Have you seen the new commercial with Heather Graham promoting universal health care? In it, Heather races a bunch of fat, lazy people in what appears to be the 100-yard dash. The lovely and lithe Heather represents The Public Option (it says so on her race tag). The lovable but lazy fat people represent the private health insurance market.
I love this commercial produced by MoveOn.org, for both the obvious and more subtle reasons. But let’s get right to the subtle reasons since they’re, well… subtle.
MoveOn got the symbolism backwards, which is always awesome. In my dealings with government at the local, state and federal levels, I’ve never had the “Heather Graham” experience. I’ve certainly had the “Jabba the Hut” experience, and I don’t expect that will change in the near future.
Has any government program ever conjured up the image of a fleet-footed goddess? I’ve repeatedly encountered this figurative goddess in the private market, but never in the public sector, where I always run into the bloated Star Wars figure… Boonowa tweepie, Han Solo! Ha ha ha ha ha!
I’m also huge fan of the old “do as I say, not as I do” mentality, particularly when it comes from pampered, filthy rich celebrities. In this case, Heather promotes the idea that we – “we” being the unwashed, non-celebrity masses – should be part of a rationed system in which we may or may not get the treatment we need.
Meanwhile, Heather and her peers will still receive the finest health care the world has to offer. Having loads of money tends to shield you from the consequences of your pet social engineering projects. “Let them wait in line!” will join “Let them drive clown cars!” as the rallying cries for our 21st Century Marie Antoinettes.
How I enjoy being told by celebrities to grin and bear it while they merely grin it! They know what’s best for us… and for them. I may not get that MRI for two years, but I should feel so much better that I’m being forced by the state to make sacrifices for the common good as we edge ever closer to Utopia.
Though we all know Utopia is really a small town in Texas, Heather Graham’s Utopia includes making sure that I can’t have what she has. Nor does any American, other than those who are Graham-approved, have the opportunity to have what she has.
Socialists from the beginning have always pitted the haves against the have-nots; it’s how they agitate for socialist “reform” and revolution. The great irony of this tactic, that’s maybe less ironic and more purposeful, is how power and wealth tends to accumulate in fewer hands in these Utopian systems. Oh well, at least I’ll be able to stand in line with the rest of the proletariat.
One more postmortem on the Cash for Clunkers program… The American taxpayer paid $24,000 per car. According to Bill Adams, spokesman for the Department of Transportation the program was “wildly successful.” It is scary what government officials deem as “wildly successful.”
The Cash for Clunkers program gave car buyers rebates of up to $4,500 if they traded in less fuel-efficient vehicles for new vehicles that met certain fuel economy requirements. A total of $3 billion was allotted for those rebates.
The average rebate was $4,000. But the overwhelming majority of sales would have taken place anyway at some time in the last half of 2009, according to Edmunds.com. That means the government ended up spending about $24,000 each for those 125,000 additional vehicle sales.
The Cash for Clunkers program is very simple. Well, at least compared to health care. The simple lesson to be learned here is that if the government cannot manage a program like this effectively, how is government run-health care going to work in the long run?
Thanks in part to Cash for Clunkers third quarter GDP growth was 3.5%. Growth was a modest 1.9% without the Cash for Clunkers program. GDP should be lower in the fourth quarter without the government propping it up.
One year after the 2008 election, one thing is certain: the average American voter is center-right. After Obama’s win, many pundits and bloggers opined about how America had moved left. In reality, Obama’s election was more about a rejection of eight years of Bush, not to mention the rejection of a boring, moderate McCain campaign. Now that the Democrats are in power their coalition is falling apart. The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg makes some good points about this phenomenon:
The Democratic Party’s leaders are a lot more liberal than their voters (the dynamic is even more true when it comes to committee chairs who are to the left of the average Democratic congressmen). The Democrats came into power in 2008 thinking they had a huge mandate for liberalism, when they really had a huge mandate for competence (for want of a better word). Obama and his coterie misunderstood this. They used a lot of “pragmatic” rhetoric, but they governed from the left, starting with the calamitous stimulus bill. Obama’s personal popularity is still sustaining him, but it seems to me that the Democratic Party missed an enormous opportunity. I don’t think they’re doomed or anything like that. But, they’ve managed to rebrand themselves as a very liberal party again, and that’s a problem when 80% of Americans don’t describe themselves as liberals.
Gallup released a new poll measuring ideological groups in America. There’s nothing really startling about the poll. It’s relatively unchanged over the last two decades. Liberals enjoyed a small jump toward the end of the Bush years, but have settled back to 20%. Goldberg is correct; Obama and the Democrats cannot maintain a winning coalition governing from the left. Obama will most certainly tack to the center at some point or risk a reelection nightmare.
Simply moving to the center will be more difficult for Obama than it was for Clinton. President Clinton campaigned for a few centrist ideas. The cornerstone issue for Clinton was welfare reform. When Clinton ran for reelection his most significant first-term achievement was something Republicans wanted. In 1996 the economy was doing better and Clinton has taken a valuable campaign issue from the Republicans. Obama doesn’t have any popular centrist plans. The President is unwilling to adopt any health care reform ideas from the right. Instead, Obama contrasts his opponents as having no ideas.
The President was able to run as a moderate in the last election because no one was willing to look at his record. Obama basically won by default against an old Republican who refused to differentiate himself in a winning year for Democrats. Even if the economy bounces back 2012 will not be a cake walk. Al Gore ran for president in 2000 when the economy was doing well and Clinton was still popular and lost. The economy was doing well in 2004, but Bush didn’t win handily against Kerry. The nation is still divided. Obama’s best hope is the rise of a third-party candidate to drain votes from the Republicans. Since the Republicans do not have a leader and there’s populist unrest within both parties a third-party candidate is becoming more likely. Who will it be?
Dances with Wolves is a classic movie. In 1990, Kevin Costner starred and directed the film that went on to win 7 Academy Awards. The film was such a hit it catapulted Costner into super stardom. Unfortunately the next movie Costner chose to do was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
About a month ago I purchased a Blu-Ray player that connects to the internet. This is awesome because Netflix streams movies. So I decided to revisit Costner’s Robin Hood. I should say that I’m a huge fan of the 1938 the Adventures of Robin Hood. Errol Flynn is amazing and the story is great. That brings me back to the 1991 travesty that is Prince of the Thieves.
Prince of Thieves has everything. It has an American playing Robin Hood and Morgan Freeman playing a Muslim Moor. This allows the film to make social commentary about religion and race. I have often wondered how 15th century England would accept a Moor. Thankfully Azeem speaks perfect English. Sadly all these politically correct public service announcements cause the film to drag for over two hours. Now it’s easy to pick on the accents. Accents don’t really bother me that much. The problem here is Costner just isn’t a believable Robin Hood. Did I mention Christian Slater is inexplicably in the movie?
As time passes Prince of Thieves does not age well. It’s too long, poorly acted, and the cast is terrible. I assume this part of the reason that Ridley Scott has his own Robin Hood movie coming out next year starting Russell Crowe. Will it be any better? I’m not sure I buy Crowe as Robin Hood either, but I’ll wait until I see the finished product. He can’t be any worse than Kevin Costner.
I can’t believe it’s almost November. It’s been one year since Obama won the election and became the first Democrat to win 50% of the vote since LBJ. Many pundits at the time speculated that a shift in American politics had occurred. I argued that Obama ran as moderate and people were so fed up with Bush and the Republicans they bought it. Well, Obama has governed from the left and let the Congress rule.
The economy more than anything else is gnawing away at support for the President and of the Congress. There are two high profile off term elections. The most notable is the race for governor in Virginia.
Intrade odds is a prediction market on elections. It’s kind of crazy but it’s typically spot on when it come to predicting election outcomes.
Republican candidate Bob McDonnell will easily win the Virginia’s governor’s race (94.9% probability), and the Democratic candidate Jon Corzine will likely win in New Jersey (63% probability in recent trading, more than double the 30% odds on October 1) in a 3-way race including an independent candidate, although recent polling shows the two leading candidates in a statistical dead heat.
The fact that McDonnell isn’t facing much of a challenge in Virginia isn’t good news for Democrats. The Democrats have done very well the past two cycles in Virginia and it’s part of the reason they’ve done well nationally. New Jersey is a sad race. Governor Corzine is terribly unpopular and cozy with corruption; however, he’s a Democrat in a very blue state. I expect Corzine to win, and New Jersey to continue to be a source of jokes about corruption.
If McConnell wins in a landslide it could scare many Democrats over the next six months. The Democrats need the economy to bounce back before the mid-terms or it could be an election slaughter.
Here is something a little lighter for the weekend.
No one knew who John Guerra was before today. He was a small time journalist at Key News in Key West, FL. Evidently a press release from Connie Mack set Guerra over the edge. Now these kind of ideological meltdowns happen on all sides of the spectrum. What makes this noteworthy is the fact Guerra is a journalist.
The Republican Party is now a mentally ill group of people who want nothing more than to destroy Obama’s first term no matter how much the country needs his policies. I despise your party’s activities and the hatred you spew on Fox and other sounding boards for the insurance companies.
Please don’t you dare get him killed, which is the underlying goal of you right wing nuts.
That hits all the high points. Republicans are all mentally ill nuts who use FOX and really just want Obama to get assassinated. I always like to point out that JFK was assassinated by a communist. He wasn’t some deranged right wing nutjob.
Now that the left doesn’t have Bush to beat up on anymore anyone who is to the right of Nancy Pelosi is an enemy of the state. Conservatives are the object of ridicule, scorn, and hate. Mr. Guerra, who really has a problem with hatred?
It’s one thing for liberal bloggers, talking heads, and small time politicians to complain about FOX News, but for the President of the United States to say that FOX is like “talk radio” is insane. Does President Obama really want to go to war with America’s most popular news source? What does he hope to gain? The President is faced with a bad economy, a health care fight and a war. Why is he wasting time bashing FOX?
“I think what our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes,” Obama told NBC’s Savanah Guthrie. “And if media is operating basically as a talk radio format then that’s one thing, and if it’s operating as a news outlet that’s another but it’s not something I’m losing sleep over.” [Emphasis added]
Oh really? Does anyone truly believe the that White House would be wasting time on FOX if Obama was completely unconcerned? One thing I think Americans are learning about this young presidency is that he can’t take criticism. By any standard Obama has received the greatest coverage from the press in modern history. Yet, he’s upset with FOX? I can see why the White House holds up CNN as the model of centrist journalism. After all it was CNN’s superstar Anderson Cooper who was making jokes about “teabagging” and Wolf Blitzer “factchecking” a skit on SNL. I can see why the White House loves CNN. Just for the record, George W. Bush never said the word “strategery” and Sarah Palin never said that she could see Russia from her front porch. I didn’t know “factchecking” was necessary for sketch comedy.
Corruption we can believe in!
Maybe what Obama is really upset about is his falling approval numbers. If so, he really is a thin-skinned woosie. If I remember my Greek mythology correctly, Narcissus was a thin-skinned woosie. This is part of the job, Mr. President. Even President Reagan had days when he wasn’t so popular. Obama needs to get tough. Quit complaining about FOX News. The leader of the free world needs to start acting like it. Let’s start with making a decision about Afghanistan.
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