Dan’s posting was so simple and important, I wanted to repeat it and reinforce that I completely agree!

Still, however, all too many remain fixated not just on the color of our skin, but on any identifying characteristic which separates us from the “norm.”  And perhaps because that characteristic put us in a disfavored class, we reply by becoming proud of our difference.

With gay people, the pride replaces the shame previous generations thoughts about our difference. Perhaps, had I come of age a decade or so before I did, I might feel proud to be gay, but I don’t.  I’m not ashamed of it.  It’s just part of who I am.  One characteristic among many.

How true, Dan.  This is another example of how left-wing identity politics is turning America into a “Balkanized Iraq-like” nation day-by-day.  We must stem the tide and all become AMERICANS again.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Glenn Reynolds:

It seems to me that President Carter has earned his place as if not the worst president in history, the worst president of the 20th Century.

DNC promises ‘rain of hellfire’

(H/t:  Hot Air)

Drudge linked earlier today to a YouTube video of a protester at an Obama campaign stop town hall meeting yelling a-la Joe Wilson “You Lie!” and being drowned out by hoots and yells. Eventually he’s led out of the arena by security, all the while suffering the slings and arrows of the sheep there to hear Big Brother pronounce. The spectacle is uncomfortable. The lone man speaking truth to power, the seemingly glazed-over adorers of The One mercilessly thrashing him (and even stealing his hat at one point) on his way out. Kinda pathetic. Here it is, but before you view it, take a second and carefully listen to what the president is saying:

Notice anything curious? Well, as in any campaign stop health care discussion, it’s a boilerplate speech that’s delivered over and over to audiences regardless of the venue. And yes, you heard the same lame story about the masectomy lady from Texas last week during the president’s stump speech address to the Joint Session of Congress. Here’s what’s actually curious about it: He’s still using it even though it’s a lie.

Check this out:

The woman’s testimony at the June 16 hearing confirms that her surgery was delayed several months. It also suggests that the dermatologist’s chart may have described her skin condition as precancerous, that the insurer also took issue with an apparent failure to disclose an earlier problem with an irregular heartbeat, and that she knowingly underreported her weight on the application.

Keep on-a lyin’, Mr. President. The old-school media sure as hell ain’t going to call you on it. Sheesh.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

(P.S., I’m leaving out this doozy: “We are the only nation on earth that leaves millions of people without health insurance.” I’ll give it that he either misread the teleprompter misspoke or was just being a drama queen.)

Given the attempts by many on the left to discredit opponents of Obamacare by tarring them as racists, it does seem so many people are so fixated on race that they assume anyone objecting to the policies of a black politician must needs be racist.  And yet, as America moves away from the ugly legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, more and more of us have come to share the vision of Dr. King’s great dream that we be judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.

Still, however, all too many remain fixated not just on the color of our skin, but on any identifying characteristic which separates us from the “norm.”  And perhaps because that characteristic put us in a disfavored class, we reply by becoming proud of our difference.

With gay people, the pride replaces the shame previous generations thoughts about our difference. Perhaps, had I come of age a decade or so before I did, I might feel proud to be gay, but I don’t.  I’m not ashamed of it.  It’s just part of who I am.  One characteristic among many.

I got to thinking about this notion again when I was reading Tom Maguire’s commentary on the hullabaloo over a recent Rush Limbaugh parody (inspired by a Newsweek article on race).  He offers an excerpt from the piece:

That leads to the question that everyone wonders but rarely dares to ask. If “black pride” is good for African-American children, where does that leave white children? It’s horrifying to imagine kids being “proud to be white.”

So, I wondered why we still dwell on such notions of ethnic pride.  It is a good thing to be aware of our heritage and the traditions and accomplishments of our forebears and peers.  But, sometimes it seems the notion of pride causes us to dwell on the identity of which we are proud and make it the very focus of our being.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Young Padawan offers:  “It’s interesting the idea that once what separated people was the shame of being different but now it’s changed to the pride of being different.”

Via Megan McArdle, I learn of another self-important utterance from Andrew Sullivan.  Where I once had read his blog on a regular basis, now I only learn of his thoughts when I chance across them in posts by conservative and, as in the current case, libertarian bloggers.  This time, Andrew misrepresents both conservatives and the reasons the “conservative coalition” no longer embraces him:

Unlike many of these tea-partiers and their supporters, I actually took on the Bush administration’s big government tendencies, fiscal recklessness and massive expansion of executive power at the time (and was largely cast out of the conservative coalition as a result). I opposed the Medicare prescription drug benefit as unaffordable – and no one can argue that what looks like the current healthcare reform would cripple future finances as profoundly as that Bush entitlement.

I’ll leave it to McArdle for a much defter analysis of legislation than I could ever offer of Andrew’s last point.  (Read her post; it’s quite good.)  Like her, indeed, like many conservatives, I opposed the prescription drug benefit.

But, Andrew is wrong to suggest he was “cast out” of the conservative coalition for standing up to Bush’s “fiscal recklessness.”  Only in his own imagination (and that of a number of left-wingers) were all conservatives complicit in and supportive of Bush’s domestic spending spree.

Indeed, in a matter of 30 minutes in April, I came up with a list of ten posts (9 from 2006 alone) where we criticized the GOP on spending in Bush Era.  And we were far from alone.  Bloggers like Stephen Green, R.S. McCain, Dan Riehl and Glenn Reynolds (to name the four whose names come most readily to mind) took Bush to task in the same manner Andrew once did.  Not to mention the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal.

I’m sure our readers with little thought and a few quick keystrokes can come up with even more. (more…)

One of the truly great thinkers of the right, Irving Kristol, died in Washington at the age of 89.   Known as the “godfather” of neo-conservatism, his ideas influenced many on the right, including yours truly.

Had more people understood his ideas, neo-conservatism would be in better repute.

Our sympathy goes out to his widow, the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, his son Wiliam Kristol, his daughter Elizabeth.

AFTERTHOUGHT:  He, like my great Aunt Ruth Friedman died on Erev  Roshanah, the last day of the Jewish year.  May we take the memory of his good deeds and great ideas with us into the new year.

John Podhoretz offers a wonderful tribute to this great man at Commentary Contentions.

Welcome Instapundit Readers!  Thanks readers for catching the mega-typo in the first paragraph, since fixed.  Yes, I did mean, “blue” states.

One of the reasons I’ve been bullish on Republican chances against incumbent Democratic Senators in such red blue states as California, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin in next fall’s elections, not to mention purple states like Colorado and Nevada (as well as red states like North Dakota) is that in 1992 and 1996, Ross Perot ran better in each state (save California and Colorado in 1996) than he did nationwide.  Indeed, in 1992, he ran above 20% in all of those states, capturing nearly one-quarter of the vote in Colorado, Oregon and Washington and exceeding that mark in Nevada.

To be sure, demographics have changed somewhat in the intervening years, but the primary appeal of Perot’s campaign, deficits spiraling out of control, remains salient, given the recent expansion in the federal government undertaken by President Obama and the 111th Congress.

And while I have shared this theory with friends, I have yet to blog on it.  Steve Chapman (via Glenn) beat me to the punch in an excellent column on the renewed relevance of the “short, crew-cut scold with a thick twang and a cranky manner“:

. . . his complaints about Washington’s chronic overspending struck a chord with the public. A few months before the election, he was leading both incumbent George H.W. Bush and challenger Bill Clinton in the polls.

Despite Perot’s loss, Chapman believes (and I agree)

His candidacy was not for nothing. It created a new awareness of a risky fiscal policy that, in Perot’s words, was “robbing future generations.” It caused Americans to consider whether fiscal indiscipline was defensible on either economic or moral terms. And it sowed the legitimate fear that deficits would be fatal to prosperity. . . .

Obama’s expensive ambitions have brought the issue back to center stage. He vows to cut the deficit in half. But under his budget blueprint, the government would accumulate some $7 trillion in new debt over the next decade.

With the deficit issue back at center stage, those Perot voters (and their younger ideological kin concerned about their future) will think twice before voting for the incumbent party this fall.  And they may, as they did in 1994, vote for Republican congressional candidates in 2010.  In Washington State which has not gone Republican in a presidential election since the Reagan landslide of 1984, voters elected Republicans to fill 7 of their 9 House seats.

A wave similar to the, which removed the then-Democratic House Speaker from his Spokane-based seat in eastern Washington, could surely topple Patty Murray.

With the spending/deficit issue continuing to gain traction, Republicans could benefit merely by being the party out of power.  The idea which rallied many to the cantankerous Texan could well rally many against the party of the righteous Illinoisian.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Liberty Jane writes (and I pretty much agree), “The Republicans have to embrace a non-establishment candidate. (Something of a non-career politician — someone who has done other things in his or her life).”  There’s lots more good stuff in the comments, so I encourage y’all to peruse them and consider the responses.  Delighted that my post generated such thoughtful discussion.

toad echoes the point of my post in his succinct remarks:

The interesting thing is not Ross Perot or some other third party candidate but the issue Perot raised. If someone(s) on the Republican side would/could emphasize it it in the same way that Perot did, it could cost the Democrats dearly in 2010.

I’m assuming he means the deficit.

While the percentage of Americans identifying as Democrats has been in steady decline since President Obama’s inauguration, the number of Republicans has remained virtually unchanged.  To be sure, there has been a substantial increase in Republican-leaning independents (and a considerable decrease in Democratic-leaning independents).

The trend lines for the GOP among independents provide a sign of hope for the party, but not yet where they need to be if the party wants to recapture the congressional majority next year (which, I believe, remains within the realm of possibility).  The key issue for Republicans, as shown in that Gallup poll cited above, is why those independents leaning to the GOP have not yet declared themselves Republicans.  (Maybe it’s only a question of time.  Maybe it’s ideas.

And we need figure out how we can get those Democrats leaving their party to join the GOP.

They should start by sitting down with California Assemblyman John Arambula (I-Fresno).  Initially elected as a Democrat, Arambula, “the son of migrant farmworkers,” had been a thorn in the side of party leaders.  In 2006, “then-Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez ordered Arambula to move into the Assembly’s ‘doghouse,’ a shoe-box-sized Capitol office often reserved for lawmakers in disfavor with their party’s leader.”

He has been most at odds with his former party over budget issues, refusing to vote for additional revenues until legislators “had done everything we can to reduce (state government) costs.”  He has also faulted Democratic legislators for having to run everything by public employee unions.  Like a certain successful Democratic presidential candidate, he’s expressed concern about the influence of special interests, but unlike that politician, he doesn’t seem to be beholden to them.

Still, he refuses to identify as a Republican.  And before he retires from public service next year, Republicans need to find out why.  Perhaps, it is his willingness to raise taxes should lawmakers make spending cuts.  Perhaps, it’s something else.

At least in talking to him, Republicans can learn what the party needs to do to attract men like him, dissatisfied with the direction his former party has been taking.

Given the high percentage of Americans who are satisfied with the current health care, it’s no wonder that polls have repeatedly shown (at least since this summer) that we prefer the status quo to the various health care plans proposed by President Obama and the Democrats.  In July, Rasmussen found that a plurality opposed health care reforms which would require a tax hike (as does the Baucus plan which emerged earlier this week, with a solid majority disapproving if the reforms would change their current plan:

Given a choice between health care reform and a tax hike or no health care reform and no tax hike, 47% would prefer to avoid the tax hike and do without reform. Forty-one percent (41%) take the opposite view.

The opposition is stronger when asked about a choice between health care reform that would require changing existing health insurance coverage or no health care reform and no change from current coverage. In that case, voters oppose reform by a 54% to 32% margin.

A new FoxNews poll offers a similar result:

More Americans would rather Congress do nothing than pass Obama’s plan: 46 percent to 37 percent of people polled say they prefer the current health care system to the one the president has proposed.

Not just that, “more people oppose — 48 percent — the health care reform legislation being considered right now than favor it — 38 percent.”  Interestingly, this poll seems to skew more pro-Obama than the most recent Gallup poll, with Fox showing the President enjoyed a 54 percent approval rating while Gallup pegs him at 51.   (more…)

Oftentimes, in L.A., you’ll see an aging Volvo or a new Prius sporting a “Free Tibet” bumper sticker, often alongside a sticker promoting a Democratic candidate or left-wing cause.  It seems the many Buddhists in this town ally themselves (at least politically) with the other left-wing denizens of this burg.

Wonder how they’ll react when they read this (if the media bothers to report it):

A new low: Obama refuses to meet with the Dalai Lama to avoid offending the Chinese, gaining the distinction as the only one to break the string of presidential visits dating back to George H.W. Bush. Does he really imagine that the Chinese will give him brownie points for this? Apparently, setting off a trade war over tires is fine (well, Big Labor wanted it), but a visit with the Dalai Lama is too great a “risk” for Obama. You can’t say his priorities aren’t clear.

This is as bad as one of the biggest blunders of the Ford Administration.

Commenting on Obama’s refusal, Michael Goldfarb offers:

Instead of standing up for human rights, cultural autonomy, and the long-suffering Tibetan people, Obama kowtowed to Beijing. Maybe if his name were Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il or Assad, Tibet’s leader could get a White House meeting.

In May 2005, trying to back away from his statement earlier that year that he hated “Republicans and everything they stand for,” then-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean claimed those remarks were “a little out of context.”  He then went on to tell us what he really hated:

But I don’t hate Republicans as individuals.  But I hate what the Republicans are doing to this country.  I really do.  I hate deficits, as you know.  When I was governor, I really was very tough on fiscal responsibility.  Deficits in the long run aren’t good for the country, and they do lower our standard of living.  Every American family knows that you have to pay your bills.  I hate the dishonesty, you know, the idea that you’d put a program through Congress without telling people what it costs, I think that’s wrong.

Emphasis added.

Now, that it’s his party is racking up record deficits, I wonder if the former Vermont Governor still harbors such an animus against deficit spending.  And while President Obama may be telling us how much the proposed health care overhaul costs, he, well, hasn’t really explained how he plans on paying for it.  Wonder if Mr. Dean finds that dishonest or just plain disingenuous.  Or whether it’s okay now that the Democrats are doing it.

Please note the chart below.  When Mr. Dean told Americans he hated deficits, we were on the gray side of the chart.  Now, we’re on the red (the White House having last month altered its estimate. meaning we should remove the pink).

Maybe the bigger deficits get, the less Mr. Dean hates them.

So, now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi laments the coarsening of our political discourse.  Guess she wasn’t listening when her fellow House Democrats booed President George W. Bush when he delivered the constitutionally-sanctioned State of the Union address in 2005.

(H/t Riehl World Review*)

Did Mrs. Pelosi ever lament the decline of civility when her political allies and members of her own partisan caucus leveled harsh criticisms against the then-President, with her own party chairman boasting that he hated Republicans.  (If you have links to Nancy Pelosi chastising Bush-haters when that good man, but flawed leader, served in the White House, please let me know so I can update this post accordingly.)

Indeed, has the Speaker even taken issue with her political allies who have been stirring up “political violence” in recent months?

. . . it’s coming from the unions. And from ObamaCare supporters, such as the protester in Tucson who elbowed a man to the head after disrupting a Tea Party forum. The incitement is coming from groups supporting ObamaCare like HCAN, who trains their followers on how to disrupt town-hall forums and create turmoil.

And she has the audacity to claim that it is her party trying to “restore civility in Washington.”

Physician, heal thyself.  (Just do it before Obamacare takes effect so you can avoid the red tape.)

* (more…)

President Barack Obama, 5 April, 2009:

“As long as the threat [to Eastern Europe] of Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost effective and proven.”

17 September, 2009: “AP NewsBreak: Nuke agency says Iran can make bomb”

17 September, 2009: “U.S. scraps [Eastern European] missile defense shield plans”.

Nevermind.

Oh, and for the record, I’ve already heard the Obamaphile talking points about the parsing of “cost-effective and proven”. Hmm: 19 June, 2009: “Hawaii getting anti-missile defense system after North Korea test threat“. Good enough for his home state, not for our allies in Eastern Europe.

Perhaps there wasn’t enough incentive to throw Hawaii to the wolves? 17 September, 2009: “ANALYSIS-US firms, others may gain from shield pullback“. (By the way, one of these firms is the Obama flag-waving GE.)

But at least all those bad old days of Blackwater and irresponsible foreign policy that only made us weaker are behind us now, no?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

UPDATE (from Dan);  Seems Democrats are none too happy:

What are you getting? You’re getting the same thing you got when he sold out Honduras to Chavez over that non-coup “coup” they staged: The warm fuzzy glow of knowing that George Bush would heartily disapprove.

Finding a “remarkable level of anger toward Barack Obama in a lot of our recent polling so for New Jersey,” Tom Jensen writes that his outfit Public Policy Polling “decided to go a step further in determining how extreme some people’s feelings are about the President and asked respondents if they think he is the Anti-Christ.”

The numbers, he found, were “eye popping:” “8% said yes. 13% aren’t sure. Among Republicans 14% said yes and 15% weren’t sure.”

To be sure, he did point out that “extremism in New Jersey isn’t limited to the right though. 19% of voters in the state, including 32% of Democrats, think that George W. Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11.”   Delving further into the poll, Allahpundit finds “that the split among Democrats on Trutherism is almost a mirror image of the split among Republicans on Birtherism.”

All this got me wondering to what extent Jensen and other pollsters explored the extremity of some people’s feelings about the President when a Republican served in the White House.

These numbers threw a few left-wing bloggers in a tizzy, as if this were the proof they needed to show that conservatives really were nutjobs.  Yet, I grant we do have some nutjobs in our midst.  I even talked to a truther at one of the Tea Parties I attended.  But, look, there are nutjobs on both sides, as one left-of-center blogger, perusing the same poll acknowledged, “only 48% of Jersey Republicans who definitively are not Birthers, and 49% of Dems who are officially not Truthers. Don’t you just love our polarized politics?”

Indeed, despite the handful of whackos I met at the Tea Parties, I’ve been impressed the overall civility of the crowds.  Yet, it seems that all too many in the media wish to feature the most extreme signs which, at a really with hundreds of thousands, if not a million, participants, you’re bound to find.

While there are, as this poll shows, extremes on both sides of the political aisle, the media does seem to dwell on those on the right and downplay those on the left.

UPDATE: In a good piece on the phenomenon referencing in the concluding paragraphs, Nice Deb offers:

Members of the left-wing media (we no longer call them MSM) go out of their way to seek out the more extreme members of conservative protests, and then those are often grossly mischaracterized as this black gun aficionado was on MSNBC.

Tea party critics in the media are appalled by the Obama/Hitler comparisons which are done primarily by Democrat Lyndon LaRouche supporters.

Where were these critics during the Bush years, when Bush was compared to Hitler on an almost daily basis by the left? What was one of the left’s favorite nicknames for President Bush? Bushitler?

Where was the media when protesters’ signs reflected their demented, violent, deathwishes against the President?

Where was Nancy Pelosi?  Read the whole thing!

The worst President in U.S History (well at least since the Civil War), perhaps the only U.S. President since the Civil Rights movement to have won an election by making explicitly racist appeals to white voters, is once again accusing of Obama critics of racism,  He does realize that if he wants anyone to pay attention to him, he has to attack conservatives.

And now, we’ve got another media outlet following in Anderson Cooper’s footsteps (you know, the footsteps that lead to poor ratings), devoting an entire segment to accusations in a similar vein.

Yeah, there has been some harsh and nasty rhetoric at some of the rallies against big government, but there was even more harsh, nasty and mean-spirited rhetoric at the rallies in the first eight years of the current decade protesting the then-President. Wonder if ABC News ran any segments on the hatred at those rallies, speculating that the opposition was driven in part by a refusal to accept a Republican President.

And wonder if Anderson Cooper (or anyone at CNN) ran a story on the “Communist Factor” at anti-Bush rallies, given that they had closer ties to Communism than the anti-big government rallies have to racism. A “major organizer” of a great many of those protests was International ANSWER, little more than Communist-front organization.

Would the House have joined the Senate today in voting to deny ACORN federal funding if James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles had conducted a different, less prurient kind of “sting” operation, posing not as pimp and prostitute, but instead as a deadbeat Dad and his new wife, trying to get help buying a home, despite his past backruptcies, delinquent child support payments and bad credit report.

In short, without the sexual angle, would the latest ACORN scandal have attracted any notice?

For much longer the past year, conservative editorial pages, newsmagazines, websites, blogs and even the inerior pages of major dailies have been rife with stories of corruption, mismanagement and malfeasance at this left-wing organization.  We’ve read of embezzlement, money shuffling, vote fraud, racketeering.  Just last week, “arrest warrants were issued” in Florida for 11 workers hired by ACORN “on charges of voter registration fraud.”

And yet none of these stories stirred the popular imagination or registered outside the domains of conservative blogs (and other right-of-center circles).  Now, a guy poses as a pimp, looking for the left-wing organization’s help in setting up a brothel and even Jon Stewart takes notice.  The Senate votes to deny the group federal funding, the House follows suit.  The President tries to distance himself from the organization whose support he eagerly embraced and whose coffers his campaign generously filled.

Our lesson of the day?  Sex sells.

UPDATE:   (more…)

Is it just me, or maybe this notion is just my expression of an idea that has been cropping up in the various blogs I read and news/opinion sites I frequent?

Does it strike other people as presumptuous that with all his pontificating on health care,* the President still hasn’t come forward with a particular plan with specific details of what he intends to do.  Instead of legislation (or even a draft of his speech), he delivered a laminated copy of talking points to the legislators assembled to hear his address last week.

With a plan, he could show clearly that this or that provision is not in the bill.   And those who oppose the overhaul could identify the particular provisions which concern them.

Yes, I know that today we’re celebrating Constitution Day and it took the delegates an entire summer to hammer out the Constitution, but those pressing for ratification did not do so until after the delegates had agreed on a final document.  I know the situations are different. But, one thing is the same, if you’re going to ask for popular support, shouldn’t you have a particular plan you want people to support?

* (more…)

Today, September 17, 2009 is Constitution Day, marking the 222nd anniversary of the signing of the United States Constitution in Philadelphia.  Given the concerns expressed by the delegates from the various states assembled in the summer of 1787, that they could agree on a framework for a federal government is truly remarkable.

About this remarkable accomplishment, the distinguished historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote in “Postscript: Philadelphia 1787“*

What happened in Philadelphia that summer was the culminating achievement of the Enlightenment in America, if not the world.  Fifty-five men agreed on a way of government that has been more successful in almost every way than any other in a thousand years and more.  Yes, the members of the Constitutional Convention all had their special interests to protect, among them the interests of slaveholders, not among them the interests of slaves.  But they listened to each other.  They reasoned together.  And what they did was not unreasonable.  It worked.  It still works.

In his essay, Morgan shows how remarkable this accomplishment was not by the traditional means.  He doesn’t commend James Madison for his design, doesn’t praise George Washington for his skill in presiding over the proceedings.  He doesn’t detail how they delegates worked out the Great Compromise, creating a bicameral legislature which different means of selection for the representatives in each, to address the concerns of the small and big states .  Nor does he elucidate the advantages of the separation of powers.

Instead, he looks to the popular mood that summer in the City of Philadelphia to show just how great were the odds against which the Framers labored.  He details the story of woman accused of being a witch to suggest that certain superstitions ran deep in post-Revolutionary America.

While laws against witchcraft had been repealed in 1736, “belief in witchcraft,” Morgan wrote, “could not be repealed.  Fear of witchcraft continued, and so did popular methods of detecting and dealing with witches.”

Indeed, the very day James Madison arrived in Philadelphia, a woman named Korbmacher was attacked for being a witch; she “applied to the authorities for protection.”  Two months later, on July 10 to be precise, while “America’s great men sat in solemn conclave, working out the compromise that saved the union,” an “ignorant and inhuman mob” kidnapped this poor woman and carried her through the streets where she “was hooted and pelted as she passed along.”  She died eight days later.

The juxtaposition of her torment and the drafting of the Constitution leads Morgan to conclude:

. . . the episode did not seem as bizarre to people of the time as it does to us.  The year 1787 was less than a century from 1692 [year of Salem witch trials].  It is worth reminding ourselves that Benjamin Franklin once spoke with Cotton Mather.  He and the other fifty-four men who labored n the State House that summer may have been working against greater odds that we have realized.

Emphasis added.  Theirs really was a remarkable accomplishment.  The framework of government they established still functions.  As we celebrate the Constitution today, let us remember those great men, the odds they faced and the obstacles they overcame.  Let us salute in particular James Madison who designed the document and George who presided over the deliberations, keeping order amidst contentious parties.

Would that we had their like today.

* (more…)

While the President may claim doctors back his plan to overhaul the nation’s health care system, a recent poll tells an entirely different story:

Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted, a new IBD/TIPP Poll has found.

The poll had a pretty large sample size, “with 1,376 practicing physicians chosen randomly throughout the country taking part.”  And it corresponds to what I’ve heard from the doctors I know, with most (but not all) opposed to the various Democratic plans.

Maybe they’re aware of the problems in Massachusetts.

The poll offers this disturbing statistic: 45% of doctors would consider quitting under Obamacare.  Guess that means not all of us will get to keep our doctor.  I doubt most major news outlets will pick up this poll, but given the new media, this information will out.