rhetoric.

Those with that vision do not want to even discuss evidence that students from different groups spend different amounts of time on homework and different amounts of time on social activities. To admit that inputs affect outputs, whether in education, in the economy or in other areas, would be to undermine the vision and agenda of the left, and deprive those who believe in that vision of a moral melodrama, starring themselves as defenders of the oppressed and crusaders against the forces of evil.

Redistribution of material resources has a very poor track record when it comes to actually helping those who are lagging, whether in education, in the economy or elsewhere. What they need are the attitudes, priorities and behavior which produce the outcomes desired.

But changing anyone's attitudes, priorities and behavior is a lot harder than taking a stance as defenders of the oppressed and crusaders against the forces of evil.

To the extent that doing the latter misdiagnoses the problem, it makes solving the problem even harder. That does no good for those who are lagging, however much it exalts those who pose as their defenders. "Fairness" indeed!

Copyright © 2010 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

The Fallacy of "Fairness": Part III
Thomas Sowell
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Most of us want to be fair, in the sense of treating everyone equally. We want laws to be applied the same to everyone. We want educational, economic or other criteria for rewards to be the same as well. But this concept of fairness is not only different from prevailing ideas of fairness among many of the intelligentsia, it contradicts their idea of fairness.

People like philosopher John Rawls call treating everyone alike merely "formal" fairness. Professor Rawls advocated "a conception of justice that nullifies the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstances." He called for a society which "arranges" end-results, rather than simply treating everyone the same and letting the chips fall where they may.

This more hands-on concept of fairness gives third parties a much bigger role to play. But whether any human being has ever had the omniscience to determine and undo the many differences among people born into different families and cultures-- with different priorities, attitudes and behavior-- is a very big question. And to concentrate the vast amount of power needed to carry out that sweeping agenda is a dangerous gamble, whose actual consequences have too often been written on the pages of history in blood.

There is no question that the accident of birth is a huge factor in the fate of people. What is a very serious question is how much anyone can do about that without creating other, and often worse, problems. Providing free public education, scholarships to colleges and other opportunities for achievement are fine as far as they go, but there should be no illusion that they can undo all the differences in priorities, attitudes and efforts among different individuals and groups.

Trying to change whole cultures and subcultures in which different individuals are raised would be a staggering task. But the ideology of multiculturalism, which pronounces all cultures to be equally valid, puts that task off limits. This paints people into whatever corner the accident of birth has put them.

Under these severe constraints, all that is left is to blame others when the outcomes are different for different individuals and groups. Apparently those who are lagging are to continue to think and act as they have in the past-- and yet somehow have better outcomes in the future. And, if they don't get the same outcomes as others, then according to this way of seeing the world, it is society's fault!

Society may lavish thousands of dollars per year on schooling for a youngster who does not bother to study, and yet when he or she emerges as a semi-literate adult, it is considered to be society's fault if such youngsters cannot get the same kinds of jobs and incomes as other youngsters who studied conscientiously during their years in school.

It is certainly a great misfortune to be born into families or communities whose values make educational or economic success less likely. But to have intellectuals and others come along and misstate the problem does not help to produce better results, even if it produces a better image.

Political correctness may make it hard for anyone to challenge the image of helpless victims of an evil society. But those who are lagging do not need a better public relations image. They need the ability to produce better results for themselves-- and a romantic image is an obstacle to directing their efforts toward developing that ability.

Tests and other criteria which convey the realities of their existing capabilities, compared to that of others, can have what is called a "disparate impact," and are condemned not only in editorial offices but also in courts of law.

But criteria exist precisely to have a disparate impact on those who do not have what these criteria exist to measure. Track meets discriminate against those who are slow afoot. Tests in school discriminate against students who did not study.

Disregarding criteria in the interest of "fairness"-- in the sense of outcomes independent of inputs-- adds to the handicaps of those who already have other handicaps, by lying to them about the reasons for their situation and the things they need to do to make their situation better.

Copyright © 2010 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

The Fallacy of "Fairness": Part IV
Thomas Sowell
Friday, February 12, 2010
Mixed up with the question of fairness to individuals and groups has been the explosive question of whether individuals and groups have the innate ability to perform at the same levels, if they are all treated alike or even given the same objective opportunities.

Intellectuals have swung from one side of this question at the beginning of the 20th century to the opposite side at the end. Both those who said that achievement differences among races and classes were due to genes, in the early years of the 20th century, and those who said that these differences were due to discrimination, in the later years, ignored the old statisticians' warnings that correlation is not causation.

The idea that some people are innately superior (usually one's own group) goes back for centuries, but various new facts that came out in the 19th and early 20th centuries gave the appearance of "science" to such beliefs during the Progressive era.

Sir Francis Galton's research turned up the fact of remarkable achievements among members of the same family, which he regarded as evidence of genetic superiority. The rise of IQ testing, and especially the massive mental testing of soldiers in the U.S. Army during the First World War, showed great differences in test scores among various racial and ethnic groups.

In the public schools, there were similarly large differences in which ethnic group's children failed to get promoted. In both the Army mental tests and in the schools, Polish Jews did poorly at that time. Carl Brigham-- a leading authority on mental tests and the author of the SAT-- said that the Army tests tended to "disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent."

It should be noted that all of these conclusions were based on hard data, not mere "perceptions" or "stereotypes," as so many inconvenient facts are dismissed today. What was wrong were not the data but the inferences.

Polish Jews were among the many immigrants from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe who were relatively recent arrivals in the United States. Many of these immigrants grew up in homes where English was not spoken, as Carl Brigham acknowledged in later years, when he recanted his earlier statements. In later years, Jews scored above average on mental tests.

It is also a hard fact of history that some races had far more advanced technological, economic and other achievements than others at particular times and places. But those who were ahead in some centuries were often behind in other centuries-- the Chinese and the Europeans having changed positions dramatically after Europe eventually caught up with China and then surpassed it within recent centuries. But there was no evidence of any dramatic changes in genetics among either the Chinese or the Europeans.

While striking changes in the relative positions of different races at different periods of history undermine genetic explanations, the fact that there has been no period when their achievements have been the same undermines today's presumption that different economic or other outcomes are due to discrimination.

Whatever the innate capacity of any race, class or other group, what pays off in the real world are developed capabilities, and these have never been the same-- or even close to being the same-- for individuals or groups.

All the leading brands of beer in the United States were created by people of German ancestry and so is the leading beer in China, not to mention breweries created by Germans in Australia, Argentina and elsewhere. Germans were producing beer in the days of the Roman Empire.

This does not mean that beer brewing skill is genetic but it also does not mean that this skill-- or any other skill-- is randomly distributed among peoples, so that a failure to have equal "representation" of groups in a given institutions can be presumed to be due to discrimination by that institution.

Fairness as equal treatment does not produce fairness as equal outcomes. The confusion between the two meanings of the same word has created enormous mischief, much of it at the expense of lagging groups, who have been distracted from the things that would enable them to catch up. And whole societies have been kept in a turmoil pursing a will o' the wisp in the name of "fairness."

Copyright © 2010 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Genius

2009-10-11T18:30:00.003-04:00

(Este video fue enviado por el ex gordo Carlos de la promoción 75. Me gusto tanto que lo estoy apropiando para mi blog.)

"The USSR broke 80 percent of Germany's divisions and lost 27 million people to the Nazi extermination machine. The Soviet Victory Generation saved humanity. Everyone on this planet understood that in 1945"

What Doctors confront almost every day!!!!

2009-10-06T06:52:00.002-04:00

A Doctor in Full
The man who developed Gleevec could have said 'wait.'

By ROGER MCCAFFREY

Last Friday, a molecular biologist named Brian Druker shared the 2009 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for his part in "converting a fatal cancer into a manageable chronic condition."

The cancer is chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). The drug Dr. Druker developed, Gleevec, manufactured by Novartis, has saved thousands of lives.

My wife Priscilla and I have a rooting interest. Dr. Druker, a scientist, never had a child as a patient until he met our son John. John's cancer, CML, killed almost all its victims until Gleevec was developed. Ninety percent of CML patients, whose blood stem-cells go haywire, now lead normal lives.

John was diagnosed with accelerated CML in 1998 at age 4 and all treatment had failed. His bone-marrow transplant meant seven weeks in a sterile hospital unit on a dangerous assortment of drugs. Hell on earth.

I still remember the desperation felt deep in my chest when we learned his transplant had failed. I took John to a big East Coast cancer center. A specialist there put it bluntly: "He is a time bomb."

Later I revealed that we wanted an experimental drug. I had spoken to an oncologist, Dr. Carlo Gambacorti, doing stunning early Gleevec research in Europe—and to its chief investigator, Dr. Brian Druker.

"Couldn't this be a cure?" I asked gingerly for support. The specialist fixed her gaze upon me: "Brian who?"

Dr. Druker was willing to help but cautioned, "This is in the hands of Novartis." And Novartis had its strict protocols.

So we approached Novartis through Congressman Richard Gephardt and an intrigued Newt Gingrich, and through friends Pat Buchanan and Congressman Bob Schaffer. Novartis consented—but only if Dr. Druker quarterbacked.

"If John dies while he is on this drug," said a doctor, "the FDA will shut the whole program down."

Delays ensued. Novartis had FDA paperwork to deal with. Our "time bomb" was ticking away. But Dr. Druker hung in with us. He had nothing to gain. In fact, he risked his reputation.

Life has its vindications. Ultimately, in July 1999, John and I flew across the country to Portland, Ore., for the kind of treatment most patients only dream of, under Dr. Druker and his colleagues at Oregon Health & Science University and the Doernbecher Children's Hospital. We used empty seats in corporate jets that the Corporate Angel Network, a nonprofit out of White Plains, N.Y., found for John. No cost.

On the Gulfstreams, flight attendants pampered John with his favorites—Beefaroni and hot dogs. Gleevec rapidly transformed his life. Fevers vanished, blood counts normalized—and miraculously, so did his bone marrow.

I looked forward to those cross-country flights. One featured an eye-level pass by Mount Rushmore.

But the flights did come to an end. A corporate jet flew John's body back home to Connecticut in October 2001, on a bitterly bleak evening.

For all our early exultation, John did "die while he was on Gleevec." My notes show that Dr. Druker worried this might happen. There was going to be no glory on John's account. For anyone who touched our beloved son, there was only risk.

Fear of making a "mistake," despite our assurances and confidence in the doctors, caused hesitation, and lower dosing of Gleevec at one stage. I asked a physician, "What is everyone afraid of?" His response was: "Lawyers."

John's life and death, and the manner in which his doctors in Portland dealt early on with the dilemmas, taught my wife and me that obstacles can be conquered when faced with courage and—the great unseen force in this entire saga—prayer. After all, we did get what we had prayed for: a miraculous drug that cured or managed this stem-cell cancer. But it was too late for John.

Dr. Druker's agreement to treat John in 1999 was a large moral act—a triumph of the Golden Rule—that took more courage than his pursuit of a cure through years of fruitless lab work. He could have said "no," or "wait." Instead, he said, "I think I can help him."

A scientist willing to risk so much for one patient is a doctor in full.

Mr. McCaffrey is a book publisher in Naples, Fla.

Breakthrough!

2009-10-04T08:24:00.000-04:00

AGAINST TOTALITARIANISM TAKE ACTION!

2009-08-31T18:56:00.002-04:00

This is the people that want to change the best medical system of the world!!!!!!!!!

2009-08-31T18:18:00.001-04:00

Josue

2009-08-26T21:59:00.002-04:00

Anyone interested in helping this young man, please contact me through this blog

Bureacrats Mess it Up

2009-08-26T10:58:00.000-04:00

No Socialized Medicine

2009-08-14T23:04:00.000-04:00

Fabian Tactics (Google it)

2009-08-10T13:36:00.001-04:00

Improving Memory

2009-08-09T14:14:00.000-04:00

Free???? Health Care????

2009-07-28T23:32:00.000-04:00

The Cost of Free Government Health Care
By David Gibberman
Proponents of government-run health care like to point out that countries with such a system spend a smaller percentage of their gross domestic product on health care than the United States. What they don't like to mention is how those savings are achieved. For example:

Patients Lose the Right To Decide What Treatment They'll Receive. Instead, patients receive whatever care politicians and bureaucratic number crunchers decide is "cost effective."

Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence usually won't approve a medical procedure or medicine unless its cost, divided by the number of quality-adjusted life years that it will give a patient, is no more than what it values a year of life in great health - £30,000 (about $44,820). So if you want a medical procedure that is expected to extend your life by four years but it costs $40,000 and bureaucrats decide that it will improve the quality of your life by 0.2 (death is zero, 1.0 is best possible health, and negative values can be assigned), you're out of luck because $40,000 divided by 0.8 (4 X 0.2) is $50,000.

There Are Long Waits for Care. One way governments reduce health care costs is to require patients to wait for treatment. Patients have to wait to see a general practitioner, then wait to see a specialist, then wait for any diagnostic tests, and then wait for treatment.

The United Kingdom's National Health Service recently congratulated itself for reducing to 18 weeks the average time that a patient has to wait from referral to a specialist to treatment. Last year, Canadians had to wait an average of 17.3 weeks from referral to a specialist to treatment (Fraser Institute's Waiting Your Turn). The median wait was 4.9 weeks for a CT scan, 9.7 weeks for an MRI, and 4.4 weeks for an ultrasound.

Delay in treatment is not merely an inconvenience. Think of the pain and suffering it costs patients. Or lost work time, decreased productivity, and sick pay. Worse, think of the number of deaths caused by delays in treatment.

Patients Are Denied the Latest Medical Technology and Medicines. To save money, countries with government-run health care deny or limit access to new technology and medicines. Those with a rare disease are often out of luck because medicines for their disease usually cost more than their quality-adjusted life years are deemed worth.

In a Commonwealth Fund/Harvard/Harris 2000 survey of physicians in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom, physicians in all countries except the United States reported major shortages of resources important in providing quality care; only U.S. physicians did not see shortages as a significant problem. According to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Health Data (2008), there are 26.5 MRIs and 33.9 CT scanners per million people in the United States compared to 6.2 MRIs and 12 CT scanners in Canada and 5.6 MRIs and 7.6 CT scanners in the United Kingdom.

Breakthroughs in Life-Saving Treatments Are Discouraged. Countries with government-run health care save money by relying on the United States to pay the research and development costs for new medical technology and medications. If we adopt the cost-control policies that have limited innovation in other countries, everyone will suffer.

The Best and Brightest Are Discouraged from Becoming Doctors. Countries with government-run health care save money by paying doctors less. According to a Commonwealth Fund analysis, U.S. doctors earn more than twice as much as doctors in Canada and Germany, more than three times as much as doctors in France, and four times as much as doctors in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The best and brightest will be encouraged to go into professions where they can earn more money and have more autonomy.

Is Government-Run Health Care Better? Proponents of government-run health care argue that Americans will receive better care despite the foregoing. Their main argument has been that despite paying more for health care the United States trails other countries in infant mortality and average life expectancy.

However, neither is a good measure of the quality of a country's health care system. Each depends more on genetic makeup, personal lifestyle (including diet and physical activity), education, and environment than available health care. For example, in their book The Business of Health, Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider found that if it weren't for our high rate of deaths from homicides and car accidents Americans would have the highest life expectancy.

Infant mortality statistics are difficult to compare because other countries don't count as live births infants below a certain weight or gestational age. June E. O'Neill and Dave M. O'Neill found that Canada's infant mortality would be higher than ours if Canadians had as many low-weight births (the U.S. has almost three times as many teen mothers, who tend to give birth to lower-weight infants).

A better measure of a country's health care is how well it actually treats patients. The CONCORD study published in 2008 found that the five-year survival rate for cancer (adjusted for other causes of death) is much higher in the United States than in Europe (e.g., 91.9% vs. 57.1% for prostate cancer, 83.9% vs. 73% for breast cancer, 60.1% vs. 46.8% for men with colon cancer, and 60.1 vs. 48.4% for women with colon cancer). The United Kingdom, which has had government-run health care since 1948, has survival rates lower than those for Europe as a whole.

Proponents of government-run health care argue that more preventive care will be provided. However, a 2007 Commonwealth Fund report comparing the U.S., Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom found that the U.S. was #1 in preventive care. Eighty-five percent of U.S. women age 25-64 reported that they had a Pap test in the past two years (compared to 58% in the United Kingdom); 84% of U.S. women age 50-64 reported that they had a mammogram in the past two years (compared to 63% in the United Kingdom).

The United Kingdom's National Health Service has been around for more than 60 years but still hasn't worked out its kinks. In March, Britain's Healthcare Commission (since renamed the Care Quality Commission) reported that as many as 1,200 patients may have died needlessly at Stafford Hospital and Cannock Chase Hospital over a three-year period. The Commission described filthy conditions, unhygienic practices, doctors and nurses too few in number and poorly trained, nurses not knowing how to use the insufficient number of working cardiac monitors, and patients left without food, drink, or medication for as many as four days.

Does Government-Run Health Care Provide Everyone Access to Equal Care? Proponents tout government-run health care as giving everyone access to the same health care, regardless of race, nationality, or wealth. But that's not true. The British press refers to the National Health Service as a "postcode lotter" because a person's care varies depending on the neighborhood ("postcode") in which he or she lives. EUROCARE-4 found large difference in cancer survival rates between the rich and poor in Europe. The Fraser Institute's Waiting Your Turn concludes that famous and politically connected Canadians are moved to the front of queues, suburban and rural residents have less access to care than their urban counterparts, and lower income Canadians have less access to care than their higher income neighbors.

Ironically, as we're moving toward having our government completely control health care, countries with government-run health care are moving in the opposite direction. Almost every European country has introduced market reforms to reduce health costs and increase the availability and quality of care. The United Kingdom has proposed a pilot program giving patients money to purchase health care. Why is this being done? According to Alan Johnson, Secretary for Health, personal health budgets "will give more power to patients and drive up the quality of care" (The Guardian, 1/17/09). It's a lesson we all should learn before considering how to improve our health care system.

Obama Scare

2009-07-27T14:08:00.001-04:00

Why Obamacare is Sinking
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 24, 2009
WASHINGTON -- What happened to Obamacare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health care nirvana: more coverage, less cost.
But you can't fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes.
President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn -- surprise! -- that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats' health care plans, says the CBO, increase costs in the range of $1 trillion plus.
In response, the president retreated to a demand that any bill he sign be revenue neutral. But that's classic misdirection: If the fierce urgency of health care reform is to radically reduce costs that are producing budget-destroying deficits, revenue neutrality (by definition) leaves us on precisely the same path to insolvency that Obama himself declares unsustainable.
The Democratic proposals are worse still. Because they do increase costs, revenue neutrality means countervailing tax increases. It's not just that it is crazily anti-stimulatory to saddle a deeply depressed economy with an income tax surcharge that falls squarely on small business and the investor class. It's that health care reform ends up diverting for its own purposes a source of revenue that might otherwise be used to close the yawning structural budget deficit that is such a threat to the economy and to the dollar.
These blindingly obvious contradictions are why the Democratic health plans are collapsing under their own weight -- at the hands of Democrats. It's Max Baucus, Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who called Obama unhelpful for ruling out taxing employer-provided health insurance as a way to pay for expanded coverage. It's the Blue Dog Democrats in the House who wince at skyrocketing health-reform costs just weeks after having swallowed hemlock for Obama on a ruinous cap-and-trade carbon tax.
The president is therefore understandably eager to make this a contest between progressive Democrats and reactionary Republicans. He seized on Republican Sen. Jim DeMint's comment that stopping Obama on health care would break his presidency to protest, with perfect disingenuousness, that "this isn't about me. This isn't about politics."
It's all about him. Health care is his signature reform. And he knows that if he produces nothing, he forfeits the mystique that both propelled him to the presidency and has sustained him through a difficult first six months. Which is why Obama's red lines are constantly shifting. Universal coverage? Maybe not. No middle-class tax hit? Well, perhaps, but only if they don't "primarily" bear the burden. Because it's about him, Obama is quite prepared to sign anything as long as it is titled "health care reform."
This is not about politics? Then why is it, to take but the most egregious example, that in this grand health care debate we hear not a word about one of the worst sources of waste in American medicine: the insane cost and arbitrary rewards of our malpractice system?
When a neurosurgeon pays $200,000 a year for malpractice insurance before he even turns on the light in his office or hires his first nurse, who do you think pays? Patients, in higher doctor fees to cover the insurance.
And with jackpot justice that awards one claimant zillions while others get nothing -- and one-third of everything goes to the lawyers -- where do you think that money comes from? The insurance companies, who then pass it on to you in higher premiums.
But the greatest waste is the hidden cost of defensive medicine: tests and procedures that doctors order for no good reason other than to protect themselves from lawsuit. Every doctor knows, as I did when I practiced years ago, how much unnecessary medical cost is incurred with an eye not on medicine but on the law.
Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health care news conference. Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.
Didn't Obama promise a new politics that puts people over special interests? Sure. And now he promises expanded, portable, secure, higher-quality medical care -- at lower cost! The only thing he hasn't promised is to extirpate evil from the human heart. That legislation will be introduced next week.

!!!!!WARNING!!!!!!

2009-07-23T08:35:00.001-04:00

MaO-Bama Health Care

2009-07-14T15:42:00.000-04:00

Fallacies in Health Care

2009-07-01T05:59:00.003-04:00

Parsing the Health Reform Argument

By GEORGE NEWMAN

The health-care debate continues. We have now heard from nearly all the politicians, experts and interested parties: doctors, drug makers, hospitals, insurance companies, even constitutional lawyers (though not, significantly, from trial lawyers, who know full well "change" is not coming to their practices). Here is how one humble economist sees some of the main arguments, which I have paraphrased below:

- "The American people overwhelmingly favor reform."

If you ask whether people would be happier if somebody else paid their medical bills, they generally say yes. But surveys on consumers' satisfaction with their quality of care show overwhelming support for the continuation of the present arrangement. The best proof of this is the belated recognition by the proponents of health-care reform that they need to promise people that they can keep what they have now.

- "The cost of health care rises two to three times as fast as inflation."

That's like comparing the price of hamburger 30 years ago with the price of filet mignon today and calling the difference inflation. Or the price of a 19-inch, black-and-white TV 30 years ago with the price of a 50-inch HDTV today. The improvements in medical care are even more dramatic, leading to longer life, less pain, fewer exploratory surgeries and miracle drugs. Of course the research, the equipment and the training that produce these improvements don't come cheap.
[Commentary] Corbis

- "Health care represents a rising proportion of our income."

That's not only true but perfectly natural. Quality health care is a discretionary, income-elastic expense -- i.e. the richer a society, the larger the proportion of income that is spent on it. (Poor societies have to spend income gains on food and other necessities.) Consider the alternatives. Would we feel better about ourselves if we skimped on our family's health care and spent the money on liquor, gambling, night clubs or a third television set?

- "Shifting funds from health care to education would make for a better society."

These two services have a lot in common, including steadily rising cost. What is curious is that this rise in education costs is deemed by the liberal establishment smart and farsighted while the rise in health-care costs is a curse to be stopped at any cost. What is curiouser still is that in education, where they always advocate more "investment," past increases have gone hand-in-hand with demonstrably deteriorating outcomes. The rising cost in health care has been accompanied by clearly superior results. Thus we would shift dollars from where they do a lot of good to an area where they don't.

- "Forty-five million people in the U.S. are uninsured."

Even if this were true (many dispute it) should we risk destroying a system that works for the vast majority to help 15% of our population?

- "The cost of treating the 45 million uninsured is shifted to the rest of us."

So on Monday, Wednesday and Friday we are harangued about the 45 million people lacking medical care, and on Tuesday and Thursday we are told we already pay for that care. Left-wing reformers think that if they split the two arguments we are too stupid to notice the contradiction. Furthermore, if cost shifting is bad, wait for the Mother of all Cost Shifting when suppliers have to overcharge the private plans to compensate for the depressed prices forced on them by the public plan.

- "A universal plan will reduce the cost of health care."

Think a moment. Suppose you are in an apple market with 100 buyers and 100 sellers every day and apples sell for $1 a pound. Suddenly one day 120 buyers show up. Will the price of the apples go up or down?

- "U.S. companies are at a disadvantage against foreign competitors who don't have to pay their employees' health insurance."

This would be true if the funds for health care in those countries fell from the sky. As it is, employees in those countries pay for their health care in much higher income taxes, sales or value-added taxes, gasoline taxes (think $8 a gallon at the pump) and in many other ways, effectively reducing their take-home pay and living standards. And isn't it odd that the same people who want to lift this burden from businesses that provide health benefits also (again, on alternate days) want to impose this burden on the other firms that do not offer this benefit. What about the international competitiveness of these companies?

- "If you like your current plan you can keep it."

In other words, you can keep your current plan if it (and the company offering it) is still around. This is not a trivial qualification. Proponents have clearly learned from the HillaryCare debacle in the 1990s that radical transformation does not sell. What we have instead is what came to be dubbed "salami tactics" in postwar Eastern Europe where Communist leaders took away freedoms one at a time to minimize resistance and obscure the ultimate goal. If nothing else, a century of vain attempts to break the Post Office monopoly should teach us how welcoming Congress is to competition to one of its high-cost, inefficient wards.

- "Congress will be strictly neutral between the public and private plans."

Nonsense. Congress has a hundred ways to help its creation hide costs, from squeezing suppliers to hidden subsidies (think Amtrak). And it has even more ways to bankrupt private plans. One way is to mandate ever more exotic and expensive coverage (think hair transplants or sex-change operations). Another is by limiting and averaging premiums and outlawing advertising. And if all else fails Congress can always resort to tax audits and public harassment of executives -- all in the name of "leveling the playing field." Then, in the end, the triumphal announcement: "The private system has failed."

- "Decisions will still be made by doctors and patients and the system won't be politicized."

Fat chance. Funding conflicts between mental health and gynecology will be based on which pressure group offers the richer bribe or appears more politically correct. The closing (or opening) of a hospital will be based not on need but which subcommittee chairman's district the hospital is in. Imagine the centralization of all medical research in the country in the brand new Robert Byrd Medical Center in Morgantown, W.Va. You get the idea.

- "We need a public plan to keep the private plans honest."

The 1,500 or so private plans don't produce enough competition? Making it 1,501 will do the trick? But then why stop there? Eating is even more important than health care, so shouldn't we have government-run supermarkets "to keep the private ones honest"? After all, supermarkets clearly put profits ahead of feeding people. And we can't run around naked, so we should have government-run clothing stores to keep the private ones honest. And shelter is just as important, so we should start public housing to keep private builders honest. Oops, we already have that. And that is exactly the point. Think of everything you know about public housing, the image the term conjures up in your mind. If you like public housing you will love public health care.

Mr. Newman is an economist and retired business executive.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A13

WETHER THE LEFT LIKES IT OR NOT "THIS IS THE TRUTH"

2009-06-19T11:48:00.000-04:00

LIVE FREE OR DIE

2009-06-17T11:59:00.001-04:00

Live Free or Die
Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, June 17, 2009

"Live Free or Die" is the title of author and columnist Mark Steyn's speech at Hillsdale College, reproduced in Imprimis (April 2009), a Hillsdale publication that's free for the asking. Canadian born, now living in New Hampshire, Steyn has had firsthand experience with socialist tyranny in his home country that is rapidly becoming a part of America. Commenting on one of his run-ins with Canada's human rights commissions, Steyn points how it might seem bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of that alliance is pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists and the other half is homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Steyn argues what they have in common overrides their differences, namely, "Both the secular Big Government progressives and the political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential."

I doubt whether there are many Americans who think Congress has either the right or competency to choose where they live, what clothes they wear or what cars they drive. Yet many Americans stand ready to allow Congress to decide what doctors they go to and what treatments they receive. We forget that once we have government-sponsored health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on liberty. That's the justification behind helmet and seatbelt laws. Britain is well along the road toward totally controlling health care. Steyn says, "Under Britain's National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the British Health Secretary, says that it's appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of 'lifestyle choices.'" Steyn adds, "Smokers and the obese may look at their gay neighbor having unprotected sex with multiple partners, and wonder why his 'lifestyle choices' get a pass while theirs don't. But that's the point: Tyranny is always whimsical."

In most of the developed world, the government has gradually taken over many of the responsibilities of adulthood from health care, childcare, care of the elderly and other responsibilities formerly seen as individual or family. Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman suggests that American conservatives preaching "family values" is hypocrisy while Europeans live it. On the continent, Krugman says, "Government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff -- to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family." Steyn insightfully observes, "As befits a distinguished economist, Professor Krugman failed to notice that for a continent of 'family friendly' policies, Europe is remarkably short of families. While America's fertility rate is more or less at replacement level -- 2.1 -- seventeen European nations are at what demographers call 'lowest-low' fertility -- 1.3 or less -- a rate from which no society in human history has ever recovered. Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Greeks have upside-down family trees: four grandparents have two children and one grandchild." Steyn asks, "How can an economist analyze 'family friendly' policies without noticing that the upshot of these policies is that nobody has any families?" My answer to Steyn's questions is: the kind of economist that looks at the seen and ignores the unseen.

Mark Steyn provides us with a historical tidbit. "Live Free or Die," which graces New Hampshire's license plate, are the words of John Stark, New Hampshire's Revolutionary War hero. He uttered those words decades after the War when he was 81 years old, the complete sentence being: "Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils." Steyn says these words should not be interpreted "as a battle cry: We'll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it's something far less dramatic: It's a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die."

LAS BUENAS NUEVAS

2009-05-19T07:09:00.000-04:00

Chose Life or Death, No Middle Ground Allowed

2009-05-18T18:07:00.003-04:00

IMAGINE YOURSELF - REALLY, REALLY-IMAGINE YOURSELF SEATING ON THE FLOOR, CAMERAS IN FRONT OF YOU, AND RIGHT BEHIND YOU 5-6 TERRORIST WITH A MACHETE IN HAND,-THEY GRAB YOU FROM YOUR HAIR AND THEY ASK THE GUY IN FRONT OF THEM -OBVIOUSLY THEIR LEADER "SHOULD WE CHOP HIS HEAD? " "LIFE OR DEATH?; THERE IS NO MORE CHOICES IS EITHER YES OR NOT . NO MIDDLE GROUND THE REST IS NON SENSE.GOT IT?
J.M. Arrunategui

Obama Practices the Low Art of Political Seduction at Notre Dame
May 18, 2009

Extracted from Rush Limbaugh Site

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I think some people are missing this whole Obama at Notre Dame commencement speech event yesterday. Not everybody, but some people are missing this. The real question's not what did Obama say. I mean Obama is who he is. He was consistent as he can be. The question is what happened to Notre Dame over the years? I mean that's the real question. Obviously Notre Dame is what's changed, and I think in simplified terms you'd have to say that Notre Dame is what? A major American university and what has happened to major American universities? They've all been overrun by the left, and we all know the Catholic Church has its own liberal members who are trying to tell the Vatican and the pope to leave them alone and modernize the church and so forth. So it appears that that's happened at Notre Dame. Greetings, folks, great to have you here. We have another week of broadcast excellence, kicking off right now, our telephone number on the Rush Limbaugh program, 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

We're gonna parse it, we got the audio sound bites of some of the speech that President Obama made yesterday. In addition to his comments on abortion and what drew him to Christ, I found it amazing he didn't mention Reverend Wright. And of course what's now becoming the obligatory message to these college graduates: don't go to work, go to a nonprofit, don't make any money, do not try to achieve, do not try to excel, focus yourself on service and giving back. How can they give back if they don't have anything? The only thing they've got is what their spoiled, rotten parents have given them. What have they got to give back? It's not just Obama making these types of commencement speeches all over the country. Every lib doing so is pretty much carrying the same message. I don't know how many of you have read the book 1984. I'm sure you've all heard about it. I'm sure many of you have heard of the book, but I don't know how many people have actually read it. Have you read it, Snerdley? When did you read 1984? You were forced to read it in high school. Do you remember much about it? All right.

George Orwell wrote 1984, and in the book he created Newspeak: using language to mislead, to confuse and control. Some of the examples from 1984: War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. This is Newspeak in 1984. Now we have a real life addition to this given President Obamas speech at Notre Dame yesterday, and it is this: Morality is immoral. That's the message Obama delivered yesterday, morality is immoral. Pro-life is a moral position. Pro-life is the extremist position, rather instead of being a moral position. Pro-life is an extremist position, according to President Obama. The entire abortion debate is manipulated. There are two manipulations of the language. It's not about abortion. It's about choice. That's one manipulation of the language, and morality is not morality. It's extremism. Pro-life is the extreme position; pro-choice is the moderate or normal position. This is how the liberal mind works, this is how they do it, and the treachery here is spreading.

They use it on abortion and they're using it on union enrollment. They call it the Employee Free Choice Act, right? Card check. What it really should be titled is: The Union Brass Knuckles Busting on Your Knees Act, because that's what it is. There's no free choice whatsoever in the Union Free Choice Act, the Employee Free Choice Act. And just as Obama told us yesterday that pro-life is an extreme position, pro-choice is the moral position, they're now considering changing the cap-and-trade policy or legislation. It's not working. So they're thinking of changing that to the Clean Energy Jobs Bill, when the truth is, by any name, it is a massive tax increase on the neediest families in the country. That's all cap-and-trade is. Cap-and-trade is a stealth secret way to raise taxes to pay for all of this spending, and it won't work, by the way, that Obama is ginning up. I went and played golf a couple days over the weekend and I had a chance to talk to a lot of people. It's amazing the people who brought up Obama's making a speech last week in which he said that this kind of spending, deficit spending and borrowing, selling our debt to China, is not sustainable. And, of course, it's his spending and his borrowing that he is criticizing.
In my mind, he threw himself under the bus, and everybody's focusing on that, "My gosh, and the press didn't even get it," and I said, "No, you guys are missing the point. He wasn't talking about himself. What he was doing was setting the stage for tax increases to pay for this. This was all to set the stage for more tax increases." After in his first hundred days running up debt like we have never seen in this country, after spending like we have never seen in this country, he goes out and condemns it. He knows that he's still in the honeymoon period where the Drive-By Media is concerned. He knows that it's only people like me who are gonna point out the irony of him throwing himself under the bus. The Drive-Bys have yet to make this connection. Nobody in the mainstream media has yet to make the connection that Obama was ripping his own policy, that Obama was criticizing to shreds his own legislation. No, they just think that Obama is responsible; Obama cares; he understands the future that we face and how to deal with it. He was just setting the stage for tax increases.

So as we go through the audio sound bites from the speech today, you will see what I mean when I tell you that morality is now immoral. The pro-life position is not a moral position; it is an extremist position. The New York Times in a story today, headline: "At Notre Dame, Obama Calls for Dialogue on Abortion." Now, what exactly has been going on in this country for 40 years? It's no different than the libs saying, "You know what, we need to have that national conversation about race." What have we been doing since the founding of this country but having a conversation about race? What have we been doing the last 40 years but having a dialogue on abortion? And Obama appealed to partisans on each side to find ways to respect one another's basic decency and even work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. Now, I have two thoughts about this. I have often asked, "Where is the middle ground between good and evil? Where do you compromise, where's the compromise between life and death? Where's the compromise between killing and birth? Where do you compromise on that?"

So the assumption here is, find ways to respect one another's basic decency. Well, what's decent? Language still matters to me. What the hell is decent about abortion? What's decent about it? This is the first time I've ever heard abortion categorized as a form of decency. Even the pro-choice crowd in trying to justify it, has tried to say that pregnancy is a disease, or that pregnancy is a sickness that can threaten the life of the mother, or a fetus is an unviable tissue mass. But I've never heard them say that abortion is decency. But Obama has now just said that both sides of the argument feature people who are advocating decency. And then he said we need to work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. This is right out of Bill Clinton's mouth back in the nineties where abortion needs to become safe but rare, or something like that. Now, my question is, if President Obama at Notre Dame yesterday says that everybody on this debate is decent and we gotta work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, is he not admitting there's something wrong about it, then? If there's nothing wrong with an unwanted pregnancy and if there's nothing wrong with abortion, why do we have to limit them?

Why do we hope it's rare, if there's nothing wrong, if it's really nothing more than an issue of liberty and freedom for women, then why do we have to make liberty and freedom rare for women? So I think he bastardizes his own argument here, while trying to sound triangulated, above the fray, understanding both sides. There's not one word in his speech -- and I wouldn't expect there to be -- in his votes as an Illinois state senator three times for infanticide. I went back to the archives. Andrew McCarthy, who as you know is a friend of mine and he writes at National Review Online, wrote a piece in 2008, I think it was June, I've got it here in the stack, detailing Obama's votes, comments, and so forth, on the Illinois law that says if a baby intended to be aborted is born alive, you gotta let it die. He sided with the doctors. We can't have the doctors be liable here for a botched abortion. The mother wanted the baby to be aborted, so a baby born alive is supposed to die, voted three times this way and then tried to tell everybody who characterized it this way they're lying about his position. But as McCarthy pointed out, going and getting transcripts of debates in the Illinois legislature, Obama participated in, it's far worse than that, even.
It's worse than just infanticide, it's a purposeful decision that he made three different times here and there have been all kinds of excuses made by the Obama people and himself to cover it up and to portray it as something other than what it is. As all this is going on, we have the poll that came out last week for the first time in four years or however many number of years the majority of the American people think abortion is wrong. A majority of the American people, 51%, are pro-life or describe themselves that way. TIME Magazine, Nancy Gibbs, in a story that's published today, attempts to explain all this: "A new Pew poll finds that while a majority of independents said abortion should be legal in most cases as recently as October, just 44% do so now. This may inspire some introspection on the part of political operatives in both parties who attribute the Republicans' present frailty to its orthodoxy on social issues. The GOP may have fielded some hapless messengers, but their message, on abortion at least, may be closer to the mainstream than Democrats care to acknowledge."

You go to page two of her story, it passes off the shift as a response to Obama as president. In other words, not because people are substantively pro-life, it's just a bunch of Republicans reacting to Obama, just opposing Obama. That's the means to express it. What's interesting to me, and I mentioned this last week, too -- and, by the way, folks, the purpose of this discussion, we're not going to debate abortion, and Mr. Snerdley, when we go to the phones, we're not going to debate abortion. We're going to treat this in a little different way. We've been there and done that and everybody here knows, everybody listening knows I'm pro-life and have respect for life. What I want to discuss here today, rather, is a technique that Obama is using to make himself as a radical look like a reasonable guy, when he is just extremely radical, and he's calling people who hold positions of morality the radicals. It's Orwell, it's Newspeak, it's doublespeak, whatever you want to call it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: As we start with the audio sound bite excerpts of President Obama's speech at Notre Dame yesterday, I want you to understand what this is. This is an outstanding demonstration of the low art of political seduction as practiced by the master, and that master is Barack Obama. He is good. He excels at the low art of political seduction. Here's our first sound bite.

OBAMA: How do we engage in vigorous debate? How does each of us remain firm in our principles and fight for what we consider right without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side? And of course nowhere do these questions come up more powerfully than on the issue of abortion. Maybe we won't agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision, for any woman, is not made casually. It has both moral and spiritual dimensions. So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions. (applause) Let's reduce unintended pregnancies.
RUSH: You see how that got applause? Why? I ask again, why do we want to reduce the number of women seeking abortions if there's nothing wrong with it? If a position of pro-choice is just as valid as the pro-life position, if we shouldn't demonize, what's wrong with it? Why limit it? Why reduce unintended pregnancies? What's wrong with it? " Even though the decision to have an abortion may be gut-wrenching..."? What's wrong with it? I always thought it was a matter of liberty -- a matter of liberation, a matter of independence. So why in the world go through the farce here of wanting to reduce the number of pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies and reduce the number of abortions?

See, this is how good Obama is at the low art of political seduction. 'Cause, as I mentioned, several years ago he made the case for killing babies born alive and giving legal protection to the doctors that did it, and it did not cost him politically. So Obama, after advancing his case for infanticide and the protection of the doctors, he went on to become United States Senator and then president. He talks about the debate about abortion. What's the debate? Seriously, what's the debate? Obama's position in the debate is that a baby that survives an abortion is fair game to be killed, and the doctor should have legal protection. And his excuse at the time that he advanced this barbaric argument was that it was necessary to protect a woman's right to choose.

Okay, so... Now, I want to know, folks. I want to know where it is that we compromise -- and I want to know why it is. Why is this "a difficult moral and spiritual decision" for women to make? Why? I don't understand the left's reasoning. I don't understand why we should have to reduce the number of abortions, if there's nothing wrong with it. I don't know why we should have to reduce unwanted pregnancy if there's nothing wrong with it, and I don't understand why making the decision to go through with abortion is "a moral and spiritual question," if it's not a baby. The only thing that can make abortion a tough decision is what's being aborted, correct? So here's the low art of political seduction. The low art of political seduction is: "Both sides have legitimacy, and we're never going to agree. These are irreconcilable differences, but we must not attack personally, and we must try to get along with one another."

What do we do in the process? We blur something that's crucial: the definition of life. We blur morality. Just as Orwell had his Newspeak, immorality is now morality. Death is now freedom! This is one of the foundations of liberal reasoning as a means to advance any of their beliefs which you and I would find to be questionable, unjust, or immoral. This is how they justify it. It's the low art of political seduction. But we look at Obama, and he's such a nice man. He's got a great family, and he wants us all to respect each other the same way he respected secured creditors for Chrysler, the same way that he respects retention contracts. Those are Fifth Amendment rights that Barack Obama stomped on at AIG and at Chrysler, but we need to have an open mind and an open heart about that, too. And by all means we must not open up and be critical. Because, you see, the extreme position here, according to Obama, is the pro-life position -- and extreme because liberals do not share it, and anything not liberal, by definition, is extreme.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Obama, back to the Notre Dame speech, said this...

OBAMA: I found myself drawn not just to the work with the church; I was drawn to be in the church. It was through this service that I was brought to Christ. And at the time Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was the archbishop of Chicago. For those of you too young to have known him or known of him, he was a kind and good and wise man.

RUSH: Mmm.

OBAMA: A saintly man.

RUSH: Mmmm!

OBAMA: I can still remember his speaking at one of the first organizing meetings I attended on the South Side.

RUSH: Hmmm!

OBAMA: He was congenial and gentle --

RUSH: Mmm.

OBAMA: -- in his persuasion --

RUSH: Mm.

OBAMA: -- always trying to bring people together --

RUSH: Mm.

OBAMA: -- always trying to find common ground.

RUSH: Cardinal Bernardin? Obama says the kind and gentle words of a Cardinal in Chicago brought him to Christ? Okay, at so one of his first organizing meetings he was gently persuaded by the cardinal in Chicago -- and then, he didn't join the Catholic Church. He went out and joined a church where the pastor was this guy.

WRIGHT (screaming): Barack knoooows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people! [snip] Hillary ain't never been called a nigger! [snip] Bill did us just like he did Monica Lewinsky!

CONGREGATION: (cheers)

WRIGHT: He was riding dirty. [snip] In white America, US of KKKA: black men turning on black men. [snip] I am sick of Negroes who just do not get it. [snip] Not God bless America, God (bleep) America! It's in the Bible. For killing innocent people, God (bleep) America! [snip] (screaming) And now we are indignant because of stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards!

CONGREGATION: (cheers)

WRIGHT: America's chickensssss are coming home to roost.

RUSH: That's the elegant and eloquent Reverend Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. That's the church where Obama was a member for 20 years. Now, Obama said he didn't hear anything like this. Obama said he didn't hear it. You know, a lot of people, by the way, folks, ask me, "Were you not upset with president laughing at that comedian's jokes at the White House correspondent dinner? Rush, those weren't jokes. Rush, the woman was wishing for you to die." And I said to them, "I don't think President Obama heard them. He sat in Reverend Wright's church for 20 years and never heard any of that, so I don't think there's any evidence to prove that he heard what the comedian or anybody was saying at the White House Correspondents' Dinner."

But this is the low art of political seduction: a Catholic cardinal warmed his heart with gentle persuasion and brought him to Christ -- and after he found Christ, Christ directed him to Jeremiah Wright. Of course, we didn't hear about Jeremiah Wright in the speech yesterday. We heard about the cardinal in Chicago. By the way, somebody sent me an e-mail, and I don't know how you pronounce Cardinal Bernardin's name. Did he mis...? Somebody said he mispronounced the cardinal's name, and I don't know whether that's true because I don't know how you pronounce Cardinal Bernar-din, Ber-nar-din. I never heard it pronounced, so I'm sorry. I don't know. You gotta be careful of people that send you e-mails. Let's see. But may as well grab number eight here. One more from Obama at Notre Dame on Sunday.

OBAMA: I stand here today, as president and as an African-American, on the 55th anniversary of the day the Supreme Court handed down the decision --

RUSH: Mm.

OBAMA: -- on Brown vs. Board of Education.

RUSH: Mmmm!

OBAMA: Brown was, of course, the first major step in dismantling the "separate but equal" doctrine. But it would take a number of years and a nationwide movement to fully realize the dream of civil rights for all of God's children.

RUSH: Except for the unborn. Except for the unborn. The civil rights movement still hasn't made enough ground, covered enough ground to fully realize the dream of civil rights for all -- all -- of God's children. The unborn. "Gee, we hope it's rare," but damn. Why do you hope it's rare? I still can't get past this. Why do you hope unwanted pregnancy is require? There's nothing wrong with it. Why is it a tough decision for women, spiritually, emotionally, if there's nothing wrong with it? If it's not a big deal, what is so tough about it? Notice how they want credit for making all these tough decisions. "Ah, they're laboring hard to get through all this. They're coming to the right conclusions, doing everything they can. It's so difficult." Notice how they assign themselves the great hard work that they have overcome.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Maybe I did not make myself clear, and if that's the case, then I feel some guilt because I am a professional communicator. I had hoped I had made myself clear at the beginning of the program. I just read an e-mail and there have been two or three of these that I have found.

Dear Rush: All this talk about abortion, since the beginning of time, if a woman really wants an abortion, she's gonna get one. Nobody's going to stop her, no matter how many politicians or commentators say she should or shouldn't. These kind of personal things will always be left to the woman when it gets down to it so with all the economic problems, the wars, nukes, don't you think all these senators, presidents, commentators should talk about something they can really do something about? Signed, Martha in Texas.

Martha, I'm glad you wrote me this. I mentioned at the top of the program. This is not about abortion. This is about the low art of political seduction. This is about Newspeak. This is about turning what is immoral into the moral. This is about Barack Obama persuading the people of this country to vote against their own very interests all the time. This abortion discussion today is just an illustration, is just an example of it. It's the most recent one since it happened yesterday. We're not debating abortion. Now, you might think so because I'm asking some questions about what Obama said. If there's nothing wrong with it, then why all this confusion, if there's nothing wrong with abortion, why all this stress, why all this tension? And where do you compromise here? I don't know where the moderate, middle ground is on life and death. I just don't know where it is. I don't know where you compromise on victory and defeat. I don't know where you compromise on good and bad, good and evil, I don't know where you compromise on it. But see, we're supposed to compromise on everything, and for that to happen, notice Obama is not changing his position. We have to change ours, because of his successful practice of the low art of political seduction.

So I'm simply trying to illustrate how he does it with the most recent example. If the truth be known, why isn't the left up in arms? He invoked Jesus Christ. He stroked the name of Christ. Where's separation of church and state? The president of the United States at a commencement speech went out and talked about Jesus Christ and detailed how he was delivered to Christ. Now, you let George Bush or somebody go to Notre Dame and make this speech, I guarantee you that's what they're going to be focusing on, how the Republican president should not enforce and impose his religious views on people. What did we get but Obama imposing his religious views, or attempting to have us justify or accept his? It's the low art of political seduction. I know full well a woman who wants an abortion is going to go get one. No matter what the law; we can have laws against murder, it's going to happen. We have laws against robbing a bank; it's going to happen.

The law defines what is moral and just and right in a society. It does not intend to get rid of all that activity. Nobody is stupid enough to think that we're going to get rid of it. But there is an effort to limit it, damn right, because it's wrong, pure and simple. But I know this is a discussion that makes many of you uncomfortable. I know it puts many of you ill at ease, and I would only ask, why? What's so uncomfortable about it? What is it about abortion you don't want to hear? Well, okay, it's polarizing. Why is it polarizing? Why is it polarizing -- because we're talking about babies -- why is it polarizing? Here's April 2002, Illinois state Senate -- and remember what we're doing here. I'm illustrating the low art of political seduction practiced by President Obama, how he just made a speech advocating a point of view or suggesting that we peacefully co-exist here, but he didn't detail his position here. I want you to know what his position is in his own words. This is in the Illinois state Senate, April of 2002.
OBAMA: And that essentially adding an additional doctor, who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.

RUSH: Now, here he is talking about the Born Alive Infant Protection Act and why he was going to vote against it. And he voted against it three times, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, because it would be a burden to bring in another doctor, okay, the abortion doctor botches it, so you gotta bring in a third doctor to save the baby. That's a burden on the first doctor. It's a burden on the second doctor; it's a burden on the mother, who intended to abort. Here's Obama, August 16, 2008. This is Lake Forest, California, after the Saddleback civil forum with Rick Warren, the Christian Broadcasting Network David Brody talked to Obama, said, "Real quick, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, they're basically saying they felt like you misrepresented your position on that bill."

OBAMA: Here is a situation where folks are lying. I have said repeatedly that I would have been completely and fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported, which was to say that you should provide assistance to any infant that was born, even if it was as a consequence of an induced abortion. That was not the bill that was presented at the state level. What that bill also was doing was trying to undermine Roe vs. Wade. By the way, we also had a bill -- a law already in place in Illinois that ensured lifesaving treatment was given to infants. So for people to suggest that I and the Illinois Medical Society, so Illinois' doctors, were somehow in favor of withholding lifesaving support from an infant born alive is ridiculous.

RUSH: Well, play number nine real quick again. He says ridiculous? Well, let's listen to number nine again.

OBAMA: And that essentially adding an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.

RUSH: Now, if he's going to start calling people liars, we're going to have to ignore what he said on three different occasions in order not to call him one.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We're going to start in Dubuque, Iowa. This is Colleen. Great to have you here Colleen. Thank you so much for waiting.

CALLER: Thank you for taking my call.

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: I just want to say that we took a busload of people from Dubuque to Notre Dame yesterday to join with the pro-life students who were having an alternative prayer service at the Grotto [of Our Lady Lourdes at Notre Dame]. And it was a beautiful experience, a very prayerful spirit, very peaceful, and in fact when the priest started the announcements he said, "My first notes say to calm down the crowd," and everybody chuckled because we were all very calm and prayerful. And my point was to say, you know, he talks about healing divisions that have occurred, but the fact is he's the cause of division, and he's the cause of why those graduating seniors were not at that commencement and why so many Catholics are divided.

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait just a second. I know what you mean, and I agree with you Barack Obama is a divisive guy. I think Barack Obama's presiding over the most split, partisan country we've had in a long time. But, look, all he got was an invitation. You really need to look at Notre Dame, Colleen, and figure out what happened there. Now, I know they've got a tradition of inviting presidents to commencement speeches. But 30 years ago this wouldn't have happened.

CALLER: Well, they also have a history of dissent. You know, one of the favorite people for the media to go to is Father Richard McBrien (sic) who is on their theology staff there, and he's a well-known dissenter. So they also have a long history of dissent.

RUSH: Well... (sigh) Yeah, but a long time ago this -- actually not that long ago -- an invitation to this person, with these kind of beliefs, would not have been extended. But you have to ask what's happened to Notre Dame. Notre Dame is a university. It's like every other university; it's been overrun by the left. We know that the Catholic Church, religion in general, has a bunch of leftist theologians. We know that there's a war in the Catholic Church for the church to "moderate" and modify what it believes. I remember hearing this when I whole life. There are people who believe the church must change to accommodate the cyclical mores of the culture of the moment.

CALLER: Just like the main line Protestant churches have done and have lost membership and are sinking fast?

RUSH: That's not why they want the church to moderate. They're not trying to actually grow the church. They're trying to excuse themselves!

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: They don't want to have to adhere. I mean, the church is the church. You find a religion, its faith. You ascribe to it and you go to it because it doesn't change. It's always there. If a church, if a religion is going to change itself to stay in line with the congregation every six months or every year, it's not gonna become a church anymore. It's gonna become, you know, a social hall.

CALLER: Amen. Our traditions go be back 2,000 years.

RUSH: Exactly. So Obama, if I were him, I would have gone, too. What a political opportunity here to ram it down everybody's throat! You don't blame Obama here. He's the president. He got an invitation. It's a tradition. The real question to me is what's happened to Notre Dame over all these years, and it's been slow, and it's crept up on people. But it's there. I mean this is good illustration of the creeping liberalism throughout institutions that once people thought were impenetrable. But they're everywhere. They're everywhere. It's not because they're trying to grow these institutions. They're trying to water 'em down on purpose so that they can blur the lines between what's right and wrong. They don't want judgmentalism or to be judged by anybody, particularly a religion. Anyway Colleen, thanks much. I appreciate the call. This is Katherine in Baltimore. You're next on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. I wanted to make a point about the Notre Dame -- Obama speaking at Notre Dame --and it ties in beautifully with the political art of seduction you were talking about.

RUSH: "Low art." The low art of political seduction.

CALLER: The low art of political seduction, and the fact that people end up voting against their own interests. And it came up when I heard that the students were chanting "yes, we can" at him. And it horrified me that at this education, this institution of education, that they're idiotic enough to not realize that one of the Catholic principles is individualism. And he is all about the collective, not the individual. This goes not only when you're in the womb, but when you're outside of the womb. He wants to lump us all together, and he wants to ration education and health care. The media asked one of the adults at the campus what she thought about Obama coming and speaking, and she thought it was wonderful. While she's against abortion, she understands that Obama is pro-Catholic principles of education and health care for all. But that's not what he's about at all, ad in fact the way he speaks, he seduces people into believing what is not true.

RUSH: Well, that's exactly right. That was my point at the top of the program: Morality is now immoral.

CALLER: Mmm-hmm.

RUSH: War is peace. All these things that you thought you knew. (snorts) We're all scratching our heads as everybody is applauding Obama here. "What is this?" But you have to understand. I'm not surprised at young skulls full of mush would be among the first to be seduced by this guy. After all when you're young is when you're an idealist. You know, in addition to all the abortion stuff, Obama again went through the same rigmarole he went through at Arizona State in which he told these students, "Don't amount to anything. Don't follow the..." In fact, he used the word "acquisitiveness." He condemned being "acquisitive."

Now, does anybody...? What do you think acquisitive means? When you hear it, a lot of people, I think, confuse the definition of "acquisitive," and they think, "Well, don't be curious." That's not what acquisitive means. "Acquisitive," the root word is "acquire." He was telling them don't try to acquire a lot. Reject the formulas of the past and be different. Don't seek. He actually used the word "self-interest" yesterday, in a condemnatory way. He said self-interest has led to immorality and a whole lot of rotten things, and he told these students to shed their self-interest.

When, in fact, it is self-interest that propels every achievement. Self-interest achieves or propels every success. Without self-interest, you aren't going to be any kind of a success whatsoever. And then he was telling them, "Give back, give back," all these college graduates. Give back what? They've got nothing to give back. They haven't acquired anything yet! The things they do have, have been given to them, everything -- by their overindulgent Baby Boomer mommies and daddies. Now when they can go out and earn money so they can repay what they've been given, Obama is trying to tell 'em, "Don't do that! Don't give back. Go back and 'give back' by working at a nonprofit or some such thing." It's convoluted.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I hate this whole concept of "giving back" anyway, that somehow it is the duty of the successful to "give back." Walter Williams, an occasional guest host on this program, has it exactly right on this whole notion of "giving back." The only people need to give anything back are the thieves among us: the thieves and the criminals, the people who have taken things which are not theirs. They're the ones that need to give back. What in the world does Bill Gates need to give back? How many millionaires has he created? How many jobs has he created? I know he has his big foundation and he gives away a lot of money. But this notion of giving back is so convoluted because Obama is talking to a bunch of college graduates who don't have anything yet and telling them to give back.

What's to give back? The only thing they have is what they have been given by their parents -- and by definition, they haven't earned it. So when they graduate, at that very moment when they are now supposedly prepared to go out and produce, achieve, accomplish, and earn money (so that they, quote, unquote, "can give back") you have people like Obama telling them, "No, no, no! Don't do any of that. You go work for the government or you go work for a nonprofit, and that's how you give back." Give back for what? "Well, their good fortune, Mr. Limbaugh. These people who graduate from Notre Dame and other universities, Mr. Limbaugh, have been extremely fortunate and they're winners of life's lottery. It's time to pay it back."

What, give back? This whole notion of giving something back is rooted in the belief whatever you have is somehow ill-gotten. That you've cheated, lied, or stolen to get it or that you're somehow not entitled to it, and so you need to give back. People melt over that -- "Ohhhhh, yeah!" -- the whole concept of giving back, when people don't even have the foggiest idea what genuine contributions are to society

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Ethan in Pittsburgh. You're next on the EIB Network hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, mega dittos.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Hey I wanted to call in and talk to you about Notre Dame a little bit. My wife and my three daughters were there yesterday, and they were at the student protest called ND Response. And what's really shocking is how it's not being covered at all in the media. You had about 4,000 students at the South Quad, and 4,000 people. There were faculty members there. There was a whole slew of speakers. They had a Holy Cross priest, actually an African-American priest who is a Notre Dame grad who went to Notre Dame obviously. There was ex-football player Chris Godfrey who spoke, a lot of great speakers. They actually had the different faculty members that were there supporting what they were doing get up on stage and be recognized. There were about 30 faculty members that stood up. And when we went to read about this on the news last night and how it was reported, there was just no coverage of it. And I kind of compare it to what happened with the tea parties and how the press just really ignored it because it was going to be anti-Obama press and they just didn't need to cover it. They were covering the real outspoken pro-life demonstrators out at the gates of Notre Dame and the people getting arrested and things, but they didn't cover this peaceful protest that was on campus organized by the students and had an actual turnout.

RUSH: Well, I heard some of that. I played golf yesterday. By the way, by the way, I played one of the best rounds of golf I have ever played. I eagled a 515-yard par 3. I drove a 325-yard par 4 over water. I was just creaming the ball yesterday. And I was driving home, and I had the Fox News Channel on the satellite radio. And I gotta tell you something, Ethan. They were wired. There was controversy, and they were interviewing -- exactly as you said. They went out and they found the most radical elements of the pro-life community they could find and had them being interviewed. The media loved the story, but from this standpoint: They loved that there was some protests. They loved, because it gave them something to talk about on the Sunday afternoon. But they ignored you. They ignored the sizeable peaceful protests. See, that wasn't news. What they instead chose to do was point out how small the number of protesters really was at the speech, and those that did stand up and boo during the speech were easily shouted down. So at the end of the day the picture was that there weren't 4,000 people there who disputed any of this. There were five or six five or six, and that they were all lunatic fringe radicals who were probably let out of jail for the day to get there.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here's Jeff in Indianapolis. Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Thanks for taking my call, Rush.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: And to steal a quote from you, thanks for keeping the gullible grounded in reality. During the campaign in one of those rare off-the-teleprompter moments, Obama was asked a question regarding abortion and how we would address the issue with his daughters when they were old enough to understand it. And I remember him saying that he would teach his daughters values and morals but if they made a mistake, he did not want them punished for the baby. And I remember being thrown back in my seat and I said did he just actually say punished? And I couldn't believe that he was actually teaching the value of life, in this case, and equating it to being punished.

RUSH: Well, we have that sound bite. Would you like to hear it again and be knocked back on your ass?

CALLER: I think so.

RUSH: All right, here it is.

OBAMA: I've got two daughters, nine years old and six years old. I'm going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn't make sense to not give them information.

RUSH: All right, there you have it. Yeah, he did say he didn't want his girls punished with a baby and he didn't want them punished with an STD but, you know, you cannot abort an STD.

CALLER: That's true.

RUSH: Once you get an STD, you've got it. You can't abort it. What's your big problem with this? I mean because, look, the low art of political seduction, do you realize how many people think that that is thoughtful and deep and caring and devoted to his daughters? Do you realize how many people hear it exact opposite way you do.

CALLER: Yeah, but I mean he first predicated it by teaching values and morals.

RUSH: Well, yeah, but then he covered it, "I'm going to teach 'em values and morals but what if this they screw up, what if they make a mistake? I'm going to teach them values and morals -- his. In this case, is he going to tell them to abstain? He doesn't believe in abstinence only. I mean, what morals is he going to teach? I would assume he's gonna say, "I don't want you punished with a baby, don't get pregnant. If you don't want to get pregnant, then don't have sex, but I don't believe in abstinence only. So he's going to teach 'em morality and values and what? But then he gets the gold star for teaching them values and morality. Then, when kids are kids -- I mean you have kids?

CALLER: Yes, I have two kids.

RUSH: All right you've taught 'em values and morals, right?

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: Well, they haven't been flawless in their execution of life that way, have they?

CALLER: They have not, no.

RUSH: All right. Neither will his be. And he knows it. So he gets the gold star for teaching values and morality. Then his daughters go out and make a mistake, one of them might make a mistake, (gasping, crying) I don't want them punished, it's so young, I don't want them punished with a baby. Do you realize most people will hear that and say, "I don't want my kids punished either." The pro-choice people will say that, the pro-choice people, I agree with them; I wouldn't want them punished with a baby. And the whole pro-choice movement looks at a baby as punishment in order to survive. It's a disease, it's punishment or something (interruption). I'm being argued with here in the IFB, Jeff, my own staff, as usual, thinking I don't know what I'm talking about when I say that a lot of people will look at a baby at punishment. If your teenaged daughter gets pregnant, "Ah, I wouldn't want my daughter punished." I guarantee you there are more people look at it that way, maybe not a majority, but he's not that different.

Anyway he gets a gold star twice here. He gets a gold star twice here. Low art of political seduction. Now, you and I don't look at a baby as punishment. I don't think there are people that do? If there weren't people that do, there wouldn't be any abortion. If people looked at babies as a blessing we wouldn't be talking about abortion as something as common as it is even though the numbers are decreasing. So he gets gold stars on this. Now, the way you're hearing it is he's going to teach them morality and values, but then they're going to ignore him and they're going to go out and do something that's a mistake, but every kid does. Everybody who has kids knows they go out and make mistakes. Every adult makes mistakes. What I don't know is how you abort an STD.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Brian, Yuma, Arizona, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Thanks indeed, Mr. Limbaugh.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: It's an honor. I appreciate it. Between my wife's prescience and my addiction to logic, we've got a great little Limbaugh program in our house. We're raising our three children to push back against the --

RUSH: Good.

CALLER: -- liberalism that's just rampant out there.

RUSH: Good for you.

CALLER: Well, thank you. Thank you for everything you do. We do pray for you and your continued success. And I sincerely mean that.

RUSH: Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate it.

CALLER: The point I want to make was about Obama yesterday at Notre Dame talking about wanting to reduce the number of abortions, et cetera, et cetera, and there was raucous applause for what he was saying. And like Obama, on the one hand he's saying reduce the number of abortions, and on the other, within the first 100 days, he funded programs for more abortions across the country.

RUSH: Exactly right, reduce the number of abortions, and what is he doing? He's enabling them, worldwide. Brilliant point. Thank you.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Lewis in Illinois, cell phone call. Nice to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Yes, Rush, mega dittos.

RUSH: Thanks.

CALLER: I just wanted to give a different perspective on the Notre Dame commencement that maybe you've not heard before, but my wife and I are on our way back to Texas after seeing our daughter graduate and it was really disheartening and sickening to us to see how far the priests of Notre Dame and the faculty have taken the student body to positions where the moral clarity is not there any longer. All the focus is all about social justice, worker rights, help for the poor, health care for the poor -- and, as a matter of fact, the biggest new building, a building on the campus is the Center for Social Justice and Peace. That kind of gives you an indication of where the leadership of the school is taking the students. And I realized this over the past four years after being glad that my daughter was going there, now being somewhat melancholy about the fact that she is being subjected to this just like the majority of students that were in that hall.

RUSH: What did your daughter major in?

CALLER: She was a biology major and a Russian major.

RUSH: Biology and Russian.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Okay. So she was taught to be nice to frogs and extend social justice?

CALLER: Well, that's the commencement speaker. The valedictorian, she praised her and she was very accomplished, but one of the times she spent in countries to help other people in Haiti, she worked for a Catholic Workers women's relief center.

RUSH: Yeah?

CALLER: Now, if I remember the Catholic Workers from the thirties, that was basically a communist socialist organization. There are a lot of people in that hall -- despite the students and the faculty cheering Obama on -- about my view about a third of the families and friends that were in the audience sat there in silent protest, did not get up on their feet, did not get and up applaud anything that he said or for that matter Father Jenkins said who has been really abysmal on this whole issue. There was a lot of silent protest. Those who were loud did get booted out, and the students chanted "We are indeed," not "Yes, we can." A little bit different take on that. But there was a lot of silent protest going on by myself, am I wife, and a lot of other people in that organization, in that hall, that did not want to honor back home in any way, shape, or form.

RUSH: Well, I'm glad you called. I'm glad to get your perspective on that. Thanks very much, Louis. John in Libertyville Illinois. You're next. I'm glad you waited, sir. You're up on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Hi. I'm sure you're aware that the vast majority of students and alumni at Notre Dame University supported the university's position to ask the president to speak. And I think it's also certain that there's no question that a great many of those people are also anti-abortion like you. But I think the difference between them and you is that they recognized that the word "universe" as included in the word "university" implies a very broad range of information and ideas and opinions and that the university should be a forum for those ideas rather than sharing your viewpoint, that the university should be a place where they put on a blindfold, they stop anyone who they disagree with from speaking and if they hear anything they don't agree with they stick their fingers in their ears and go, "La la la la. I can't hear you."

RUSH: I'm a little bit surprised and shocked and stunned here at your point of view, because you have just criticized the vast majority of major American universities who are closed to all points of view. They are closed to the conservative point of view. When conservative speakers are invited to speak, they are often shouted down to the point of not being able to speak and being forced to leave the stage. The university is anything but what you've just described. There is no "universe" in university today. It's pure, unadulterated, 100% Marxism leftism. But I wasn't talking about Notre Dame the university. I was talking about the Catholic Church and the people at Notre Dame University -- the theologians there -- who are doing their best to undermine the Catholic Church. I know full well what's happening on American campuses today, and it's why the country is in such bad shape, or one of the reasons.

Obamosis Tyranntophyllia--Is He An Idiot Savant?

2009-05-12T07:55:00.004-04:00

How ObamaCare Will Affect Your Doctor
Expect longer waits for appointments as physicians get pinched on reimbursements.

By SCOTT GOTTLIEB

At the heart of President Barack Obama's health-care plan is an insurance program funded by taxpayers, administered by Washington, and open to everyone. Modeled on Medicare, this "public option" will soon become the single dominant health plan, which is its political purpose. It will restructure the practice of medicine in the process.
[Commentary] Chad Crowe

Republicans and Democrats agree that the government's Medicare scheme for compensating doctors is deeply flawed. Yet Mr. Obama's plan for a centrally managed government insurance program exacerbates Medicare's problems by redistributing even more income away from lower-paid primary care providers and misaligning doctors' financial incentives.

Like Medicare, the "public option" will control spending by using its purchasing clout and political leverage to dictate low prices to doctors. (Medicare pays doctors 20% to 30% less than private plans, on average.) While the public option is meant for the uninsured, employers will realize it's easier -- and cheaper -- to move employees into the government plan than continue workplace coverage.

The Lewin Group, a health-care policy research and consulting firm, estimates that enrollment in the public option will reach 131 million people if it's open to everyone and pays Medicare rates, as many expect. Fully two-thirds of the privately insured will move out of or lose coverage. As patients shift to a lower-paying government plan, doctors' incomes will decline by as much as 15% to 20% depending on their specialty.

Physician income declines will be accompanied by regulations that will make practicing medicine more costly, creating a double whammy of lower revenue and higher practice costs, especially for primary-care doctors who generally operate busy practices and work on thinner margins. For example, doctors will face expenses to deploy pricey electronic prescribing tools and computerized health records that are mandated under the Obama plan. For most doctors these capital costs won't be fully covered by the subsidies provided by the plan.

Government insurance programs also shift compliance costs directly onto doctors by encumbering them with rules requiring expensive staffing and documentation. It's a way for government health programs like Medicare to control charges. The rules are backed up with threats of arbitrary probes targeting documentation infractions. There will also be disproportionate fines, giving doctors and hospitals reason to overspend on their back offices to avoid reprisals.

The 60% of doctors who are self-employed will be hardest hit. That includes specialists, such as dermatologists and surgeons, who see a lot of private patients. But it also includes tens of thousands of primary-care doctors, the very physicians the Obama administration says need the most help.

Doctors will consolidate into larger practices to spread overhead costs, and they'll cram more patients into tight schedules to make up in volume what's lost in margin. Visits will be shortened and new appointments harder to secure. It already takes on average 18 days to get an initial appointment with an internist, according to the American Medical Association, and as many as 30 days for specialists like obstetricians and neurologists.

Right or wrong, more doctors will close their practices to new patients, especially patients carrying lower paying insurance such as Medicaid. Some doctors will opt out of the system entirely, going "cash only." If too many doctors take this route the government could step in -- as in Canada, for example -- to effectively outlaw private-only medical practice.

These changes are superimposed on a payment system where compensation often bears no connection to clinical outcomes. Medicare provides all the wrong incentives. Its charge-based system pays doctors more for delivering more care, meaning incomes rise as medical problems persist and decline when illness resolves.

So how should we reform our broken health-care system? Rather than redistribute physician income as a way to subsidize an expansion of government control, Mr. Obama should fix the payment system to align incentives with improved care. After years of working on this problem, Medicare has only a few token demonstration programs to show for its efforts. Medicare's failure underscores why an inherently local undertaking like a medical practice is badly managed by a remote and political bureaucracy.

But while Medicare has stumbled with these efforts, private health plans have made notable progress on similar payment reforms. Private plans are more likely to lead payment reform efforts because they have more motivation than Medicare to use pay as a way to achieve better outcomes.

Private plans already pay doctors more than Medicare because they compete to attract higher quality providers into their networks. This gives them every incentive, as well as added leverage, to reward good clinicians while penalizing or excluding bad ones. A recent report by PriceWaterhouse Coopers that examined 10 of the nation's largest commercial health plans found that eight had implemented performance-based pay measures for doctors. All 10 plans are expanding efforts to monitor quality improvement at the provider level.

Among the promising examples of private innovation in health-care delivery: In Pennsylvania, the Geisinger Clinic's "warranty" program, where providers take financial responsibility for the entire episode of care; or the experience of the Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Virginia, where doctors are paid more for delivering better outcomes.

There are plenty of alternatives to Mr. Obama's plan that expand coverage to the uninsured, give them the chance to buy private coverage like Congress enjoys, and limit government management over what are inherently personal transactions between doctors and patients.

Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D., N.Y.) has introduced a bipartisan measure, the Small Business Cooperative for Healthcare Options to Improve Coverage for Employees (Choice) Act of 2009, that would make it cheaper and easier for small employers to offer health insurance. Mr. Obama would also get bipartisan compromise on premium support for people priced out of insurance to give them a wider range of choices. This could be modeled after the Medicare drug benefit, which relies on competition between private plans to increase choices and hold down costs. It could be funded, in part, through tax credits targeted to lower-income Americans.

There are also measures available that could fix structural flaws in our delivery system and make coverage more affordable without top-down controls set in Washington. The surest way to intensify flaws in the delivery of health care is to extend a Medicare-like "public option" into more corners of the private market. More government control of doctors and their reimbursement schemes will only create more problems.

Dr. Gottlieb, a former official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a practicing internist. He's partner to a firm that invests in health-care companies

PIN HEAD DRIVE-MEDIA OPERATIVE PSEUDOSCIENCE WORSHIPER

2009-05-07T09:10:00.002-04:00

La Trinidad Americana

2009-05-06T22:03:00.001-04:00

The Idiot's Bible

2009-04-27T13:56:00.000-04:00

The Idiot's Bible

*
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Just days after Hugo Chávez gave President Barack Obama a copy of "Open Veins of Latin America" in Trinidad last week, the English-language version of the book shot to the No. 2 slot on Amazon.com.
[The Americas] AP

Hugo Chávez hands Barack Obama a copy of "Open Veins of Latin America."

Americans seemed to be curious about Mr. Chávez's reading tastes. But in Latin America, "Open Veins" is a well-known rant by Uruguayan Marxist Eduardo Galeano. And it also has another distinction that Mr. Chávez may be less inclined to publicize: It is widely regarded in free-market circles as "the idiot's bible."

The book was tagged with that moniker in the 1996 best seller, "The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot." Penned by three Latin American journalists -- Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner and Alvaro Vargas Llosa -- the "manual" is a witty assault on the populist, militarist, caudillo mentality that has dominated the region for hundreds of years.

Chapter three is dedicated to explaining the importance of Mr. Galeano's book for the idiot: "For the past quarter century the Latin American idiot has had the notable advantage of having at his disposal a kind of sacred text, a bible filled with all the nonsense that circulates in the cultural atmosphere that the Brazilians call the 'festive left.' Naturally we refer to Open Veins of Latin America."

Open any page of Mr. Galeano's book and you will learn that Latins are losers. Not on their own account, mind you. It's all because Europe and the U.S. (the world's winners) buy raw materials from them and don't pay a fair price. In this way the haves of the world exploit the have-nots. "The history of Latin America's underdevelopment is, as someone has said, an integral part of the history of world capitalism's development."

Mr. Galeano wasn't alone in promoting these ideas back in 1971 when the book came out. "Dependency theory," the economic dogma that drove regional policy for much of the 20th century, operated from the same premise. Its roots are in something called "structural economics," championed by Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, the first secretary general of the United Nation's Economic Commission for Latin America.

Prebisch argued that Latin American poverty persisted because while rich countries could boost living standards through productivity gains, poor countries exporting only agricultural products and raw materials could not because of excess labor. Thus, they could not build the surplus capital they needed to move up the economic ladder.

These beliefs mixed well with fascism and Marxism. Politicians, whether from the extreme right or left, got behind Prebisch, and a regional policy emerged in favor of subsidization for local industries and protection from international competition. The state took a prominent role in this "import substitution industrialization," fueling corruption and hyperinflation and destroying any hope of rising living standards. By the late 1980s, with Latin America in crisis, Prebisch and his antitrade ideas were thoroughly discredited.

But Mr. Galeano remained an icon of the revolutionary left and a rich source of ideological hatemongering. Chilean novelist Isabel Allende wrote the foreword for the 25th anniversary edition, bemoaning the fact that her cousin Salvador's effort to convert Chile into another Cuba had been thwarted.

Equally amazing was Ms. Allende's praise of Mr. Galeano's "stupendous love of freedom." Of course, not for those engaged in voluntary exchange. Mr. Galeano condemns this guilty group: "The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business."

Confused? Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa explains in the foreword for "The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot": "History" for the idiot "is a successful conspiracy of the evil ones against the good, in which they always win and we always lose." In other words, exchange is a zero-sum game. This may sound like parody, but it is precisely Mr. Galeano's reasoning.

In "Forgotten Continent" (2007), Michael Reid, the Americas editor for the Economist, says Mr. Galeano's "history is that of the propagandist, a potent mix of selective truths, exaggeration and falsehood, caricature and conspiracy theory."

The Galeano book was not a present to Mr. Obama, though it was hyped as such. After all it was in Spanish, a language Mr. Obama does not read -- and Cuban and Venezuelan military intelligence surely would have advised Mr. Chávez of that fact. Its purpose was instead a way for the resentful Venezuelan to shove his anticapitalist, anti-American prejudices in Mr. Obama's face before rows of television cameras.

Yet, unwittingly, Mr. Chávez's gag gift served another purpose. If there has been any doubt about how he has run his oil-rich country into the ground during a decade of booming petroleum prices, the mystery is now solved. Mr. Galeano's book is Mr. Chávez's bible.

La Biblia de los Idiotas

2009-04-27T13:54:00.000-04:00

Por Mary Anastasia O'Grady

Sólo días después de que Hugo Chávez le obsequiara al presidente estadounidense Barack Obama una copia de Las venas abiertas de América Latina en Trinidad la semana pasada, la versión en inglés saltó al segundo lugar de los libros más vendidos de la página Web de comercio en línea Amazon.com.

Los estadounidenses parecían curiosos acera de las preferencias de lectura de Chávez. En América Latina, sin embargo, Las venas abiertas es una conocida diatriba del autor marxista uruguayo Eduardo Galeano. Además, existe otra distinción que quizá a Chávez no le interese tanto revelar: entre los partidarios del libre comercio es ampliamente considerada como la "Biblia de los idiotas".

El libro se hizo acreedor a esa distinción en el best-seller de 1996 El manual del perfecto idiota latinoamericano. Escrito por tres periodistas latinoamericanos —Plinio Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner y Álvaro Vargas Llosa— el "manual" es un ingenioso asalto a la mentalidad populista y de caudillo militarista que ha dominado a la región durante cientos de años.

El tercer capítulo está dedicado a explicar la importancia del libro de Galeano para el idiota: "Durante el último cuarto de siglo el idiota latinoamericano ha tenido la notable ventaja de un texto casi sagrado, una Biblia llena de todas las tonterías que circulan en la atmósfera cultural de lo que los brasileños llaman 'la izquierda festiva'. Naturalmente, nos referimos a Las venas abiertas de América Latina".

Abra cualquier página del libro de Galeano y aprenderá que los latinoamericanos son unos perdedores. No es su culpa. Todo se debe a que Europa y Estados Unidos (los ganadores del mundo) les compran materias primas sin pagarles un precio justo. De esta manera, los ricos explotan a los pobres. "La historia del subdesarrollo de América Latina es, como ha dicho alguien, una parte integral de la historia del desarrollo del capitalismo mundial".

Galeano no era el único que promovía estas ideas en 1971 cuando se publicó el libro. La "Teoría de la dependencia", el dogma económico que impulsó la política regional durante buena parte del siglo XX, partía de la misma premisa. Sus raíces se remontan a la llamada "economía estructural", que pregonizaba el economista argentino Raúl Prebisch, el primer secretario general de la CEPAL.

Prebisch afirmaba que la pobreza de América Latina persistía porque mientras que los países ricos podían elevar sus estándares de vida a través de una mayor producción, los países pobres que sólo exportaban productos agrícolas y materias primas no podían hacer lo mismo debido a un exceso de mano de obra. Por lo tanto no podían acumular el superávit de capital que necesitaban para ascender en la jerarquía económica.

Las ideas de Prebisch combinaban bien con el fascismo y el marxismo. Los políticos, ya sea de la extrema derecha o izquierda, lo apoyaron y surgió una política regional en favor de subsidiar a las industrias locales y protegerlas de la competencia extranjera. El Estado asumió un papel predominante en esta "industrialización de sustitución de importaciones", alimentando la corrupción y la hiperinflación y aniquilando cualquier esperanza de elevar los estándares de vida. Para finales de los años 80, América Latina estaba sumida en una crisis y Prebisch y sus ideas anti libre comercio quedaron ampliamente desacreditadas.

Galeano, en todo caso, siguió siendo un ícono de la izquierda revolucionaria y una fuente abundante para quienes promueven el odio ideológico. La novelista chilena Isabel Allende escribió el prólogo de la edición del vigésimoquinto aniversario, lamentando que el esfuerzo de su primo en segundo grado, Salvador, de convertir a Chile en otra Cuba había sido frustrado.

Igual de sorprendente fue el elogio de Allende al "amor estupendo por la libertad" de Galeano. Tal amor, por cierto, no se extiende a quienes se dedican al intercambio voluntario. Galeano los condena. "Mientras más libertad se les da a las empresas, más prisiones deben construirse para alojar a los que sufren a manos de estas empresas".

¿Confundido? El novelista Mario Vargas Llosa explica en el prólogo de El manual del perfecto idiota latinoamericano: "La historia es una exitosa conspiración de malos contra buenos, en la que aquellos siempre ganan y nosotros siempre perdemos". En otras palabras, el libre comercio es un juego de suma cero. Esto puede sonar a una parodia pero es precisamente el razonamiento de Galeano.

En El continente olvidado (2007) de Michael Reid, el editor latinoamericano de The Economist, dice que la historia de Galeano "es la del propagandista, una combinación poderosa de verdades selectivas, exageración y falsedad, caricatura y teoría de la conspiración".

El libro de Galeano no fue un regalo para Obama, aunque fue presentado como tal. Después de todo, estaba en español, un idioma que Obama no lee y casi seguro que la inteligencia militar cubana y venezolana tiene que haberle advertido a Chávez sobre eso. La intención del venezolano resentido fue, por el contrario, una manera de restregar sus prejuicios anticapitalistas y antiestadounidenses en la cara de Obama frente a un pelotón de cámaras de televisión.

Pero, sin saberlo, el regalo de Chávez tuvo otro propósito. Si quedaba alguna duda sobre cómo Chávez ha manejado su país rico en petróleo durante una década de auge en los precios del crudo, ya se resolvió el misterio. El libro de Galeano es la Biblia de Chávez.

GET LOOSE AND PRODUCE!.BELIEVE AND THRIEVE!!GET TIGHT AND FIGHT!!!

2009-03-21T09:37:00.004-04:00

BIG BROTHER WANTS YOU TO DEPEAND ON HIM ‘CAUSE THAT GIVES HIM POWER
DON’T LET HIM. GET LOOSE AND PRODUCE!.BELIEVE AND THRIEVE!!GET TIGHT AND FIGHT!!!

(This is one of the best discernments I have ever reviewed about the importance of individualism)

The Democrat Party and the Obama administration are conducting an all-out assault on the individual and liberty and freedom.

And that's exactly what it is. Snerdley says, "You better explain why the individual is so important. You know, a lot of people, you got a whole bunch of brand-new tuner-inners out there, Rush, and a lot of these people think the individual is just a greedy SOB, and the individual, a bunch of individuals are what got the country in trouble." I said to Snerdley during the top-of-the-hour break, "If I have to explain this, it's over." I mean, it depresses me to have to try to explain this, why is the individual important? If you have to explain why the individual is important in the United States of America, then you have to explain freedom, and if you have to explain that, I'm at a loss. I guess I'll just ask you a question.

To those of you in the audience who kind of have a fit when you hear me say that this administration's targeting and making an all-out assault on the individual, which is an assault on freedom, individual freedom and liberty, where and how do you think your freedom comes from? Why is it you are free? To me, that answers it. I mean are you free because you are a member of a group? Or are you free because you are your own soul, endowed by your creator, God, certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. From where does your freedom come? Do you not have freedom until you join a club? Do you not have freedom until you join a union? Do you not have freedom until you are part of the disabled? Do you not have freedom until you are a minority? Where does your freedom come from?

In the United States of America, what our revolution was fought over -- the whole concept of individual freedom and liberty was the reason we sought independence from the tyranny of King George. Not Bush. George III of Britain. I said back in the nineties when the Clintons were running this show, "You know, rugged individualism is what built this country," and Mrs. Clinton went out there and took me on and ripped me, and we forget what she said, but she had a very critical comment about rugged individualism. Rugged individuals don't care about anybody else, they leave everybody else behind, and it takes people like Mrs. Clinton to care about the people who get left behind when rugged individuals take over.

Mrs. Clinton had a book that says It Takes a Village to raise a child. I said, no, it doesn't, it takes individuals to raise a child. It doesn't take a village. The town doesn't raise a child, village or what have you. That was just code word for the parents don't really matter. It's the school. It's government enterprises that are responsible for raising the child right. And nothing could be further from the truth. This country was not built on group politics. The country was not built on group identities. The country was built on rugged individualism. Rugged individualism is portrayed, unfortunately, as selfishness. But it is not selfishness. Rugged individualism is self-interest, and self-interest is good. If we were all acting in our own self interest... What are your self interests? Let's say you're a father, a husband. What is your self-interest?
Well, if you take it responsibly, the responsibility of being a husband and father, your self-interest is improving the life that your family lives. You want economic opportunity for them. You want social stability for them. You want a relatively crime-free existence. You want some security. You want to see to it that your kids don't go off the wrong path. All of these things are the things that you work for. And you rely on yourself to provide them. Of course you have support groups, the church and friends and so forth. It doesn't mean that you are solitary, doesn't mean that you're isolated. But it means that you accept responsibility for your life and what happens to you is your responsibility, and that you have, in this country, all of the ability and opportunity in the world to make the most of it. Or, you can slough it off, and you can not make the most of yourself.

But then you're not acting in your own self-interest. Then you're letting everybody down. When you don't seek your best, when you don't try to be the best you can be, you're letting everybody down, you're letting the country down. Obama even said this. When talking about the dropout rate, he said, "You people dropping out, you're not helping your country. You're harming your country." That's the same thing: self-interest. He won't ever say that again. It sounds too Reaganesque, and it sounds too conservative. But individuals, rugged individuals have great and high expectations of themselves. It was rugged individualists that built the railroads. It was rugged individualists that discovered the New World. It was rugged individualists that dreamed about getting to the moon.

It was rugged individualists that invented the automobile and the airplane, the bullet, the gun. It was rugged individualists who invented medicines, improvements in health care. It wasn't a bunch of groups. "But, Rush! But, Rush! The pharmaceuticals have a bunch of people in laboratories working." Yeah, they do. There's somebody that runs them, but they're all working to try to be the best they can be and come out on top. Thomas Edison, the lightbulb. Benjamin Franklin, electricity. Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone. Marconi, the radio. Henry Ford, automobile mass production, the assembly line. Karl Benz, the automobile. I'll never forget a story. Reagan was governor of California in the seventies -- and this is in one of the books about Reagan.

I heard William Rusher who was the former publisher of National Review tell the story. I'm paraphrasing this. There may be others that know it better. But the students at Berkeley were all bent out of shape one day as they always were during the free speech movement. They didn't like what Reagan was doing with the National Guard. They didn't like Reagan's policies. They thought Reagan, back in the seventies, was just an old man, out of touch, he had no clue about their lives, and who was he to sit there and make policies about their future? So they demanded, they had a sit-in, State Capitol in California, somewhere outside his office, they got in the building, they were let in, they demanded to see him. And at some point Reagan let a couple of these student leaders in, and they went in there, cocky young little kids, and they essentially said, "Who are you, old man? You don't know anything about our lives. You don't know how we function. You don't know how we get along. You don't know anything about the telephone, you don't know anything about computers, televisions, you don't know anything about that. These things are all foreign to you. Look at all these old-fashioned things around here."

And Reagan looked at them and said, "You know, you're right about that. We had to invent these for you to use them. We had to invent them for you." Take your favorite actor or actress, take your favorite television personality and ask yourselves what government, what protective agency got them their job, or was it rugged individualism? Or sleeping on the couch or whatever they had to do, but they did it. They also get $20 million a movie because they put people in the theater seats. Whether the movie's any good or not, people go, except Tom Cruise is in trouble right now. Well, Valkyrie just wasn't quite it. But the point here, ladies and gentlemen, is that anything that beats you down, anything that says to you that you're no more than anybody else, that you're no better, no different, no worse, that you're the same as anybody else, is lying to you, and they're seeking to control you. They're seeking to limit your own ability and your own desire, because we're not the same. The whole premise of equality, it's a great thing to strive for, like equality before the law, equality in job opportunity and so forth. But there are no two things that are equal, certainly not outcomes. Other than identical twins, no two human beings look exactly alike.
Do you realize that as many human beings as will be created in the history of the earth, no two of them will look alike. It's not possible, other than the rare cases of identical twins. But even those people are not the same. They have the same shell, the same look, but they're not the same inside. No two people are the same. Everybody's got different level of ambition, desire. Everybody has a different IQ. Everybody has different intelligence. Everybody has a different metabolism. Everybody has a different hairline. Everybody's got something. No two people are the same. And it's not fair. Some people are smarter than others; some people are more creative than others. Some people could walk down the street and just have people throw money at them.

Other people can toil their whole lives and never make more than minimum wage. Why? Who knows. But it is our contention that the people who never make more than minimum wage can do far better if they're just invested in themselves, not in a government, not in a president, not a Congress, not a program. How many people in those people's lives tell 'em that they're special, versus how many of them tell them, "You don't have a chance. You don't have a prayer. This country's racist. It's homophobic; it's bigoted. You don't have a chance. You need to vote for us." Even I, ladies and gentlemen, you listen to me, and you see whatever you see, but you see me as successful, it may make you mad, may make you furious, but nevertheless you see me successful. But you don't know the 35, 37 years that I've spent in this business since I was 16 (minus five that I worked for the Kansas City Royals baseball team) you don't know the seven times I got fired, and you don't know how many people in this business told me to quit and told me to give it up, that it's not a fair business, even if you're good, there are too many idiots above you, too many jealous people above you that don't want you to get anywhere because you're better than them. Hey? Hello? That's the world. There are a lot of professors who don't want you to be smarter than they are. There are a lot of people working at banks who are tellers that probably could be at the investment side but somebody is threatened by them. Everybody's trying to hold everybody back.

It's just human nature, and it's only the belief in yourself that propels you through all those things, and yourself is the individual. I got fired seven times. One time was it probably justified. The other times due to vagaries of the broadcast business, but each time I got fired the person that fired me said, "You know, you really don't have what it takes to succeed here. If you want to stay in this business you need to go into sales or something else. You really don't have that much talent," and I'm saying to myself, "How would you know? You've never let me exhibit it. You and your brilliant management have come up with ways that I could only say this here or that there, and I can only take that much time. How do you know what my talent is? And when was the last time you cared to really find out what my talent is?"

Without believing in yourself, you're going nowhere, and you won't believe in yourself if somebody beats the individual out of you. If somebody convinces you that you don't deserve to do better than anybody else because that's not fair, and they are teaching you that in school about your grades and they're teaching you that about economics. It's not fair that you might have a nicer car than the schlub down the street. It's not fair. It's humiliating to the people who have less. So they're trying to beat the individual out of you, and the individual in you, the belief in yourself is the only thing you've got to compete against everybody that's trying to hold you back, and they all are. It's the way of the world. You look at things from afar, you look at pop culture, you look at movie stars, and you think that's a community, and they all decided one day, they all decided that Cameron Diaz is great and they all got together and they all loved Cameron Diaz and they've all made her a big star.

That's the image they project because they want you to think it's all a giant community. Cameron Diaz is like everybody else, she had to fight for everything she has, and they're nipping at her heels now as she gets older, same thing with Julia Roberts, it doesn't change, no matter where you are, no matter what kind of glamour. You take a look around you, the genuinely successful people that you see who you want to be did not check their individualism at the door when they started their work. They didn't check their self-interests at the door, and they didn't check their self-respect, and they didn't turn over the belief in themselves to somebody else. That's all I'm talking about and that's under assault by this administration, which wants to control and limit freedom, 'cause the only way Obama can get the power he wants and the Democrats can get the power they want is if you willingly turn it over to them, by getting rid of your self-interest, your self-respect and holding your best interests at heart. Your best interests do not coincide with your government's, especially now.

(Brilliant analysis by Rush Limbaugh)

The Seduction of the Uninformed by those who Want Power

2009-03-11T08:47:00.001-04:00

El Lapiz de la Libertad The Liberty Pencil

2009-02-22T02:08:00.000-05:00

Freedom

2009-02-20T01:50:00.001-05:00

Socialized Medicine First Step to Full Blown Socialism

2009-02-20T01:36:00.001-05:00

Avaricia by Milton Friedman- Nobel Price in Economy

2009-02-07T16:22:00.001-05:00

-La Decapitacion de Daniel Pearl

2009-02-03T07:43:00.005-05:00

Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil
When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?

By JUDEA PEARL

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today's world emerged after his tragedy?

The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.

Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South Asian reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in Guantanamo, would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of sympathetic jihadi supporters. Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of "the resistance." Or that another kidnapped young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his kidnappers deserve international recognition.

No. Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.

But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.

I believe it all started with well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that propels acts of terrorism -- the ideological license to elevate one's grievances above the norms of civilized society -- was wished away in favor of seemingly more manageable "tactical" considerations.

This mentality of surrender then worked its way through politicians like the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. In July 2005 he told Sky News that suicide bombing is almost man's second nature. "In an unfair balance, that's what people use," explained Mr. Livingstone.

But the clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. In his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Mr. Carter appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. "It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel." Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices.

Mr. Carter's logic has become the dominant paradigm in rationalizing terror. When asked what Israel should do to stop Hamas's rockets aimed at innocent civilians, the Syrian first lady, Asma Al-Assad, did not hesitate for a moment in her response: "They should end the occupation." In other words, terror must earn a dividend before it is stopped.

The media have played a major role in handing terrorism this victory of acceptability. Qatari-based Al Jazeera television, for example, is still providing Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi hours of free air time each week to spew his hateful interpretation of the Koran, authorize suicide bombing, and call for jihad against Jews and Americans.

Then came the August 2008 birthday of Samir Kuntar, the unrepentant killer who, in 1979, smashed the head of a four-year-old Israeli girl with his rifle after killing her father before her eyes. Al Jazeera elevated Kuntar to heroic heights with orchestras, fireworks and sword dances, presenting him to 50 million viewers as Arab society's role model. No mainstream Western media outlet dared to expose Al Jazeera efforts to warp its young viewers into the likes of Kuntar. Al Jazeera's management continues to receive royal treatment in all major press clubs.

Some American pundits and TV anchors didn't seem much different from Al Jazeera in their analysis of the recent war in Gaza. Bill Moyers was quick to lend Hamas legitimacy as a "resistance" movement, together with honorary membership in PBS's imaginary "cycle of violence." In his Jan. 9 TV show, Mr. Moyers explained to his viewers that "each [side] greases the cycle of violence, as one man's terrorism becomes another's resistance to oppression." He then stated -- without blushing -- that for readers of the Hebrew Bible "God-soaked violence became genetically coded." The "cycle of violence" platitude allows analysts to empower terror with the guise of reciprocity, and, amazingly, indict terror's victims for violence as immutable as DNA.

When we ask ourselves what it is about the American psyche that enables genocidal organizations like Hamas -- the charter of which would offend every neuron in our brains -- to become tolerated in public discourse, we should take a hard look at our universities and the way they are currently being manipulated by terrorist sympathizers.

At my own university, UCLA, a symposium last week on human rights turned into a Hamas recruitment rally by a clever academic gimmick. The director of the Center for Near East Studies carefully selected only Israel bashers for the panel, each of whom concluded that the Jewish state is the greatest criminal in human history.

The primary purpose of the event was evident the morning after, when unsuspecting, uninvolved students read an article in the campus newspaper titled, "Scholars say: Israel is in violation of human rights in Gaza," to which the good name of the University of California was attached. This is where Hamas scored its main triumph -- another inch of academic respectability, another inroad into Western minds.

Danny's picture is hanging just in front of me, his warm smile as reassuring as ever. But I find it hard to look him straight in the eyes and say: You did not die in vain.

Mr. Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA, is president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, founded in memory of his son to promote cross-cultural understanding.

¿Dios Existe? Does God Exist?

2009-01-17T00:35:00.001-05:00

Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist? from Andrew Ketchum on Vimeo.

Adios Mercado Libre

2009-01-06T15:09:00.001-05:00

Social Justice???? It Sounds Like a Good Commercial

2008-12-30T19:52:00.003-05:00

Why Reporters -- and Judges and Professors -- Are Biased
Dennis Prager
Tuesday, November 25, 2008

That the news media were biased in the 2008 presidential election is now acknowledged by fair-minded people, left or right

As Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin said this weekend at a Politico/USC Conference on the 2008 election: “It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business. … It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

Given how obvious this bias is, the question is not whether liberals in the media tend to offer biased reporting. The question is why? Why can’t liberal news people report the news without any slant?

The answer is that for people on the left, all -- I repeat, (set ital) all (end ital) -- professions are a means to an end, not ends in themselves. That end is the social transformation of society, meaning the promoting of “social justice” as the left understands that term.

For most liberal news reporters, therefore, the purpose of news reporting is not to report news as objectively as possible. The purpose of the media in general and of reporting specifically is to promote social justice and the social transformation of society.

For most liberal judges, the primary purpose of being a judge is to promote social justice and transform society. That is why liberal judges are so much more likely to be judicial activists than conservative judges. Most liberal judges do not see their roles as merely adjudicating a dispute according to the law. They see their role primarily as using the law and their power to rule on the law to promote social justice.

For most university professors -- and many high school teachers, as well -- outside of the natural sciences and math, the same holds true. The task of a teacher is to teach, i.e., to convey the most important information as honestly as possible. But, again, this conflicts with the social justice goal of the left. History teachers who merely teach history are of little use to the left. History -- and English and political science, and sociology and other liberal arts -- teachers must use their classroom to produce young people who will wish to engage in society-transforming work for social justice.

For most liberals in the arts (there are very few conservatives in the arts) there is no denial of their having an agenda. They state quite candidly that the purpose of the arts is to challenge the (conservative) status quo, to raise political and social consciousness by advancing a “progressive” political and social agenda. The artist whose agenda is merely to produce beautiful art is looked upon as a reactionary buffoon, and is not likely to be taken seriously -- no matter how talented -- in the worlds of music, dance, painting, and sculpture.

Even the natural sciences are increasingly subject to being rendered a means to a “progressive” end. There was the pseudo-threat of heterosexual AIDS in America -- science manipulated in order to de-stigmatize AIDS as primarily a gay man’s disease and to increase funding for AIDS research. There are the exaggerated secondhand smoke data popularized so as to decrease smoking and fight “Big Tobacco.” And now we have the scientifically questionable belief in man-made carbon emissions causing global warming leading to natural catastrophe – and recommended “solutions” many of which, if adopted, will serve the goal of undermining corporate capitalism.

The best analogy of the directing of all human endeavors toward a left-wing purpose would be those early medieval centuries of European life when just about everything man made was supposed to reflect a religious consciousness. Virtually nothing stood apart from the Church. The arts were religious, the sciences were handmaidens of theology, and schools were religious in nature.

Most moderns look upon that period as a dark age -- perhaps a bit unfairly at times. But the people who most scorn what they deem the religious “Dark Ages” are trying to building a secular-left dark age in our time. Because the left is a religion, a substitute for the Christianity it seeks to displace.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

The Left Smooth Agenda

2008-12-30T08:06:00.001-05:00

Public Schools Change Young Evangelicals' Values
Phyllis Schlafly TownHall
Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Why did 18-to-29-year-old evangelicals vote for Barack Obama despite his apostasy on the fundamental moral issues of abortion and same-sex unions? They voted 32 percent for Obama, twice the percentage of that demographic group who voted for John Kerry in 2004.

Many of these young people identify "social justice" as the reason that led them to relegate the prime moral issues of life and marriage to the back burner. But the term "social justice" does not define a moral cause -- it is left-wing jargon to overturn those who have economic and political power.

What caused young evangelicals, the children of the so-called "religious right," to change their moral imperatives so dramatically? Most likely it's the attitudes and decision-making they learned in the public schools, which 89 percent of U.S. students attend.

The public schools took a major left turn in the 1960s, when humanist John Dewey and the instructors he trained at Columbia Teachers College began their put-down of objective truth and authoritative notions of good and evil. In the 1970s, Sidney Simon's best-seller "Values Clarification" taught students to cast off their parents' values and make their own choices, often aided by Kinsey-trained sexperts determined to change our sexual mores.

By the 1980s, many radical antiwar activists of the 1960s had become tenured college professors, so teachers colleges and public schools opened their doors to "social justice" instruction. Among these '60s radicals was Weather Undergrounder William Ayers, who escaped prosecution only because of government misconduct in collecting evidence against him and then emerged as a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Ayers developed quite a following as he taught resentment against America. In 2008, he was elected by his peers as vice president for curriculum studies of the American Education Research Association, the nation's largest organization of education professors and researchers.

In 1983, Humanist Magazine featured an article that boasted, "The battle for mankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom." Ayers put it this way: "Education is the motor-force of revolution."

Ayers became a leading advocate of "social justice" teaching -- i.e., getting students to believe that they are victims of an unjust, oppressive and racist America. Community organizers can then use these young people to vote and otherwise carry out Ayers' "revolution."

Ayers has been on a decades-long mission to transform education into anti-American indoctrination and to get young people to demand government control of the economy, politics and culture. We see the result in the 2008 post-election surveys: Seven out of every 10 voters between the ages of 18 and 29 now favor expanding the role of government and agree that the government should do more to solve the nation's problems. It's obvious which party and which candidates will get their vote.

Ayers worked closely with Barack Obama in the 1990s when Obama headed the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which gave $160 million in grants to so-called school-reform projects. Ayers and Obama guided some of this Annenberg money to community organizers such as ACORN.

The National Association of Scholars reports that use of the term "social justice" is today understood to mean "the advocacy of more egalitarian access to income through state-sponsored redistribution." That is academic verbiage for Barack Obama's assertion that he wants to "spread the wealth around."

"Rethinking Schools" is a Milwaukee-based organization that publishes instructional materials to assist teachers how to "weave social justice issues throughout the curriculum." Lessons include "Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers" and "Reading, Writing and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word."

Howard Zinn, author of the anti-American "People's History of the United States," urges educators to prioritize "social justice" education over political neutrality. In a 1998 interview, he said "quiet revolution" to move us toward "democratic socialism" was his goal in writing "People's History."

The thinking of teachers is further molded at expensive conferences, financed by billing the taxpayers. The National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) sponsors seminars with titles such as "Our Work as Social Justice Educators," "Teaching for Social Justice in Elementary Schools," "Dismantling White Privilege and Supporting Anti-Racist Education in Our Classrooms and Schools" and "Creating Change Agents Who Teach for Social Justice."

This "social justice" curriculum results in a heavy cost in time not spent on the basics. Young Americans who are exposed to Ayers' radical left-wing ideas generally have little background information to help them evaluate bias and errors.

Barack Obama's selection for secretary of education is his crony Arne Duncan, who most recently made news by recommending the creation of a Chicago Social Justice High School-Pride Campus, where half the students would be homosexuals and the other half straight. Somehow that school was canceled just about the time that Obama announced Duncan's appointment.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Un Idolo Falso

2008-12-29T18:06:00.001-05:00

Hollywood Celebrates Che Guevara
But it makes no films about the Cuban resistance movement.
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY WSJ
Hollywood hotshot Benicio Del Toro is not a stand-up comic, but he seemed to be playing one earlier this month when he said he found the role of Cuban Revolution hero Ernesto Guevara, in the new film "Che," like Jesus Christ.

"Only Jesus would turn the other cheek. Che wouldn't," Mr. Del Toro explained. Right. And Bernie Madoff is Mother Teresa, only she wasn't into fraud.

With next month marking the 50th anniversary of the Castro dictatorship, it's no surprise that the film industry is trying to cash in by celebrating pop-culture icon Guevara. As one of Fidel Castro's lieutenants in the Sierra Maestra and a Castro enforcer in the years following the rebel victory, his name is synonymous with the Cuban Revolution.

Interesting films are hard to come by these days and "Che" is a good example of the problem. Rebel glamour sells T-shirts and coffee mugs so why not another airbrushed rerun of Guevara's life? Or, more precisely, some mythical version of it, sanitized for the mass market. Meanwhile the real marvel of the past 50 years in Cuba -- the steady stream of heroic nonconformists who have risked all in their aspiration to think, speak and act freely -- remains the untold epic of our time.

If Mr. Del Toro's "Christ" comment is foolish, it's nothing compared to film director Steven Soderbergh's explanation of why we should care about Che. Bad things happen in society when "you make profit the point of everything," the movie director told Politico.com. Che's "dream of a classless society, a society that isn't built on the profit motive, is still relevant. The arguments still going on are about his methodology."

Putting aside for a moment the hilarity of Mr. Soderbergh's personal revulsion with profits, the "methodology" that he suggests is debatable is otherwise known as murder. Che had a "homicidal idea of justice," Alvaro Vargas Llosa explained in The New Republic in 2005, after researching his life. In his April 1967 "Message to the Tricontinental," Che spoke these words: "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine."

The results of Che's utopian agenda aren't much to admire either. As author Paul Berman explained in 2004 in Slate, "The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster."

The miserable Argentine was killed in 1967 in the Bolivian Andes while trying to spread revolution in South America. But his vision of how to govern lives on in the Cuba of today. It is a slave plantation, where a handful of wealthy white men impose their "morality" on the masses, most of whom are black and who suffer unspeakable privation with zero civil liberties.

There is something rich about the supposedly hip, countercultural Hollywood elite making common cause with Cuba's privileged establishment in 2008. Its victims -- artists, musicians, human-rights activists, journalists, bloggers, writers, poets and others deprived of freedom of conscience -- would seem to deserve solidarity from their brethren living in freedom. Instead, the ever-so avant-garde Soderberghs side with the politburo.

The Cuban regime loves its apologists. They give cover and deflect international criticism while at home the regime brutalizes its people. Reports from the island are that since Raúl took over from Fidel in 2006, the repression has gotten worse.

Oswaldo Payá, leader of the Varela Project, which collected more than 11,000 signatures calling for free elections and civil liberties in 2002, says that in recent months there has been a crackdown, "with a fierce persecution against Varela Project activists, other members of the opposition, and the ongoing scandal of not freeing the prisoners of conscience."

Among Castro's captives is Oscar Elias Biscet, an Afro-Cuban doctor who is renowned for his commitment to peaceful resistance and is serving a 25-year sentence. Fifty-eight journalists, writers and democracy advocates rounded up in March 2003 also languish in Fidel's deplorable jails. The total number of political prisoners is not known but is undoubtedly much higher.

State security and rapid-response brigades -- aka thugs paid to rough up dissidents -- have been fully employed this year. But, despite the terror and the threat of imprisonment, the Cuban spirit still struggles for freedom.

At least five resistance publications now circulate in eastern Cuba. Thirty-two-year-old blogger Yoani Sánchez has been warned to keep quiet, but she still chronicles the ridiculousness of Che economics, giving a voice to ordinary Cubans who live lives of desperation. The Ladies in White -- wives, sisters and mothers of prisoners of conscience -- still walk quietly in Havana on Sundays. Rock bands mock the old dictator.

This is the wonder of the revolution: Fifty years of state terror hasn't silenced the resistance. Maybe one day Hollywood will make a film about it.

Write to O'Grady@wsj.com

Feliz Natividad Merry Christmas Freedom and Full Life

2008-12-25T11:45:00.002-05:00

In Hoc Anno Domini
Extracted from WSJ

When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.

Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.

But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression -- for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?

There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.

And the voice from Galilee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent this gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.

So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that man would still believe salvation lay with the leaders.

But it came to pass for a while in divers places that the truth did set man free, although the men of darkness were offended and they tried to put out the light. The voice said, Haste ye. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you, for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.

Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterward Paul of Tarsus, too, was sore afraid. He feared that other Caesars, other prophets, might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom.

Then might it come to pass that darkness would settle again over the lands and there would be a burning of books and men would think only of what they should eat and what they should wear, and would give heed only to new Caesars and to false prophets. Then might it come to pass that men would not look upward to see even a winter's star in the East, and once more, there would be no light at all in the darkness.

And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

This editorial was written in 1949 by the late Vermont Royster and has been published annually since.

Speaks by it Self

2008-12-20T18:16:00.002-05:00

"I Am Against Abortion" Obamism (chutzpah +lie)

2008-11-20T07:32:00.001-05:00

Obama's Abortion Extremism
by Robert P. George (This is a publication of the Witherspoon Institute)

Sen. Barack Obama's views on life issues ranging from abortion to embryonic stem cell research mark him as not merely a pro-choice politician, but rather as the most extreme pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket.

Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.

Yet there are Catholics and Evangelicals-even self-identified pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals—who aggressively promote Obama's candidacy and even declare him the preferred candidate from the pro-life point of view.

What is going on here?

I have examined the arguments advanced by Obama's self-identified pro-life supporters, and they are spectacularly weak. It is nearly unfathomable to me that those advancing them can honestly believe what they are saying. But before proving my claims about Obama's abortion extremism, let me explain why I have described Obama as "pro-abortion" rather than "pro-choice."

According to the standard argument for the distinction between these labels, nobody is pro-abortion. Everybody would prefer a world without abortions. After all, what woman would deliberately get pregnant just to have an abortion? But given the world as it is, sometimes women find themselves with unplanned pregnancies at times in their lives when having a baby would present significant problems for them. So even if abortion is not medically required, it should be permitted, made as widely available as possible and, when necessary, paid for with taxpayers' money.

The defect in this argument can easily be brought into focus if we shift to the moral question that vexed an earlier generation of Americans: slavery. Many people at the time of the American founding would have preferred a world without slavery but nonetheless opposed abolition. Such people—Thomas Jefferson was one—reasoned that, given the world as it was, with slavery woven into the fabric of society just as it had often been throughout history, the economic consequences of abolition for society as a whole and for owners of plantations and other businesses that relied on slave labor would be dire. Many people who argued in this way were not monsters but honest and sincere, albeit profoundly mistaken. Some (though not Jefferson) showed their personal opposition to slavery by declining to own slaves themselves or freeing slaves whom they had purchased or inherited. They certainly didn't think anyone should be forced to own slaves. Still, they maintained that slavery should remain a legally permitted option and be given constitutional protection.

Would we describe such people, not as pro-slavery, but as "pro-choice"? Of course we would not. It wouldn't matter to us that they were "personally opposed" to slavery, or that they wished that slavery were "unnecessary," or that they wouldn't dream of forcing anyone to own slaves. We would hoot at the faux sophistication of a placard that said "Against slavery? Don't own one." We would observe that the fundamental divide is between people who believe that law and public power should permit slavery, and those who think that owning slaves is an unjust choice that should be prohibited.

Just for the sake of argument, though, let us assume that there could be a morally meaningful distinction between being "pro-abortion" and being "pro-choice." Who would qualify for the latter description? Barack Obama certainly would not. For, unlike his running mate Joe Biden, Obama does not think that abortion is a purely private choice that public authority should refrain from getting involved in. Now, Senator Biden is hardly pro-life. He believes that the killing of the unborn should be legally permitted and relatively unencumbered. But unlike Obama, at least Biden has sometimes opposed using taxpayer dollars to fund abortion, thereby leaving Americans free to choose not to implicate themselves in it. If we stretch things to create a meaningful category called "pro-choice," then Biden might be a plausible candidate for the label; at least on occasions when he respects your choice or mine not to facilitate deliberate feticide.

The same cannot be said for Barack Obama. For starters, he supports legislation that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which protects pro-life citizens from having to pay for abortions that are not necessary to save the life of the mother and are not the result of rape or incest. The abortion industry laments that this longstanding federal law, according to the pro-abortion group NARAL, "forces about half the women who would otherwise have abortions to carry unintended pregnancies to term and bear children against their wishes instead." In other words, a whole lot of people who are alive today would have been exterminated in utero were it not for the Hyde Amendment. Obama has promised to reverse the situation so that abortions that the industry complains are not happening (because the federal government is not subsidizing them) would happen. That is why people who profit from abortion love Obama even more than they do his running mate.

But this barely scratches the surface of Obama's extremism. He has promised that "the first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act" (known as FOCA). This proposed legislation would create a federally guaranteed "fundamental right" to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, including, as Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia has noted in a statement condemning the proposed Act, "a right to abort a fully developed child in the final weeks for undefined 'health' reasons." In essence, FOCA would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent and notification laws for minors, state and federal funding restrictions on abortion, and conscience protections for pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry-protections against being forced to participate in the practice of abortion or else lose their jobs. The pro-abortion National Organization for Women has proclaimed with approval that FOCA would "sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws [and] policies."

It gets worse. Obama, unlike even many "pro-choice" legislators, opposed the ban on partial-birth abortions when he served in the Illinois legislature and condemned the Supreme Court decision that upheld legislation banning this heinous practice. He has referred to a baby conceived inadvertently by a young woman as a "punishment" that she should not endure. He has stated that women's equality requires access to abortion on demand. Appallingly, he wishes to strip federal funding from pro-life crisis pregnancy centers that provide alternatives to abortion for pregnant women in need. There is certainly nothing "pro-choice" about that.

But it gets even worse. Senator Obama, despite the urging of pro-life members of his own party, has not endorsed or offered support for the Pregnant Women Support Act, the signature bill of Democrats for Life, meant to reduce abortions by providing assistance for women facing crisis pregnancies. In fact, Obama has opposed key provisions of the Act, including providing coverage of unborn children in the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), and informed consent for women about the effects of abortion and the gestational age of their child. This legislation would not make a single abortion illegal. It simply seeks to make it easier for pregnant women to make the choice not to abort their babies. Here is a concrete test of whether Obama is "pro-choice" rather than pro-abortion. He flunked. Even Senator Edward Kennedy voted to include coverage of unborn children in S-CHIP. But Barack Obama stood resolutely with the most stalwart abortion advocates in opposing it.

It gets worse yet. In an act of breathtaking injustice which the Obama campaign lied about until critics produced documentary proof of what he had done, as an Illinois state senator Obama opposed legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist's unsuccessful effort to kill them in the womb, or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability. This legislation would not have banned any abortions. Indeed, it included a specific provision ensuring that it did not affect abortion laws. (This is one of the points Obama and his campaign lied about until they were caught.) The federal version of the bill passed unanimously in the United States Senate, winning the support of such ardent advocates of legal abortion as John Kerry and Barbara Boxer. But Barack Obama opposed it and worked to defeat it. For him, a child marked for abortion gets no protection-even ordinary medical or comfort care-even if she is born alive and entirely separated from her mother. So Obama has favored protecting what is literally a form of infanticide.

You may be thinking, it can't get worse than that. But it does.

For several years, Americans have been debating the use for biomedical research of embryos produced by in vitro fertilization (originally for reproductive purposes) but now left in a frozen condition in cryopreservation units. President Bush has restricted the use of federal funds for stem-cell research of the type that makes use of these embryos and destroys them in the process. I support the President's restriction, but some legislators with excellent pro-life records, including John McCain, argue that the use of federal money should be permitted where the embryos are going to be discarded or die anyway as the result of the parents' decision. Senator Obama, too, wants to lift the restriction.

But Obama would not stop there. He has co-sponsored a bill-strongly opposed by McCain-that would authorize the large-scale industrial production of human embryos for use in biomedical research in which they would be killed. In fact, the bill Obama co-sponsored would effectively require the killing of human beings in the embryonic stage that were produced by cloning. It would make it a federal crime for a woman to save an embryo by agreeing to have the tiny developing human being implanted in her womb so that he or she could be brought to term. This "clone and kill" bill would, if enacted, bring something to America that has heretofore existed only in China-the equivalent of legally mandated abortion. In an audacious act of deceit, Obama and his co-sponsors misleadingly call this an anti-cloning bill. But it is nothing of the kind. What it bans is not cloning, but allowing the embryonic children produced by cloning to survive.

Can it get still worse? Yes.

Decent people of every persuasion hold out the increasingly realistic hope of resolving the moral issue surrounding embryonic stem-cell research by developing methods to produce the exact equivalent of embryonic stem cells without using (or producing) embryos. But when a bill was introduced in the United States Senate to put a modest amount of federal money into research to develop these methods, Barack Obama was one of the few senators who opposed it. From any rational vantage point, this is unconscionable. Why would someone not wish to find a method of producing the pluripotent cells scientists want that all Americans could enthusiastically endorse? Why create and kill human embryos when there are alternatives that do not require the taking of nascent human lives? It is as if Obama is opposed to stem-cell research unless it involves killing human embryos.

This ultimate manifestation of Obama's extremism brings us back to the puzzle of his pro-life Catholic and Evangelical apologists.

They typically do not deny the facts I have reported. They could not; each one is a matter of public record. But despite Obama's injustices against the most vulnerable human beings, and despite the extraordinary support he receives from the industry that profits from killing the unborn (which should be a good indicator of where he stands), some Obama supporters insist that he is the better candidate from the pro-life point of view.

They say that his economic and social policies would so diminish the demand for abortion that the overall number would actually go down-despite the federal subsidizing of abortion and the elimination of hundreds of pro-life laws. The way to save lots of unborn babies, they say, is to vote for the pro-abortion-oops! "pro-choice"-candidate. They tell us not to worry that Obama opposes the Hyde Amendment, the Mexico City Policy (against funding abortion abroad), parental consent and notification laws, conscience protections, and the funding of alternatives to embryo-destructive research. They ask us to look past his support for Roe v. Wade, the Freedom of Choice Act, partial-birth abortion, and human cloning and embryo-killing. An Obama presidency, they insist, means less killing of the unborn.

This is delusional.

We know that the federal and state pro-life laws and policies that Obama has promised to sweep away (and that John McCain would protect) save thousands of lives every year. Studies conducted by Professor Michael New and other social scientists have removed any doubt. Often enough, the abortion lobby itself confirms the truth of what these scholars have determined. Tom McClusky has observed that Planned Parenthood's own statistics show that in each of the seven states that have FOCA-type legislation on the books, "abortion rates have increased while the national rate has decreased." In Maryland, where a bill similar to the one favored by Obama was enacted in 1991, he notes that "abortion rates have increased by 8 percent while the overall national abortion rate decreased by 9 percent." No one is really surprised. After all, the message clearly conveyed by policies such as those Obama favors is that abortion is a legitimate solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancies—so clearly legitimate that taxpayers should be forced to pay for it.

But for a moment let's suppose, against all the evidence, that Obama's proposals would reduce the number of abortions, even while subsidizing the killing with taxpayer dollars. Even so, many more unborn human beings would likely be killed under Obama than under McCain. A Congress controlled by strong Democratic majorities under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi would enact the bill authorizing the mass industrial production of human embryos by cloning for research in which they are killed. As president, Obama would sign it. The number of tiny humans created and killed under this legislation (assuming that an efficient human cloning technique is soon perfected) could dwarf the number of lives saved as a result of the reduced demand for abortion-even if we take a delusionally optimistic view of what that number would be.

Barack Obama and John McCain differ on many important issues about which reasonable people of goodwill, including pro-life Americans of every faith, disagree: how best to fight international terrorism, how to restore economic growth and prosperity, how to distribute the tax burden and reduce poverty, etc.

But on abortion and the industrial creation of embryos for destructive research, there is a profound difference of moral principle, not just prudence. These questions reveal the character and judgment of each man. Barack Obama is deeply committed to the belief that members of an entire class of human beings have no rights that others must respect. Across the spectrum of pro-life concerns for the unborn, he would deny these small and vulnerable members of the human family the basic protection of the laws. Over the next four to eight years, as many as five or even six U.S. Supreme Court justices could retire. Obama enthusiastically supports Roe v. Wade and would appoint judges who would protect that morally and constitutionally disastrous decision and even expand its scope. Indeed, in an interview in Glamour magazine, he made it clear that he would apply a litmus test for Supreme Court nominations: jurists who do not support Roe will not be considered for appointment by Obama. John McCain, by contrast, opposes Roe and would appoint judges likely to overturn it. This would not make abortion illegal, but it would return the issue to the forums of democratic deliberation, where pro-life Americans could engage in a fair debate to persuade fellow citizens that killing the unborn is no way to address the problems of pregnant women in need.

What kind of America do we want our beloved nation to be? Barack Obama's America is one in which being human just isn't enough to warrant care and protection. It is an America where the unborn may legitimately be killed without legal restriction, even by the grisly practice of partial-birth abortion. It is an America where a baby who survives abortion is not even entitled to comfort care as she dies on a stainless steel table or in a soiled linen bin. It is a nation in which some members of the human family are regarded as inferior and others superior in fundamental dignity and rights. In Obama's America, public policy would make a mockery of the great constitutional principle of the equal protection of the law. In perhaps the most telling comment made by any candidate in either party in this election year, Senator Obama, when asked by Rick Warren when a baby gets human rights, replied: "that question is above my pay grade." It was a profoundly disingenuous answer: For even at a state senator's pay grade, Obama presumed to answer that question with blind certainty. His unspoken answer then, as now, is chilling: human beings have no rights until infancy—and if they are unwanted survivors of attempted abortions, not even then.

In the end, the efforts of Obama's apologists to depict their man as the true pro-life candidate that Catholics and Evangelicals may and even should vote for, doesn't even amount to a nice try. Voting for the most extreme pro-abortion political candidate in American history is not the way to save unborn babies.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and previously served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Mercado Libre vs Proteccionismo

2008-09-12T08:15:00.000-04:00

América Latina quiere más libre comercio
September 8, 2008 11:45 a.m.
Por Mary Anastasia O'Grady

De los dos candidatos a la presidencia de Estados Unidos, uno promete expandir las oportunidades de comercio internacional para los fabricantes y consumidores estadounidenses. El otro prefiere aumentar las barreras que ya existen en el comercio global.

Para América Latina, el libre comercio el tema más importante de la campaña. Si gana, el candidato republicano John McCain dice que llevará el hemisferio occidental hacia un comercio más libre. En cambio, el candidato demócrata Barack Obama ha prometido que diseñará una política de comercio más proteccionista frente a los vecinos latinoamericanos de EE.UU. McCain mejorará la integración económica de la región, mientras que Obama intensificará el aislamiento de Latinoamérica.

Nuestra columnista Mary O'Grady habla con James Freeman y asegura que los países latinoamericanos necesitan una victoria de John McCain. (En inglés).
Cualquiera que haya leído algo de historia del siglo XX sabe cuán seria es esta división. La última vez que Washington adoptó una postura proteccionista frente a sus vecinos del sur fue en 1930, cuando el Congreso aprobó los aranceles Smoot-Hawley. Empezar a salir de ese agujero costó más de 50 años.

Muchos economistas culpan a Smoot-Hawley por la profundidad de la depresión que sufrió EE.UU. Los latinoamericanos, sin embargo, han sufrido incluso más y por un período más prolongado. Sus líderes optaron por emprender represalias mediante sus propios aranceles proteccionistas. Pero el daño no terminó ahí.

En su libro de 1995 Crisis y Reforma en América Latina, el profesor de la Universidad de California en Los Ángeles (UCLA) Sebastián Edwards escribe que pese a que hubo un breve período de liberalización en Argentina, Brasil y Chile a finales de los años 30, no duró demasiado. Las condiciones adversas impuestas por la Segunda Guerra Mundial forzaron a las autoridades de la región a restaurar los aranceles, con la esperanza de que el proteccionismo estimularía el desarrollo económico.

"Hacia finales de los años 40 y principios de los 50", escribe Edwards, "las políticas proteccionistas basadas en la sustitución de importaciones estaban muy arraigadas y constituían, de lejos, la perspectiva dominante". La Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), un organismo de Naciones Unidas, "aportó el fundamento intelectual para la postura proteccionista".

El proteccionismo sumió a la región en el desastre, no sólo porque la ola de aranceles y las barreras no arancelarias bloquearon las importaciones y destruyeron el sector exportador, sino porque provocaron el aislamiento intelectual a medida que la información y las nuevas ideas que fluyen de la mano del comercio se agotaron, junto con las elecciones de los consumidores y la competencia. También hubo un efecto nocivo sobre la política, a medida que las economías cerradas generaron importantes intereses que se apoderaron no sólo del poder económico, sino también del político, para luego enraizarse.

Según Edwards, fue sólo a finales de los 80 y principios de los 90 que los líderes de EE.UU. y América Latina (sin incluir a Chile, que ya se había liberalizado para entonces) empezaron a reconocer las consecuencias inesperadas de este modelo (pobreza e inestabilidad) y decidieron tomar cartas en el asunto. "Los aranceles fueron drásticamente reducidos, muchos países eliminaron completamente las licencias de importación y prohibiciones, y varios países empezaron a negociar acuerdos de libre comercio con Estados Unidos".

En 1993, México y Canadá firmaron con EE.UU. el Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte, pero el proceso de apertura regional continuó hasta bien entrada esta década. El acuerdo bilateral entre EE.UU. y Chile entró en efecto en 2004. Cinco países centroamericanos y la República Dominicana firmaron su propio acuerdo, el Cafta, con EE.UU. en 2006. El TLC de Perú con EE.UU. quedó listo negociar en 2007. Colombia y Panamá han firmado acuerdos con EE.UU. que esperan la ratificación por parte del Congreso estadounidense.

Es cierto que una apertura unilateral habría sido un mejor camino. Pero, debido a varias razones (como la atracción política de la reprocidad), los TLC se han puesto de moda. No cabe duda que los acuerdos de libre comercio, pese a todas sus fallas, han contribuido al desmantelamiento de las barreras comerciales, han reforzado el imperio de la ley y empujado la región en la dirección de un capitalismo democrático.

McCain quiere que EE.UU. mantenga su papel de liderazgo en la apertura de los mercados de la región. Está a favor de la ratificación de los TLC con Colombia y Panamá, los cuales siguen estancados en un Congreso controlado por los demócratas. También quiere levantar el arancel de US$0,54 sobre el etanol brasileño y preservar el Nafta.

A su vez, Obama revertiría el progreso del comercio regional. El candidato demócrata es partidario de la oposición liderada por Nancy Pelosi, presidenta de la Cámara de Representantes de EE.UU., al TLC con Colombia, pese a que el tratado abriría nuevos mercados a los exportadores estadounidenses. Promete "mantenerse firme" ante los pactos como el Cafta y propone exigir una renegociación del Nafta, la cual podría interrumpir las cadenas de suministro en América del Norte y dañar la economía estadounidense. Al imponer nuevas regulaciones laborales y medioambientales sobre nuestros socios comerciales, su propuesta de "comercio justo" incrementará los costos para nuestros socios y reducirá su competitividad.

Tal vez lo peor de todo es que su tendencia anticomercio puede ser una señal para la región de que el proteccionismo vuelve a estar en boga en EE.UU. y encender nuevas guerras comerciales. De eso no puede salir nada bueno, ni para EE.UU. ni para América Latina

Castro's Gulag

2008-08-17T17:12:00.001-04:00

Armando Valladares
Twenty-Two Years in Castro's Gulag
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
August 16, 2008; Page A9

Miami

In late December 1959, nearly a year after Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista had been run out the country by a movement that had a goal of restoring the 1940 Cuban constitution, Fidel Castro was tightening his grip.

At the time, Armando Valladares was a 22-year-old government bureaucrat at the Post Office Savings Bank. One day a group from the Communist Party showed up in his office and put a sign on his desk that read 'If Fidel is a communist, put me on the list. He's got the right idea.'
[Twenty-Two Years in Castro's Gulag]
Zina Saunders

Castro had not yet made public his communist intentions. But Mr. Valladares says that 'the sign was part of the campaign by the party and by Fidel to prepare the population for communism,"

Solzhenitsyn a Champion of Peace

2008-08-05T11:04:00.001-04:00

Alexander Solzhenitsyn speaking at Harvard in 1978:

Very well-known representatives of your society, such as George Kennan, say: We cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism's well-planned world strategy. There are no other criteria. . . .

In spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it, the West has difficulties in understanding reality such as it is. There have been naive predictions by some American experts who believed that Angola would become the Soviet Union's Vietnam or that Cuban expeditions in Africa would best be stopped by special U.S. courtesy to Cuba. Kennan's advice to his own country -- to begin unilateral disarmament -- belongs to the same category. If you only knew how the youngest of the Moscow Old Square officials laugh at your political wizards! As to Fidel Castro, he frankly scorns the United States, sending his troops to distant adventures from his country right next to yours.

However, the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear? The American Intelligentsia lost its [nerve] and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?

DA ' MESSIAH IS BACK

2008-07-25T07:44:00.000-04:00

From The Times
July 25, 2008
He ventured forth to bring light to the world
The anointed one's pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a miracle in action - and a blessing to all his faithful followers
Gerard Baker

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: "Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?"

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.

And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth - for the first time - to bring the light unto all the world.

He travelled fleet of foot and light of camel, with a small retinue that consisted only of his loyal disciples from the tribe of the Media. He ventured first to the land of the Hindu Kush, where the

Taleban had harboured the viper of al-Qaeda in their bosom, raining terror on all the world.

And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the

Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more.

From there he went forth to Mesopotamia where he was received by the great ruler al-Maliki, and al-Maliki spake unto him and blessed his Sixteen Month Troop Withdrawal Plan even as the imperial warrior Petraeus tried to destroy it.

And lo, in Mesopotamia, a miracle occurred. Even though the Great Surge of Armour that the evil Bush had ordered had been a terrible mistake, a waste of vital military resources and doomed to end in disaster, the Child's very presence suddenly brought forth a great victory for the forces of the light.

And the Persians, who saw all this and were greatly fearful, longed to speak with the Child and saw that the Child was the bringer of peace. At the mention of his name they quickly laid aside their intrigues and beat their uranium swords into civil nuclear energy ploughshares.

From there the Child went up to the city of Jerusalem, and entered through the gate seated on an ass. The crowds of network anchors who had followed him from afar cheered "Hosanna" and waved great palm fronds and strewed them at his feet.

In Jerusalem and in surrounding Palestine, the Child spake to the Hebrews and the Arabs, as the Scripture had foretold. And in an instant, the lion lay down with the lamb, and the Israelites and Ishmaelites ended their long enmity and lived for ever after in peace.

As word spread throughout the land about the Child's wondrous works, peoples from all over flocked to hear him; Hittites and Abbasids; Obamacons and McCainiacs; Cameroonians and Blairites.

And they told of strange and wondrous things that greeted the news of the Child's journey. Around the world, global temperatures began to decline, and the ocean levels fell and the great warming was over.

The Great Prophet Algore of Nobel and Oscar, who many had believed was the anointed one, smiled and told his followers that the Child was the one generations had been waiting for.

And there were other wonderful signs. In the city of the Street at the Wall, spreads on interbank interest rates dropped like manna from Heaven and rates on credit default swaps fell to the ground as dead birds from the almond tree, and the people who had lived in foreclosure were able to borrow again.

Black gold gushed from the ground at prices well below $140 per barrel. In hospitals across the land the sick were cured even though they were uninsured. And all because the Child had pronounced it.

And this is the testimony of one who speaks the truth and bears witness to the truth so that you might believe. And he knows it is the truth for he saw it all on CNN and the BBC and in the pages of The New York Times.

Then the Child ventured forth from Israel and Palestine and stepped onto the shores of the Old Continent. In the land of Queen Angela of Merkel, vast multitudes gathered to hear his voice, and he preached to them at length.

But when he had finished speaking his disciples told him the crowd was hungry, for they had had nothing to eat all the hours they had waited for him.

And so the Child told his disciples to fetch some food but all they had was five loaves and a couple of frankfurters. So he took the bread and the frankfurters and blessed them and told his disciples to feed the multitudes. And when all had eaten their fill, the scraps filled twelve baskets.

Thence he travelled west to Mount Sarkozy. Even the beauteous Princess Carla of the tribe of the Bruni was struck by awe and she was great in love with the Child, but he was tempted not.

On the Seventh Day he walked across the Channel of the Angles to the ancient land of the hooligans. There he was welcomed with open arms by the once great prophet Blair and his successor, Gordon the Leper, and his successor, David the Golden One.

And suddenly, with the men appeared the archangel Gabriel and the whole host of the heavenly choir, ranks of cherubim and seraphim, all praising God and singing: "Yes, We Can."

NOBAMA BECAUSE IF OBAMA WE WILL BE TAXED TILL WE CRY MAMA

2008-07-25T00:30:00.002-04:00

Kids always tell the truth

2008-07-23T16:36:00.001-04:00

AMIGOS DE LAS GUERRILLAS

2008-07-07T09:09:00.000-04:00

Los amigos de "derechos humanos" de las FARC
July 7, 2008 4:33 a.m.WSJ

Por Mary Anastasia O'Grady

Mientras sale a la luz pública nueva información sobre la audaz operación del ejército colombiano para rescate a los rehenes de las FARC la semana pasada, hay un detalle que llama la atención. Al engañar a los rebeldes de las FARC para que pusieran los rehenes a bordo de un helicóptero, las fuerzas especiales encubiertas simplemente les dijeron a los comandantes que la aeronave había sido facilitada por un organismo no gubernamental ficticio llamado La Misión Internacional Humanitaria que simpatizaba con su causa.

El ejército colombiano pudo haber demorado años para infiltrar las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia y debió haber sido difícil imitar a los rebeldes de manera convincente. Pero lo que parece haber sido muy fácil fue hacer que las Farc creyeran que una ONG estaba aportando recursos para ayudar al trabajo sucio de trasladar a los cautivos a un nuevo lugar.

Esto me hace recordar una declaración del presidente Álvaro Uribe en 2003 de que algunas organizaciones de "derechos humanos" en su país eran una fachada de los terroristas. El comentario molestó al senador de Connecticut Christopher Dodd, quien sermoneó al mandatario colombiano sobre "la importancia de los valores democráticos"

Como lo sugiere la historia del helicóptero, sin embargo, Uribe parece haber tenido la razón. ¿De qué otra forma se explica el hecho de que las Farc se tragaran el cuento sin siquiera pestañear?

Esto es importante porque se suma a la ya sólida evidencia de que las ONG izquierdistas y otros llamados defensores de los derechos humanos, incluyendo al presidente de Venezuela Hugo Chávez y a la senadora colombiana Piedad Córdoba, no son más que propagandistas de los terroristas.

Cuando las pasiones sobre la víctima del secuestro Ingrid Betancourt y otros rehenes estaban en su nivel máximo, estos actores presionaron a Uribe para que aceptara las exigencias de las Farc. Ahora está claro que estas presiones buscaban más el fortalecimiento de los rebeldes que la liberación de los cautivos.

Durante años la prioridad de las ONG de izquierda ha sido minar la credibilidad del gobierno colombiano. Un informe interno de 2003 de la embajada de Estados Unidos en Bogotá titulado "una mirada de cerca a las estadísticas de derechos humanos" confirmó esto. Encontró que el análisis de las ONG del ambiente de derechos humanos —como el del jesuita Centro de Investigación y Educación popular conocido como Cinep—contenía un marcado sesgo contra el gobierno mientras eludía a las guerrillas.

Desde finales de los noventa, la práctica de las ONG de llevar los militares a los tribunales bajo acusaciones de violaciones a los derechos humanos ha destruido las carreras de algunos de los mejores oficiales del país, aunque la mayoría de estos hombres resultaron inocentes después de años de investigaciones. La guerra judicial resultó ser especialmente efectiva porque bajo la legislación promovida por el senador de Vermont Patrick Leahy, las acusaciones "creíbles" contra oficiales ponían en riesgo la ayuda militar de EE.UU. a menos que el acusado fuera separado de su cargo. Las ONG sabían que solo tenían que apuntar con el dedo para deshacerse de un líder efectivo. Al tomar esto en cuenta, no es de extrañar que las Farc pensaran que un helicóptero de una ONG fuera algo perfectamente natural.

En cuanto a Chávez, los documentos obtenidos durante el ataque de Colombia al campamento de las Farc en Ecuador mostraron que como "mediador" en las negociaciones de rehenes desde el año pasado, estuvo asesorando a los rebeldes sobre cómo aprovechar el uso de los rehenes para avanzar en su revolución.

A finales del año pasado, Chávez y las Farc tramaron un audaz plan en el que el venezolano tomaría una "prueba de vida" de Betancourt para llevársela al presidente francés Nicolas Sarkozy en París, donde la situación de Betancourt era una causa célebre. Los rebeldes escribieron que Chávez estaba seguro de que la presión de Francia por las negociaciones iba a llevar al presidente Bush a "ordenarle a Uribe que permitiera una reunión" entre Chávez y los rebeldes en territorio colombiano, algo a lo que Uribe se había negado. Los rebeldes informaron que Chávez estaba "super motivado" porque veía el encuentro como un golpe de relaciones públicas que le daría a él y las Farc un renombre continental y mundial.

El plan fracasó, pero Chávez tenía otras cartas bajo su manga. Una involucraba a la senadora Córdoba, quien actualmente está bajo investigación de la Fiscalía de Colombia por sus nexos con las Farc. Ella aparece como figura prominente en los documentos capturados de los rebeldes y es notoriamente cercana a Chávez.

Ella se reunió en el palacio presidencial venezolano con líderes de las Farc el año pasado. De esa reunión los rebeldes informaron que "Piedad dice que Chávez está enloqueciendo a Uribe. El no sabe qué hacer. Que Nancy Pelosi ayuda y que está lista para ayudar en el intercambio [rehenes a cambio de guerrilleros capturados]. Que ella ha designado [al congresista de EEUU. Jim] McGovern para esto."

Si la presidenta de la Cámara de Representantes de EE.UU. estuvo colaborando con Córdoba en este plan, su juicio estaba más que un poco equivocado. Los rebeldes escriben que en un viaje a Argentina Córdoba les dijo "no me importa la propuesta que Sarkozy ha hecho para liberar a Ingrid. Por encima de todo, no liberen a Ingrid". En síntesis, ¿Por qué dejar ir una pieza tan útil?

SUPPORT ISRAEL

2008-07-07T08:14:00.000-04:00

My Last Project

2008-06-29T17:16:00.001-04:00

Obama's Paradigma : (TRIAL)Taxes Regulation Inspection Abuse Litigation

2008-06-23T09:13:00.002-04:00

June 23, 2008 4:33 a.m. EDT

Cómo Argentina pasó a ser un caso perdido
June 23, 2008 4:33 a.m.WSJ

Por Mary Anastasia O'Grady

A medida que la campaña presidencial estadounidense sigue adelante en forma monótona, Barack Obama y los demócratas están agregando más detalles o su promesa de "cambio" con algunas propuestas específicas. Muchas de estas propuestas son conocidas, tal vez porque también se han ensayado... en Argentina.

Este país ha pasado de ser el granero del mundo a ser un caso perdido. Si quiere una versión larga de cómo esto sucedió y por qué los estadounidenses no deberían intentar estas recetas, tome el próximo vuelo a Buenos Aires. Aquí ofrezco una versión abreviada.

Aunque el descenso de Argentina al estatus de país que nunca paga sus deudas empezó hace un siglo, el último capítulo es ilustrativo. En marzo, la presidenta Cristina Fernández de Kirchner aprovechó el alza de los precios para imponer un impuesto a las ganancias extraordinarias de las exportaciones de soya. Los agricultores se negaron a pagar, la presidenta no cedió y se produjo un impasse.

Muchos argentinos simpatizaron con los agricultores. Pero el levantamiento ya no es una revuelta contra los impuestos. Se ha convertido en una rebelión contra el ilimitado poder del Ejecutivo o, a ojos de la oposición, contra el autoritarismo de la señora Kirchner. Hace una semana, miles de argentinos se lanzaron a las calles en las ciudades de todo el país golpeando cacerolas para expresar su descontento con las medidas opresivas de su presidenta. Ha sido la mayor protesta desde 2001.

La señora Kirchner, cuya aprobación ha descendió a un 20%, respondió a las manifestaciones con un duro discurso el martes. Advirtió que el país no puede ser gobernado "con cacerola, corte de ruta y bocina". Esto es fácil de decir ahora, pero fueron las cacerolas en las calles las que llevaron al colapso del gobierno de Fernando de la Rúa en 2001. A la señora Kirchner no parece importarle este derrocamiento de la democracia, tal vez porque su esposo, Néstor Kirchner, fue electo posteriormente.

Tampoco la señora Kirchner levantó la voz cuando su esposo usó los "poderes de emergencia" que le delegó el Congreso de mayoría peronista para gobernar por decreto durante cinco años. No hubo ninguna intervención que la señora Kirchner considerara desproporcionada. Era, después de todo, una "crisis". Néstor Kirchner impuso controles de precios, subió los impuestos a las exportaciones, aumentó los subsidios populistas, anuló contratos, no le pagó a los acreedores, acabó con la independencia del banco central e incluso manipuló las estadísticas de inflación. El sector privado y las ganancias fueron demonizadas y la prensa acosada.

La represión funcionó lo suficientemente bien como para que su esposa fuera elegida presidenta en octubre, pero ahora el tren se vuelve a descarrilar. Es difícil de cuadrar la defensa reciente hecha por la señora Kirchner de su amada "democracia" con el hecho de que está siguiendo las huellas de su marido, quien no mostró ningún respeto por los pesos y contrapesos institucionales.

Esto nos lleva a la raíz del problema, que se desarrolló mucho antes de los abusos de los Kirchner contra el mercado y los principios legales. La Constitución alguna vez sostuvo que un rol limitado del gobierno y la propiedad privada estaban entre los más altos ideales del país. En los años 20 estas protecciones, que convirtieron al país en un imán para inmigrantes y en la séptima mayor economía del mundo, comenzaron a corroerse.

Un ejemplo precoz de este atentado a la libertad fue cuando el Congreso impuso un congelamiento sobre las rentas ante la escasez de viviendas después de la Primera Guerra Mundial. Esto sólo exacerbó el problema y en 1922 una politizada Corte suprema amplió las facultades del Estado para permitir la regulación de las rentas. Esta decisión dejó en mal pie a los derechos de propiedad. Una década más tarde, la Corte le dio poder al Congreso para regular las tasas de interés.

Las intervenciones no terminaron ahí y a medida que el control de la economía se expandió y la nación se empobreció, el país no pudo recuperar su equilibrio. El populismo económico y la militancia sindical echaron raíces; el proteccionismo floreció y Argentina se convirtió en un estado benefactor. En tanto, la economía informal creció ante el alto costo de la legalidad.

Las crisis fiscales han sido recurrentes. De acuerdo a un estudio reciente dado a conocer por investigadores de la escuela de negocios Eseade de Buenos Aires, la deuda externa como porcentaje del PIB ha crecido a un 56% comparado con 54% en 2001. Si se incluye la deuda impaga a los tenedores de bonos, el número asciende al 67%. Algunos analistas están preocupados de que si la economía pierde vigor, el gobierno recurra a las reservas del banco central, desatando una corrida contra el peso o, por temor a ello, opte por declararse en cesación de pagos por segunda vez en una década.

¿Significará esto el fin de los derechos inflados, la guerra de clases, la hostilidad hacia los productores, el capital y la propiedad privada, el fin del proteccionismo y del subsidio centralmente planificado? Es poco probable.

Los estadounidenses que leen esto pueden notar que suena mucho como la mentalidad del ala izquierda que dominará la convención del partido Demócrata y que elegirá a Barack Obama como su candidato en agosto. Desde un sistema de salud nacionalizado y refinerías en manos del gobierno hasta impuestos que castiguen a los ricos, Argentina ya lo ha intentado. Hay buenas razones para encontrar la semejanza inquietante.

The Real Liers

2008-06-04T10:11:00.002-04:00

Party of Defeat

By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | 6/4/2008
Most conversations about the coming elections focus on the question of which candidate is most suited to lead the nation as it confronts the challenges and threats ahead. A better question would be to ask whether there is one party– the Democratic Party -- which has demonstrated in word and deed that it is unfit to lead the nation in war at all. Criticism of government policy is essential to a democracy. But in the last five years the Democratic Party has crossed the line from criticism of war policy to fundamental sabotage of the war itself, a position no American party has taken until now.

Starting in July 2003, just three months into the war in Iraq, the Democratic National Committee ran a national TV ad whose message was: “Read his lips: President Bush Deceives the American People. This was the beginning of a five-year, unrelenting campaign to persuade Americans and their allies that “Bush lied, people died,” that the war was “unnecessary” and “Iraq was no threat.” In other words, for five years, the leaders of the Democratic Party have been telling Americans, America’s allies and America’s enemies that their country was an aggressor nation, which had violated international law, and was in effect the “bad guy” in the war with the Saddam Hussein regime.

The first principle of psychological warfare campaigns is to destroy the moral character of the opposing commander-in-chief and discredit his nation’s cause. Yet this is a perfect summary of the campaign that has been waged for the length of this war by the entire Democratic Party leadership, Joe Lieberman being an honorable exception who was driven out of his party as a result.

The one saving grace for Democrats would be if their charges were true – if they were deceived into supporting the war, and if they had turned against it only because they realized their mistake. But this charge is demonstrably false.

In fact, the claim that Bush lied in order to dupe Democrats into supporting the war is itself the biggest lie of the war. Every Democratic Senator who voted for the war had on his or her desk before the vote a 100-page report, called “The National Intelligence Estimate,” which summarized all America’s intelligence on Iraq that was used to justify the war. We live in a democracy; consequently, the opposition party has access to all our secrets. Democrats sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which oversees all of America’s intelligence agencies. If any Democrat on that committee, including Senator John Kerry, had requested any intelligence information Iraq, he or she would have had that information on his or desk within 24 hours. The self-justifying claim that Bush lied to hoodwink the Democrats is a fraudulent charge with no basis in reality.

The Democrats changed their views on the war for one reason and one reason alone: In June 2003, a far-left Democrat named Howard Dean was poised to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination by running on the claim that America was the bad guy in the war in Iraq, and he would get us out.

The charge that Iraq was no threat is another false claim of the Democratic attack on America’s war to defend itself. Typical of Democratic Party leaders, former vice president Al Gore now says that “Iraq posed no threat” because it was a “fragile and unstable” nation. But if this were true, the same argument would apply to Afghanistan on September 10, 2001. Afghanistan is half the size of Iraq and a much poorer and unstable nation; it has no oil and its government did not invade two countries and use chemical weapons on its own citizens as Saddam did. Yet by providing a safe harbor to terrorists, Afghanistan made possible the murder of 3,000 Americans in half an hour and allowed Osama bin Laden to do what the Germans and the Japanese failed to accomplish in six years of the Second World War: kill Americans on the American soil. That’s why in February 2002, a year before the war in Iraq, Al Gore was saying that “Iraq is a virulent threat in a class by itself” and that President Bush should “push the limit” to do what was necessary to deal with Saddam Hussein.

But the most self-serving and deceptive of the lies told by the Democratic leadership is this: you can support the troops and not support the war. No you can’t. You can’t tell a 19-year old, who is risking his young life in Fallujah and who is surrounded by terrorists who want to kill him, that he shouldn’t be there in the first place; that he’s with the “bad guys” – the aggressors, the occupiers, who have no moral right to be Iraq. You can’t do that and not undermine his morale, encourage his enemies, deprive him of allies and put him in danger. And that is exactly what the Democrats have done – and all the Democrats have done – in five years of America’s war to deny the terrorists victory in Iraq. Such a party is unfit to lead this nation in war. To place it in a position to do so would be to invite a tragedy of epic proportions.

David Horowitz is the author with Ben Johnson of Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined the War on Terror Before and After 9/11, just published by Spence Publishing.

Free Market vs Supply Side Economy explained by Milton Friedman

2008-06-03T21:31:00.001-04:00

via videosift.com

Mariategui's seeds still germinating

2008-06-01T19:05:00.001-04:00

Peru's Shining Path guerrillas on the rise again

Local security members known as 'Ronderos' patrol in Pichihuillca village in Ayacucho state, Peru, Nov. 10, 2007. Villagers are facing a new Shining Path movement, which is growing in number as its members visit isolated villages asking forgiveness for past attacks on civilians, and to join them. The Shining Path was a Maoist insurgency that bloodied Peru for more than a decade until its leader was captured in 1992. (AP Photo/Karel Navarro)

Matucana's mayor is a worried man. The Shining Path rebels who terrorized Peru decades ago are back, moving across the jungle-draped slopes near his remote village and recruiting young fighters to their born-again insurgency.

And unlike before, the rebels have almost unlimited financial support. Earning cash by protecting coca fields and cocaine-smuggling routes, they are able to buy powerful weapons and pay salaries to men and women who take up arms against the government.

It is a nightmarish prospect for Peru, which saw nearly 70,000 people killed from 1980 to the mid-'90s in the Shining Path's brutal effort to impose a Maoist communist regime. Most of the victims were peasants, caught in the crossfire between guerrillas and security forces.

The country has enjoyed more than a decade of political stability since the rebel threat was virtually eliminated by former President Alberto Fujimori, a democratically elected leader who ruled with an iron fist from 1990 until his regime ended in scandal in 2000.

Fujimori, 69, was extradited from Chile in September and is now on trial for human rights violations committed during his crackdown, including the killings of university students and the massacre of Lima tenement dwellers targeted as Shining Path collaborators by a military death squad.

But Fujimori remains a hero in the isolated valleys where the rebels drew the most blood. Matucana Mayor Florencio Velasquez, military officers and anxious villagers all praise the tough measures of the 1990s and say the government now is underestimating the threat posed by the rebels' resurgence.

Matucana is a six-hour trip from the provincial capital of Ayacucho over a rutted dirt road that twists down into the narrow Apurimac Valley, a no man's land of coca fields and cocaine production. Many of the village's 500 people grow coca along with legal crops like cacao and coffee.

"All the people here are tied to coca," said Gen. Raymundo Flores, who commands an army base in the valley. "This is a narco-economy."

Velasquez, Matucana's 40-year-old mayor, says coca is attracting the rebels to the area, but they come with a new message: We are your friends. We know we made mistakes in the past in attacking civilians. But you can trust us now. Join us.

Some people young enough to have escaped the guerrillas' brutality in their earlier incarnation have been drawn in by this gentle approach and by pay of $20 a day, a princely sum in backwater villages. But Velasquez can't forget their savage attacks on communities that refused to join the Shining Path revolution.

"They say they are not going to kill, that they come peacefully to give political talks," he said, looking uneasily at the ground. "And they tell us to keep planting coca. They say they will protect us against anyone who tries to eradicate it."

The Shining Path — "Sendero Luminoso" in Spanish — came close to bringing Peru to its knees with its insurgency. Its founder, Abimael Guzman, a former philosophy professor, had a messianic vision of a classless utopia based on communism.

His fanatical followers — as many as 10,000 guerrillas at their peak — bombed electrical towers, bridges and factories, assassinated mayors and massacred villagers. In one of their most barbaric attacks, they slaughtered 69 peasants, including two dozen children shot and hacked to death, in reprisal for the slaying of several rebels in the village of Lucanamarca in 1983.

"They killed them with machetes, stones, axes — and for those who did not die in agony in this way, they even put them into a vat of boiling water," said survivor Ignacio Tacas, now 36.

Guzman cared little about the loss of lives, preaching: "Blood does not drown the revolution. It irrigates it."

But Guzman was captured in 1992, as Fujimori's security forces jailed thousands of rebels and suspected collaborators. By 1999 there were fewer than 200 armed fighters left in the Apurimac and Huallaga valleys, the only regions where the Shining Path remained active, and many Peruvians believed the movement was in its death throes.

The rebels' fortunes, however, changed after the capture that year of a top Guzman lieutenant, an ideological purist who had opposed cocaine trafficking as a stain on the revolution.

The remaining guerrillas in the Apurimac Valley eagerly provided armed escorts to protect "mochileros," smugglers who tote cocaine over mountain trails in backpacks.

The rebels spent their drug earnings on lightweight assault rifles and other more powerful modern weapons. And they began buying supplies in shops, unlike the past when small, desperate bands raided rural settlements for food and medicine.

After years in retreat, they again are on the offensive — although still in numbers far below their peak in past decades.

"When I arrived 3 1/2 years ago, Sendero carried out one attack. Now it's clear they can carry out an ambush each week. They have developed logistics, intelligence and local support — all very dangerous," U.S. Ambassador James Curtis Struble said before retiring last year.

Backed by drug money, the rebels' numbers have quadrupled to nearly 800 in recent years, according to military officers, village militia leaders and Pedro Egoavil, 53, a former rebel commander who broke with the Shining Path in the 1990s over its violent strategy but retains friends inside the organization. The guerrillas also have hundreds of unarmed collaborators.

Interior Minister Luis Alva Castro, who heads the national police, and other government officials argue that today's Shining Path cares more about drug trafficking than its long-term goal of imposing a Maoist regime.

Flores, the army commander in the Apurimac valley, said the guerrillas now "have fields deep in the jungle where Indian communities are forced to grow coca for them."

But top military officers and other experts dismiss the idea that today's rebels have abandoned their ideology.

"They do ideological work, move through areas, gather people together in meetings, hand out flags and carry out attacks," then-Defense Minister Allan Wagner said last December. "The revolution has not ended for them."

Washington has supported Peru's war on a drug business that produces a quarter of the world's cocaine, second only to Colombia. Aid includes 23 helicopters to ferry police from U.S.-built bases in the Apurimac and Huallaga valleys on raids to destroy cocaine labs.

Police have been hit hardest in the renewed guerrilla attacks. Some 40 officers have died in ambushes in and around the Apurimac Valley since 2005. November saw the boldest raid in years: A column of 60 insurgents destroyed a police station and killed its commander in the mountain town of Ocobamba.

In response the police have pledged to work in closer cooperation with the army, and Defense Minister Antero Flores Araoz has promised to increase military forces in the valley. But budgeting restraints have limited his plans.

Flores, the Apurimac valley army commander, complained that funding for troops to fight the guerrillas has been cut back in recent years even as the rebels grew stronger.

"Sendero remains a latent threat," he said after climbing from the single, aging Soviet helicopter that his base has for ferrying troops to battle rebels.

Village "self-defense committees" supported by Fujimori once fought the rebels and provided guides and intelligence for army units. Now, with both peasants and rebels involved in the drug trade, the militias are not always on the soldiers' side.

Police seized a revolver and three shotguns during a recent raid on a cocaine lab in the village of Villarrica — weapons that, it turned out, had been assigned to the village militia.

Walter Aguilar, 47, a militia leader from the town of Quimbiri, blames such incidents on new arrivals to the valley who have joined self-defense committees. He said the Shining Path tortured and killed his father and several other relatives and insisted militia fighters who suffered such experiences would never cooperate with the rebels.

"We have spilled blood. We have lost family," he said, showing an ugly bullet scar on his left forearm from a rebel ambush. "We could never be the allies of those criminal terrorist groups."

Fujimori is accused of murder and kidnapping for allegedly authorizing a military death squad to fight the rebels. But his defenders here say his arming of the militias enabled them to regain control of their lands, in vicious fighting that claimed 8,000 lives in the Apurimac valley alone.

Jose Luis Farfan, 33, a militia leader in the jungle village of Triboline, complained bitterly that the militias have been abandoned by the governments that followed Fujimori's regime.

"Thanks to him we were able to rid ourselves of that curse," Farfan said, holding one of 12 Winchester repeating shotguns the village received from Fujimori years ago. "But now they're stronger than ever, with good arms."

Experts on the Shining Path see other ominous developments in Peru's cities, key to the rebels' support 20 years ago. They worry that rebels who have completed prison sentences have returned to clandestine political organizing in labor unions and universities and that pro-Shining Path rhetoric is allowed to flourish under the protection of free speech.

Hector Jhon Caro, who once led Peru's anti-terrorism police, said such attitudes are dangerously reminiscent of the early years of the insurgency. The government, he warned, "still doesn't understand the potential danger of letting remnants of the Shining Path remain active."

Anti-terrorism police aren't bothering to keep tabs on released rebels, Jhon Caro said. Even more worrisome, he and other experts on the movement said, Guzman has regained the right to hold private meetings with his lawyer — and thus to communicate with his followers — after years in isolation during Fujimori's regime.

Guzman, unrepentant at 73, still has a long-range strategy for taking power, the experts said. And he's working to bring errant jungle columns back under his control, said Egoavil, the former rebel commander.

"They all recognize the leadership of Abimael Guzman," he said. "They are beginning to accept it. They are coming together."

———

Joy vs Happiness

2008-05-27T21:09:00.001-04:00

Why Secular Liberals Are So Unhappy

Dinesh D'Souza
Posted May 23rd 2008 10:31AM by Dinesh D'Souza
Filed under: Religion, Cultural Left, Atheism

Why are secular liberals so unhappy? This question is provocatively discussed in Arthur Brooks' new book Gross National Happiness. Brooks is a sociologist and statistician at Syracuse University. I am reading his book while vacationing with my lovely wife on the beautiful island of Santorini. So it's natural for me, watching the most beautiful sunsets in the world, martini in hand, to think about the question of happiness.

Brooks' book is full of interesting data. We learn, for instance, that money does buy happiness, but only upto a point. Poor people and poor countries are unhappy, and by the self-description of the people involved. So the movement from grinding poverty to the comfortable middle-class brings a huge gain in happiness. But interestingly economic improvement at this point brings diminishing marginal returns. This is not to say that rich people aren't happier: they are. But not by very much.

Brooks also shows that, in his own words, "people who say they are conservative or very conservative are nearly twice as likely to say they are very happy than are people who call themselves liberal or very liberal. Conservatives are much less likely to say they are dissatisfied with themselves, that they are inclined to feel like a failure, or to be pessimistic about their future." Conservatives' mental health is far better than that of liberals.

Equally fascinating, Brooks notes that "faith is an incredible predictor, and cause, of happiness. Religious people of all faiths are much, much happier on average than secularists." Specifically, 43 percent of those who attend church weekly or more call themselves "very happy," versus 23 percent who attend seldom or never. Observant Jews and Christians are by Brooks' measure the happiest people in America.

So why are secular liberals in general so miserable? I offer two reasons. The first is that liberals are political utopians. They consider human nature to be wonderful, and they expect freedom to be used wonderfully well. So they are always bitterly disappointed when they discover that this is not the case. Conservatives, by contrast, have a dimmer view of human nature. So their expectations are more modest. When things don't turn out half-badly, conservatives are pleasantly surprised. They are happier because it takes less to make them happier.

It's not too hard to figure out why religious people are happier. Belief in God gives people a powerful sense of higher purpose in life. It assures people that the universe is in the benign hands of a omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate higher power. It offers people a code for how to live. It gives us a reason to hope in cosmic justice, which is better than the imperfect justice of our terrestrial world.

By contrast, secular people have little to hope for. They are sure that they came from nowhere--the chance product of random mutation and natural selection--and are going nowhere. They know that terrible things happen, and they don't believe there is any purpose in this. No wonder that secular people have so few children: they have much less reason than religious people to believe in the future.

So why is an atheist like Richard Dawkins so frequently wearing a conspitated scowl? And why am I usually smiling? Some may attribute these differences to our genetic temperaments. Others may put it down to the fact that I live in sunny California, eating healthy nouvelle cuisine and going on walking tours in Santorini. Dawkins, by contrast, lives in dank, rainy England and eats abominable English food. ("May I offer you some more kidney pie, Professor Dawkins? It's somewhat bland, I know, but perhaps it will work as a laxative.")

But Arthur Brooks would probably say that our temperaments are also the consequences of two very different worldviews, one producing the wholesome optimism of What's So Great About Christianity, the other the angry bitterness of The God Delusion. Read Brooks' new book yourself to see if he's right.

Original

2008-05-25T07:22:00.002-04:00

I think he Can Dance - Watch more free videos

Amazing Grace Gracia Asombrosa

2008-05-19T22:33:00.000-04:00

Carrie Underwood

2008-05-19T22:26:00.000-04:00

Sad condition of American Academy

2008-05-14T16:44:00.001-04:00

Buenas Noticias Peru

2008-05-06T11:16:00.000-04:00

Perú toma el otro sendero
May 5, 2008 4:33 a.m. WSJ

Por Mary Anastasia O'Grady

Iquitos, Perú

El vuelo entre Lima y esta metrópolis en la selva de 400.000 habitantes dura 90 minutos. Pero la vida diaria está a años luz de la capital peruana.

Luego de casi dos décadas de reformas paulatinas hechas por el gobierno central, ahora Lima tiene servicios de primera clase, empresas competitivas a nivel global, centros comerciales, supermercados y una naciente clase media. Pero aquí en el centro de la Amazonia peruana, los estándares de vida son muy similares a los de hace 30 años.

La diferencia entre ambas ciudades ilustra uno de los mayores retos para el gobierno del presidente Alan García, quien fuera un socialista renombrado pero que ahora enarbola las banderas del capitalismo democrático.

Perú ha experimentado un crecimiento acelerado, más de un 6% anual durante casi siete años, y ese crecimiento ha ocurrido en su mayoría en la costa y en la capital. Pero las regiones montañosas y selváticas del país no han gozado del mismo crecimiento y siguen siendo vulnerables al populismo de izquierda.

Esto es lo que convierte a Perú en la zona cero de la lucha continental entre la modernidad y el socialismo atávico. Hugo Chávez está rondando como un buitre sobre las regiones más pobres del país, esperando añadir al cotizado país andino a su colección de aliados revolucionarios en América del Sur. Mientras tanto, los reformistas intentan presionar para una liberalización más profunda.

Las buenas noticias son que los buenos están en racha. Es cierto que las zonas remotas como esta ciudad son vulnerables a incursiones ideológicas de la izquierda autoritaria, pero también es cierto que buena parte del resto del país comienza a pensar y actuar más como empresarios chilenos que como socialistas cubanos. Entender el motivo es crucial para el progreso futuro.

Un cambio fundamental que ha sumado partidarios a las filas del libre mercado en las pasadas dos décadas es la estabilidad de precios. En 1990, la inflación alcanzó 7.000%, pero en los últimos seis años ha promediado 2,3%. Eso significa que, incluso antes de cualquier otro cambio en las políticas gubernamentales, cada peruano ha disfrutado de una reducción de impuestos y un impulso a su capacidad de ahorro.

La estabilidad de precios por sí sola, sin embargo, habría dejado al país muy por debajo de su potencial. Mucho más impresionante es la reestructuración de la economía, que ha conducido a un crecimiento más acelerado y a una distribución más equitativa de las oportunidades. Mientras que la explosión de los precios de las materias primas ha impulsado el desarrollo últimamente, en Perú también están surgiendo rápidamente empresarios en diversas industrias no tradicionales. Y esos innovadores se están abriendo paso en el escenario global.

La reforma clave que ha hecho todo esto posible es la apertura de la economía, la cual hasta 1990 tenía elevados aranceles diseñados para proteger a las industrias locales.

El periodista peruano Jaime Althaus documenta los efectos de la apertura en su libro de 2007 titulado La revolución capitalista en el Perú. Lejos de "desindustrializar" al país, Althaus dice que la liberalización del comercio ha fortalecido la manufacturas peruanas. Con los aranceles altos, el sector industrial funcionaba principalmente como un ensamblador de autos y productos electrónicos, usando insumos del extranjero. Pero cuando la protección terminó, las empresas locales empezaron a descubrir sus ventajas comparativas.

Había muchas. Altas tasas de crecimiento, promediando 11% al año entre 1990 y 2002, se han dado en sectores que producen vajillas, porcelana, tejidos, productos plásticos y químicos básicos, por mencionar algunos.

La historia de esta aglomeración de pequeñas compañías metalúrgicas en un cluster que ha surgido en Lima es especialmente atractiva. En los últimos años, estos empresarios han sido competitivos a la hora de conseguir contratos antes reservados para importantes firmas extranjeras. También se han convertido en grandes exportadoras.

El sector agrícola en la costa también ha revivido, en parte debido a que los derechos de propiedad privada ahí (no así en el interior del país) han reemplazado los sistemas colectivistas de los años 70. Como resultado, he llegado la inversión. La agricultura moderna ha puesto a la costa en el mapa como un proveedor global de espárragos, uvas, cebollas, mangos y plátanos orgánicos. Todo esto ha sido apoyado por la desregulación y privatización de sectores clave como telecomunicaciones y la banca. Los principales beneficiarios de esta apertura han sido los consumidores.

Entonces, ¿cuál es el problema con Iquitos?

No, como podría suponer, su aislamiento. García me dijo que cree que el problema real es que sus recursos más valiosos (la caoba y el cedro) crecen en tierras que no tienen derechos de propiedad. Hay algunas concesiones a largo plazo, pero dice que le gustaría ver muchas más para que aquellos que cultivan y talan los árboles tengan los incentivos adecuados para que cuiden más los bosques.

¿Ve lo que digo respecto del cambio de mentalidad? Ahora si tan solo el presidente aprovecha el tiempo, los chavistas de Caracas empezarán a verse sólo como notas al pie de página de la historia peruana.

Cuidado Peru

2008-04-28T10:51:00.000-04:00

Amigos del terrorismo en Perú
April 28, 2008 10:35 a.m. WSJ

Por Mary Anastasia O'Grady

La decisión del jueves pasado del Parlamento Europeo de retirar al Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA) de su lista de grupos terroristas ha alborotado a todo Perú. Y con buena razón. El MRTA es conocido por secuestrar, torturar y asesinar a civiles con tal de cumplir su agenda política. Recientemente, funcionarios peruanos lo han ligado al "Movimiento Bolivariano" de Hugo Chávez, que busca desestabilizar las democracias de Latinoamérica, así como al grupo guerrillero colombiano FARC.

La decisión de los europeos es exasperante. Pero también es educativa en la medida en que muestra cómo los terroristas pueden avanzar su causa con la ayuda de los organismos no gubernamentales. Bajo títulos como la defensa de los "derechos humanos", las ONG que comparten la ideología de la extrema izquierda trabajan a diario en Perú, tratando de legitimizar a sus amigotes que, tras bambalinas, continúan su "lucha armada". Lo curioso es que estas a menudo son financiadas por gobiernos o filántropos extranjeros.

El congresista peruano Rolando Sosa, a quién entrevisté en Lima hace 10 días, sabe mucho acerca del problema. Sosa encabezó un subcomité del Congreso que investigó las actividades del Movimiento Bolivariano en Perú. Sus hallazgos se presentaron a una comisión especial con facultades para llamar a declarar que probablemente encontrará aún más. Pero lo que ya se ha descubierto es suficiente para provocar alarma.

Sosa dice que el Movimiento Bolivariano de Chávez depende de un banco de tres patas. Dos de ellas son legales, pero la tercera no lo es. La primera es la "diplomacia" oficial de Venezuela. La venta con descuento de petróleo han comprado la lealtad de 19 países de la región. Otros planes, tales como la compra de deuda argentina y la ayuda a proyectos energéticos en Ecuador están igualmente diseñados para crear dependencia y establecer el dominio venezolano en la región.

La segunda pata es el esfuerzo para establecer un control ideológico al interior de los sindicatos y las organizaciones de base. Estos grupos han creado una serie de "asociaciones" sin fines de lucro, que según Sosa, operan internamente como partidos políticos, con títulos oficiales como "secretario de relaciones exteriores y secretario de doctrina".

Los nombres de estas ONG, tales como "Casas de Alba" (Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas) y "Casas de Amistad", podrían sonar inofensivos. Pero, según Sosa, "lo que importa es su objetivo que, como una moneda, tiene dos caras. Una cara es pública. La otra está oculta".

Públicamente, estos organismos administran clínicas oculares, programas de alfabetismo y centros de salud donde abundan los médicos cubanos. Tras bambalinas, advierte Sosa, trabajan para adoctrinar a los peruanos más pobres en la ideología de la extrema izquierda.

La tercera pata, la ilegal, es la más peligrosa. Sousa cita a dos grupos: el "Coordinador Continental Bolivariano" y el "Congreso Bolivariano del Pueblo". El comité del congresista encontró que ambos están reclutando y usando a los elementos más extremistas del país, como anarquistas, terroristas y la izquierda radical, para producir "las condiciones sociales… el caos" necesario para crear la impresión de que la democracia no funciona.

Una vez que esto se logra, las organizaciones de base, ayudadas por las ONG, estarán listas para llevar a los extremistas al poder a través del voto. Esa estrategia fue usada en Bolivia para deponer al gobierno de Sánchez de Lozada en 2003 y llevar al títere de Chávez, Evo Morales, al poder.

Ahora hay amplia evidencia que liga a Chávez, el artífice del Movimiento Bolivariano, al terrorismo, cortesía de las computadoras encontradas en el campamento del guerrillero colombiano Raúl Reyes. Por el momento, la conexión, más allá de la ideología, entre las ONG bolivarianas y los terroristas bolivarianos es borrosa, anota Sosa. Sin embargo, la comisión especial del Congreso peruano podría aclarar estos vínculos.

Mientras tanto, el trabajo de otras ONG financiadas por extranjeros y que velan por los intereses de las organizaciones terroristas requiere de urgente atención. Un ejemplo es el grupo peruano de "derechos humanos" Aprodeh, que trabajó en Europa para lograr que sacaran al MRTA de la lista de terroristas, pese a que Perú aún lo considera una grave amenaza a su seguridad.

En 2007, según documentos del gobierno, Aprodeh recibió fondos de Oxfam America, la Open Society ligada al inversionista George Soros, la Fundación John Merck, la ciudad de Barcelona, la embajada holandesa y una organización del gobierno estadounidense llamada Inter-American Foundation, entre otras. El viernes, el gobierno peruano le pidió a Aprodeh explicaciones sobre cómo su status de ONG le permite intervenir en representación de terroristas, cómo lo hizo ante el Parlamento Europeo.

No es de extrañar, entonces, que ONG se haya vuelto una palabra sucia en Perú. En una entrevista en Lima la semana pasada, el presidente peruano, Alan García, me dijo que las ONG "anti-capitalismo" financiadas por extranjeros también juegan un papel importante en el bloqueo del desarrollo. "Es algo que me sorprende", manifestó.

A mi también. Especialmente tomando en cuenta que las víctimas de la pobreza y la violencia que su agenda produce son la gente más vulnerable de Perú.

Infiltracion Terrorista - Cuidado Peru

2008-04-28T08:37:00.001-04:00

Friends of Terror in Peru
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
April 28, 2008; Page A17 WSJ

Thursday's vote by the European Parliament to take the Peruvian guerrilla group known as the Tupac Amaru (aka MRTA) off its terrorist list has Peru in an uproar. For good reason: The MRTA is notorious for kidnapping, torturing and murdering civilians to advance its political agenda. More recently, Peruvian officials have linked it to Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian Movement," which seeks to destabilize democracies in Latin America, and to the Colombian rebel group FARC.

The Europeans' decision is maddening. But it is also instructive, in that it shows how terrorists can advance their cause with the help of nongovernmental organizations. Under such headings as "human-rights" advocacy, NGOs that share the ideology of the far left toil away daily in Peru, trying to legitimize their buddies who, behind the scenes, continue their "armed struggle." The kicker is that these NGOs are often funded by foreign governments and philanthropists.
WSJ Americas columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady discusses the European Parliament's decision not to include a Peruvian guerrilla group in its terrorist list, which she says has been responsible for the kidnapping and torture of many. (April 28)

Peruvian Congressman Rolando Sousa, who I interviewed in Lima 10 days ago, knows a lot about the problem. He headed a congressional subcommittee that looked into the activities of the Bolivarian Movement in Peru. Its findings are now before a special commission with subpoena power that is likely to uncover even more. But he's already learned enough to cause alarm.

Mr. Sousa says that Mr. Chávez's Bolivarian Movement sits on a three-legged stool. Two of the legs are legal, the third is not. The first leg is official Venezuelan "diplomacy." Discounted oil shipments have bought the allegiance of 19 countries in the region. Other ploys, such as the purchase of Argentine debt and aid for Ecuadorian energy projects, are likewise designed to create dependence and establish Venezuelan dominance.

The second leg of the stool is the effort to establish ideological control within unions and grassroots organizations. These organizations have created a series of nonprofit "associations," which, Mr. Sousa says, operate internally like political parties, with official titles like "secretary of foreign relations" and "secretary of doctrine."

The names of these NGO associations – like "Houses of Alba" (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) and "Houses of Friendship" – may sound innocuous. But, says Mr. Sousa, "What matters is their objective which, like a coin, has two sides. One side is open. The other is hidden."
[Friends of Terror in Peru]
AP
George Soros, founder and chairman of the Open Society Institute.

Openly, the associations administer eye clinics, literacy programs and health centers manned by Cuban doctors. Behind the scenes, the congressman warns, they work to indoctrinate the poorest Peruvians in the ideology of the extreme left.

The third, illegal leg of the stool is the most dangerous. Mr. Sousa cites two groups: the "Continental Bolivarian Coordinator" and the "Bolivarian Congress of the People." His committee found that both are recruiting and using the most extreme elements of the country – anarchists, terrorists and the radical left – to produce "the social conditions . . . the chaos" necessary to create the impression that democracy is not working.

Once this is accomplished, the grassroots organizations – nurtured by the NGOs – are standing by, ready to bring the extremists to power through the ballot box. The strategy was used in Bolivia to bring down the Sánchez de Lozada government in 2003 and bring Chávez puppet Evo Morales to power.

There is now ample evidence linking Mr. Chávez, the mastermind of the Bolivarian Movement, to terrorism, courtesy of the computers seized from the camp of dead Colombian guerrilla Raúl Reyes. At this time the connection, beyond ideology, between the Bolivarian NGOs and the Bolivarian terrorists remains blurry, notes Mr. Sousa. But the special congressional commission may bring the relationship into focus.

Meanwhile the work of other foreign-funded NGOs in the interest of terrorist organizations warrants urgent attention. Take the Peruvian "human-rights" group Aprodeh, which labored in Europe to get the MRTA off the terrorist list there, even though Peru still considers it a grave threat to its security.
[No wide] THE AMERICAS IN THE NEWS

Get the latest information in Spanish from The Wall Street Journal's Americas page.

In 2007, according to government records, Aprodeh received funding from Oxfam America, George Soros's Open Society, the John Merck Foundation, the city of Barcelona, the Dutch embassy and a U.S. government agency called the Inter-American Foundation, among others. On Friday, the Peruvian government asked Aprodeh to explain how its NGO status allows it to intervene on behalf of terrorists, as it did in the European Parliament.

No wonder the term NGO has become a dirty word in Peru. In an interview in Lima last week, Peruvian President Álan Garcia told me that "anticapitalism" NGOs funded by foreigners also play a major role in blocking development. "It's something that amazes me," he said.

Me too. Especially considering the fact that the victims of the poverty and violence that their agenda produces are Peru's most vulnerable.

Liberal?

2008-04-21T09:45:00.000-04:00

How Liberals Lost a Liberal
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, April 15, 2008

The Democratic Party's preoccupation with the question of when America will leave Iraq rather than with how America will win in Iraq reminds me of how and why this nearly lifelong liberal and Democrat became identified as a conservative and Republican activist.

I have identified as liberal all my life. How could I not? I was raised a Jew in New York City, where I did graduate work in the social sciences at Columbia University. It is almost redundant to call a New York Jewish intellectual a liberal. In fact, I never voted for a Republican candidate for president until Ronald Reagan in 1980. But I have not voted for a Democrat since 1980.

What happened? Did I suddenly change my values in 1980? Or did liberalism? Obviously, one (or both) of us changed.

As I know my values, the answer is as clear as it could be -- it is liberalism that has changed, not I. In a word, liberalism became leftism. Or, to put it another way -- since my frame of reference is moral values -- liberalism's moral compass broke. It did so during the Vietnam War, though I could not bring myself to vote Republican until 1980. The emotional and psychological hold that the Democratic Party and the word "liberal" have on those who consider themselves liberal is stronger than the ability of most of these individuals to acknowledge just how far from liberal values contemporary liberalism and the Democratic Party have strayed.

Here are four key examples that should prompt any consistent liberal to vote Republican and oppose "progressives" and others on the left.

The issue that began the emotionally difficult task of getting this liberal to identify with conservatives and become an active Republican was Communism. I had always identified the Democratic Party and liberalism with anti-Communism. Indeed, the labor movement and the Democratic Party actually led American opposition to Communism. It was the Democrat Harry Truman, not Republicans, who made the difficult and unpopular decision to fight another war just a few years after World War II -- the war against Chinese and Korean Communists. It was Democrats -- John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson -- who also led the war against Chinese and Vietnamese Communists.

Then Vietnam occurred, and Democrats and liberals (in academia, labor and the media) abandoned that war and abandoned millions of Asians to totalitarianism and death, defamed America's military, became anti-war instead of anti-evil, became anti-anti-Communist instead of anti-Communist, and embraced isolationism, a doctrine I and others previously had always associated with conservatives and the Republican Party. This change was perfectly exemplified in 1972, when the Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern ran on the platform "Come home, America."

This in turn led to the liberal embrace of the immoral doctrine of moral equivalence. As I was taught at Columbia, where I studied international relations, America was equally responsible for the Cold War, and there was little moral difference between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. They were essentially two superpowers, each looking out for its imperialist self-interest. I will never forget when the professor of my graduate seminar in advanced Communist Studies, Zbigniew Brzezinski, chided me for using the word "totalitarian" to describe the Soviet Union.

I recall, too, asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered, a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society. He said he would not.

It was therefore not surprising, only depressingly reinforcing of my view of what had happened to liberals, when liberals and Democrats condemned President Ronald Reagan for describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire."

Identifying and confronting evil remains the Achilles' heel of liberals, progressives and the rest of the left. It was not only Communism that post-Vietnam liberals refused to identify as evil and forcefully confront. Every major liberal newspaper in America condemned Israel's 1981 destruction of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor (in which one person -- a French agent there to aid the Israeli bombers, and who therefore knowingly risked his life -- was killed). As The New York Times editorialized: "Israel's sneak attack … was an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression."

Most Democrats in Congress even opposed the first Gulf War, sanctioned by the United Nations and international law, against Saddam Hussein's Iraq and its bloody annexation of Kuwait.

And today, the liberal and Democratic world's only concern with regard to Iraq, where America is engaged in the greatest current battle against organized evil, is how soon America can withdraw.

There were an even larger number of domestic issues that alienated this erstwhile liberal and Democrat. But nothing quite compares with liberal and progressive abandonment of the war against evil, the most important venture the human race must engage in every generation.

I can understand why a leftist would vote for the party not one of whose contenders for the presidency uttered the words "Islamic terror" in a single presidential debate. But I still cannot understand why a true liberal would.

Dennis Prager is a radio show host, contributing columnist for Townhall.com, and author of 4 books including Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual.

Un Escondidito de los Ateistas Fundamentalistas Puesto al Descubierto

2008-04-21T09:16:00.002-04:00

Ben Stein Exposes Richard Dawkins
By Dinesh D'Souza
Monday, April 21, 2008

In Ben Stein's new film "Expelled," there is a great scene where Richard Dawkins is going on about how evolution explains everything. This is part of Dawkins' grand claim, which echoes through several of his books, that evolution by itself has refuted the argument from design. The argument from design hold that the design of the universe and of life are most likely the product of an intelligent designer. Dawkins thinks that Darwin has disproven this argument.

So Stein puts to Dawkins a simple question, "How did life begin?" One would think that this is a question that could be easily answered. Dawkins, however, frankly admits that he has no idea. One might expect Dawkins to invoke evolution as the all-purpose explanation. Evolution, however, only explains transitions from one life form to another. Evolution has no explanation for how life got started in the first place. Darwin was very clear about this.

In order for evolution to take place, there had to be a living cell. The difficulty for atheists is that even this original cell is a work of labyrinthine complexity. Franklin Harold writes in The Way of the Cell that even the simplest cells are more ingeniously complicated than man's most elaborate inventions: the factory system or the computer. Moreover, Harold writes that the various components of the cell do not function like random widgets; rather, they work purposefully together, as if cooperating in a planned organized venture. Dawkins himself has described the cell as the kind of supercomputer, noting that it functions through an information system that resembles the software code.

Is it possible that living cells somehow assembled themselves from nonliving things by chance? The probabilities here are so infinitesimal that they approach zero. Moreover, the earth has been around for some 4.5 billion years and the first traces of life have already been found at some 3.5 billion years ago. This is just what we have discovered: it's quite possible that life existed on earth even earlier. What this means is that, within the scope of evolutionary time, life appeared on earth very quickly after the earth itself was formed. Is it reasonable to posit that a chance combination of atoms and molecules, under those conditions, somehow generated a living thing? Could the random collision of molecules somehow produce a computer?

It is ridiculously implausible to think so. And the absurdity was recognized more than a decade ago by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix. Yet Crick is a committed atheist. Unwilling to consider the possibility of divine or supernatural creation, Crick suggested that maybe aliens brought life to earth from another planet. And this is precisely the suggestion that Richard Dawkins makes in his response to Ben Stein. Perhaps, he notes, life was delivered to our planet by highly-evolved aliens. Let's call this the "ET" explanation.

Stein brilliantly responds that he had no idea Richard Dawkins believes in intelligent design! And indeed Dawkins does seem to be saying that alien intelligence is responsible for life arriving on earth. What are we to make of this? Basically Dawkins is surrendering on the claim that evolution can account for the origins of life. It can't. The issue now is simply whether a natural intelligence (ET) or a supernatural intelligence (God) created life. Dawkins can't bear the supernatural explanation and so he opts for ET. But doesn't it take as much, or more, faith to believe in extraterrestrial biology majors depositing life on earth than it does to believe in a transcendent creator?

Bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza's new book What's So Great About Christianity has just been released. His book The Enemy at Home will be published in paperback in February.

No Human Rights in Cuba

2008-04-18T11:48:00.001-04:00

Cuba and the Vatican
By ARMANDO VALLADARES
April 18, 2008; Page A16 WSJ

Pope Benedict XVI is in the midst of the first journey to America of his pontificate, and he met with President George W. Bush this week. Hopefully this visit will reinforce the need for a joint commitment to freedom in Cuba.

The Catholic Church has taken a hardline position against right-wing dictatorships. But in Cuba, the Church has been silent – or worse – ever since 1960, when Fidel Castro expelled hundreds of Catholic priests because they alerted their parishioners of the communist danger surfacing in government circles.
[Pope Benedict XVI]

In one especially shameful episode in the 1980s, Ventura, Cipriano and Eugenio García Marín and their mother entered the nunciature in Havana to ask for political asylum. Two days later they saw several priests get out of a black limousine. They were special troops from Castro's political police who entered the Holy See's diplomatic mission with the authorization and complicity of the pope's diplomats in Havana. The three brothers were executed, and their mother was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Cardinal Tarsicio Bertone's visit to Cuba this February was a different kind of outrage. In statements by the Vatican secretary of state, published by L'Osservatore Romano shortly after the cardinal's visit, the cardinal is quoted saying, contrary to historical fact, that Cuba's Catholic Church is not a "persecuted Church." He also described Cuba's universities as "renowned centers of higher education." In reality, they are sophisticated factories of atheism and apostasy.

The cardinal also said: "As we all know, Cuba's crucial problems are due to the embargo imposed by the U.S. and the economic sanctions of the European Union which slow down its development." The Vatican's chief diplomat appears to have forgotten that for almost 50 years the "crucial problem" of Cuba has been the communist regime.

Cardinal Bertone stated that the Vatican wants to encourage a dialogue between Washington and Havana that could "turn the page" in the antagonistic relations between the two governments. He added that this dialogue was also "the expectation of Cuba's president," Raul Castro. He added that he "assured [Raul Castro] that the Holy See will work hard to obtain the elimination, or at least the amelioration of the sanctions."

By pressuring the U.S. to lift the embargo, Cardinal Bertone plays the sad role of an effective ambassador of Cuban communist diplomacy. He also subverts the appraisal of Cuba's real "crucial problems" when he denounces the external embargo, while remaining silent about a communist regime that muzzles and holds in misery 11 million souls.

After the cardinal's visit, Havana promptly announced a series of cosmetic "reforms," which include financial incentives for small farmers; permitting the sale of laptop computers and cellular phones; the eventual weakening of restrictions for Cubans to travel abroad; allowing Cubans to stay in hotels, most of which have been part of Fidel Castro's abominable "tourist apartheid"; and the signing of an international agreement on social and economic rights.

But these measures may be little more than tools to facilitate Havana's ad hoc ambassador's work in Washington. Furthermore, the regime could promptly rescind such measures, just as Fidel Castro discarded previous liberalizing reforms after hoodwinking naive foreigners.

The Vatican's diplomatic behavior helps prolong the agony of my sisters and brothers in Cuba, and creates a grave problem of conscience for loyal Cuban Catholics who expect better from the pope. It in no way diminishes their veneration to express respectful disappointment and even disagreement with the Vatican.

I pray that future developments will prove wrong the concerns of so many Cuban Catholics on the island and in exile. Both the pope and President Bush have immense responsibilities before God and the Cuban people. It is my most sincere hope that they will not forget Cubans' aspirations for freedom, peace and prosperity.

Mr. Valladares, chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, spent 22 years in Cuban political prisons and served as U.S. Representative before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva from 1987 to 1990.

New Age

2008-04-14T20:09:00.000-04:00

La Relacion correcta entre Darwinismo y Ateismo

2008-04-14T10:29:00.001-04:00

Atheism Masquerading As Science
By Dinesh D'Souza Extracted from TownHall.com
Monday, April 14, 2008

The problem with evolution is not that it is unscientific but that it is routinely taught in textbooks and in the classroom in an atheist way. Textbooks frequently go beyond the scientific evidence to make metaphysical claims about how evolution renders the idea of a Creator superfluous. Here are some examples that are drawn from my recent bestseller What's So Great About Christianity.

Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson writes in his widely-assigned book On Human Nature: "If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species."

Biologist Stephen Jay Gould writes in his essay in the book Darwin's Legacy: "No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature...whatever we think of God, his existence is not manifest in the products of nature."

Douglas Futuyma asserts in his textbook Evolutionary Biology: "By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous."

Biologist William Provine writes, "Modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws...We must conclude that when we die, we die, and that is the end of us." Evolution, Provine has also said, is the "greatest engine of atheism."

In his essay on "Darwin's Revolution" in the book Creative Evolution, Francisco Ayala credits Darwin with proving that life is "the result of a natural process...without any need to resort to a Creator."

Some Christians seek to counter this atheism by trying to expose the flaws in the Darwinian account of evolution. This explains the appeal of "creation science" and the "intelligent design" (ID) movement. These critiques, however, have not made any headway in the scientific community and they have also failed whenever they have been tried in the courts.

Most Christians don't care whether the eye evolved by natural selection or whether Darwin's theories can account for macroevolution or only microevolution. What they care about is that evolution is being used to deny God as the creator. For those who are concerned about this atheism masquerading as science, there is a better way. Instead of trying to get unscientific ID theories included in the classroom, a better strategy would be to get the unscientific atheist propaganda out.

How can this be achieved?

Consider this: the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits public schools from teaching or promoting atheism in any way. How do I know this? Well, the religion clauses of the First Amendment protect the "free exercise" of religion and at the same time forbid the "establishment" of religion. Courts have routinely held that the free exercise clause protects not only religious beliefs but also the absence of religious beliefs. If you are fired from your government job because you are an atheist, your First Amendment rights have been violated. In other words, the term "religion" means not only "religion" but also "atheism."

Yet if the free exercise clause defines religion in a way that includes atheism, then the no-establishment clause must define religion in the same way. So the agencies of government are prohibited from "establishing" not only religion but also atheism. This means that just as a public school teacher cannot advocate Christianity or hand out Bibles to his students, so too public school textbooks and science teachers cannot advocate atheism.

I'd like to see Christian legal groups suing school districts for promoting atheism in the biology classroom. No need to produce creationist or ID critiques of Darwinism. All that is necessary is to parade the atheist claims that have made their way into the biology textbooks and biology lectures. The issue isn't the scientific inadequacy of evolution but the way in which it is being used to undermine religious belief and promote unbelief. If the case can be made that atheism is being advocated in any way, then the textbooks would have to be rewritten and classroom presentations changed to remove the offending material. Schools would be on notice that they cannot use scientific facts to draw metaphysical conclusions in favor of atheism.

In this way Darwinism in the public schools would no longer be a threat to religion in general or Christianity in particular.

Bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza's new book What's So Great About Christianity has just been released. His book The Enemy at Home will be published in paperback in February.

Importar esto es importar una bomba de tiempo

2008-04-09T08:10:00.000-04:00

Margaret Sanger - The self-annointed savior syndrome

2008-04-05T08:51:00.001-04:00

Margaret Sanger: The Mike Wallace Interview via kwout

Yael Naim one of Abi and I favorite singers (enjoy courtesy of cbs)

2008-03-18T22:38:00.003-04:00

Che Guevara's mith El mito de Che Guevara

2008-02-26T12:05:00.000-05:00

The Miracle of DNA

2008-02-16T12:54:00.000-05:00

StumbleVideo via kwout

Contra Arrogancia Ateistica/Against Atheistic Self rightiousness

2008-02-10T14:44:00.001-05:00

Townhall.com::Video Player via kwout

En este Año del Señor - - In Hoc Anno Domini

2007-12-24T07:24:00.000-05:00

In Hoc Anno Domini Diciembre 24, 2007

Cuando Saulo, de Tarso partió en viaje a Damasco todo el mundo estaba sumido en cadenas. Había un solo Estado, y ese era Roma. Había un amo para todos, y él era Tiberius Caesar.

En todos lados había orden civil, porque el brazo de la ley romana era poderoso. En todos lados había estabilidad, en gobierno y en sociedad, porque los centuriones aseguraban que fuera así

Pero por todas partes también había algo más,. Había opresión -- para aquellos que no eran los amigos de Tiberius Caesar. Estaba el colector de impuesto para tomar el grano de los campos y el lino del huso, para alimentar las legiones o para llenar las arcas hambrientas del Estado Romano del cual "el divino Caesar" repartía con generosidad a la gente. Estaba el empresario para encontrar a reclutas para los circos. Había verdugos para acallar a aquellos que el emperador decidía. ¿Para que servia el hombre sino para servir al Caesar?

Había persecución de los hombres que se atrevían a pensar diferentemente, que oían voces extrañas o leían extraños manuscritos. Los hombres cuyas tribus no venían de Roma eran esclavizados, Aquellos que no tenían una apariencia familiar eran tratados con desdeño. Y sobretodo, había por todas partes un desprecio por la vida humana. ¿Qué significaba un hombre más o un hombre menos en un mundo repleto de gente?

Entonces, repentinamente, apareció una luz en el mundo, y un hombre de Galilea pregonando, "rinde a Caesar las cosas que son del Caesar y a Dios las cosas que son de Dios".

Y la voz de Galilea, desafiando al Caesar, ofrecía un nuevo Reino en el cual cada hombre podría caminar en rectitud sin doblegarse a ninguno solamente a Dios. "De cierto os digo que en cuanto lo hicisteis á uno de estos mis hermanos, á mí lo hicisteis"

Y él envió estas buenas noticias del Reino del Hombre en los extremos más remotos de la tierra.

Así la luz vino al mundo y los hombres que vivían en oscuridad se asustaron, y ellos intentaron bajar una cortina de modo que los hombres aun creyeran que la salvación viene de los líderes.

Mientras tanto sucedió que en varios lugares la verdad llego a liberar a los hombres, aun cuando los hombres de la oscuridad se ofendieran y trataran de apagar la luz. La voz dijo, "Apúrate. Camina mientras tienes la luz, no vaya a ser que la oscuridad te cubra, por que el que camina en oscuridad no sabe a donde va".

A lo largo del camino a Damasco la luz brilló intensamente. Pero después Pablo, de Tarso, estuvo temeroso hasta el dolor. Él temió que otros Caesars, otros profetas, pudiera un día persuadir a los hombres, que el hombre no es nada excepto un sirviente de ellos, y que los hombres vendieran su derecho de descendencia divina por un plato de lentejas y caminaran no más en libertad.

Que pudiera entonces suceder que la oscuridad se estableciera nuevamente sobre las tierras y se quemaran libros y los hombres pensaran solamente en que es lo que habría para comer o vestir, Prestándole atención solamente a nuevos Caesars y a los falsos profetas. Que pudiera entonces suceder incluso que los hombres no dirigieran su mirada al cielo para ver una estrella de invierno en el Este, y una vez más, no habría luz en la oscuridad.

Así Pablo, el apóstol del Hijo del Hombre, hablo a sus hermanos, los Galatenses, las palabras con las cuales el nos hace recordar cada año del Señor:

"ESTAD, pues, firmes en la libertad con que Cristo nos hizo libres, y no volváis otra vez á ser presos en el yugo de servidumbre".

-------

In Hoc Anno Domini

December 24, 2007

When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.

Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.

But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression -- for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?

There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.

And the voice from Galilee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent this gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.

So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that man would still believe salvation lay with the leaders.

But it came to pass for a while in divers places that the truth did set man free, although the men of darkness were offended and they tried to put out the light. The voice said, Haste ye. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you, for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.

Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterward Paul of Tarsus, too, was sore afraid. He feared that other Caesars, other prophets, might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom.

Then might it come to pass that darkness would settle again over the lands and there would be a burning of books and men would think only of what they should eat and what they should wear, and would give heed only to new Caesars and to false prophets. Then might it come to pass that men would not look upward to see even a winter's star in the East, and once more, there would be no light at all in the darkness.

And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:

“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage”.

Tony Blair revela su fe en Cristo

2007-12-02T19:52:00.000-05:00

Terrible Abuso de los Derechos Humanos en Venezuela

2007-12-01T23:31:00.000-05:00