| Stack of Stuff Quick Hits Page |
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October 29, 2009 |
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Story #1: Doug Hoffman Collects Endorsements, Donations
RUSH: Hey, folks, Doug Hoffman has picked up a whole bunch of endorsements from important conservative leaders. Ed Meese; David Keene, the American Conservative Union; Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center; Alfred Regnery, the publisher; Craig Shirley; a whole bunch of them. His financial coffers are swelling as well. Doug Hoffman. NY-23.
Story #2: Uninsured Kids Dying? What About SCHIP?
RUSH: I'm not sure where it was, but there was a piece somewhere touting a study that estimates children without health insurance are 60% more likely to die than children with insurance. In other words, children are going to die if we don't pass health care now. Forget that we've passed SCHIP, where we're insuring children all the way up to age 25. Yeah, they are considered a child up to age 25 to qualify for this federal program, and yet there's a study that estimates that 60% of children without health insurance are more likely to die than children with health insurance. I mean, SCHIP is the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, 6.6 million children and 670,000 adults received coverage at some point from the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Obama has expanded the program tremendously, did so in February by four million. So now it covers ten million children, and who knows how many adults because it covers people up to age 25? And yet State-Controlled Media is trying to create panic, "Oh, no, so many kids dying." Makes no sense.
Story #3: Swine Flu Hasn't Caused a Panic, the Media Has!
RUSH: I'm watching Fox today, and they're doing a story on H1N1, and they had a little graphic there, it says, "H1N1 causing a panic." No, you are! The media is causing the panic! Aided and abetted by the Obama administration! No question about it.
Story #4: An Especially Brilliant Column by Daniel Henninger
RUSH: I'm going to get to this Daniel Henninger piece here because Henninger is always brilliant. He's always brilliant, but this column, Wall Street Journal, is two notches above the norm. "'Obama and the Old Hat People.' -- People thought something small, agile and smart was coming to government, but so far it's turning out to be just big-box politics. If you're an elected Democrat anywhere to the right of Barney Frank, and trying to defend a competitive seat next November, you've got to be starting to sweat. You wake up in the morning and just like every other morning as far as the eye can see the only thing in the news is the president's health-care reform. It's starting to look like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are leading the Donner Party, the snowbound emigrants who bogged down in the Sierra Nevada winter in the 1840s and resorted to cannibalism to survive. The betting is that with raw political muscle and procedural magic, the Congressional Democrats will pass something, call it reform and hand Barack Obama a 'victory.' Maybe, but I think what we are seeing with this massive legislation is that the Democrats in Washington have a bigger problem: Their party is looking so yesterday."
Get this next paragraph: "In a world defined by nearly 100,000 iPhone apps, a world of seemingly limitless, self-defined choice, the Democrats are pushing the biggest, fattest, one-size-fits all legislation since 1965. And they brag this will complete the dream Franklin D. Roosevelt had in 1939. The culture still believes the U.S. has a hipster for president. But the Obama health-care bill, and maybe this whole administration, is starting to look totally out of sync with the new zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Everything about the health-care exercise is looking very old hat, starting with the old guys working on it. Max Baucus, Patrick Leahy, Pete Stark -- all were elected to Congress in the 1970s, and live on as the immortals in Washington's Forever Land. But it's more than the fact that Congress looks old. The health-care bill is big, complex, incomprehensible and coercive -- all the things people hate nowadays.
"It's easy to make jokes about how insubstantial the millions of people seem to be who are constantly using technologies like Twitter. But these new digital and Web-based technologies, which have decentralized virtually everything, now occupy most of the average person's waking hours at work or at home. Mass media is struggling to stay massive in a world whose people want to break up into many discrete markets. The one lump that won't change is government. Government in our time is looking out of it. It'd be one thing if government were almost cool in an old-fashioned way, but it's not. When everyone else's job gets measured by performance, its hallmark is malperformance -- whether in Congress, California or New York. We define the past 25 years in terms of entrepreneurs and visionaries in places like Silicon Valley who took a small idea and ran with it. Congress does the opposite. It takes something already big ... and makes it bigger.
"We've got Medicare for the elderly, with spending claims out to Mars, so let's create Medicare for All! One of the least noticed parts of the health-care legislation is its intention to make Medicaid even bigger, when Medicaid's cost is arguably the main thing destroying California. There was a time when contributing to the common good meant joining something relatively small like the Peace Corps or Teach for America. Now it means being willing to just fall into line behind some huge piece of legislation. Read Mr. Obama's speech last week at MIT on climate change: 'The folks who pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized.' This, ironically, sounds a lot like the 2007 antiHillary 'Big Brother' TV commercial. Its message was that Hillary represented something big and ominously coercive. Boot up that ad now and put Obama's face where Hillary's is.
The larger point here isn't necessarily partisan. It's a description of the way people live their lives in a 21st century world, and how disconnected politics has become from that world. If we were really living in the world of leading-edge politics that many people thought they were getting with Barack Obama, he would have proposed an iPhone for health care -- a flexible system for which all sorts of users could create or choose health-care apps that suited their needs. Over time, with trial and error, a better system would emerge. No chance of that. Our outdated political software can't recognize trial and error. What ObamaCare is doing with health care -- the 'public option' -- may be fine with the activist left, but I suspect it's starting to strike many younger Americans as at odds with their lives, as not somewhere they want to go. Wait until EPA's ghost busters start enforcing cap-and-trade. People thought something small, agile and smart was coming to government, but so far it's turning out to be just big-box politics. None of this is to suggest the Republicans are any better. They do, however, have a better chance of breaking out of the ancient political castle. So long as the Democratic Party is the party of the Old Hat People, dependent on public-sector unions with Orwellian names like the Service Employees International Union, it will remain yoked to a pre-iPhone political model that will increasingly strike average everyday American voters as weird and alien to their world."
Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal. Of course, this is a brilliantly crafted piece. The only thing missing here is that all this is happening by design. This is not a bunch of old fuddy-duddies that can't figure it out. This is a bunch of control freaks who don't care what anybody else thinks. They're gonna do it their way, and they're going to have total control over us no matter what.
Story #5: Brookhiser's Take on NY-23, Buckley and Goodell
RUSH: Rick Brookhiser is an editor at National Review. Snerdley, would you do me a favor? Go to Amazon, somebody out there, Brookhiser has a great book on William F. Buckley Jr, growing up with him in terms of working at National Review, and I'd like to mention the name of the book. Brookhiser, this is relevant here, it's fascinating. He posted something at their blog, The Corner at National Review Online, yesterday about NY-23.  And this is exactly right. It's based on the fact, I was telling you a couple days ago, you can't look at NY-23 as a sign a third party would work. There was no primary here. Primaries are key. Primaries are how party bosses are overruled. Primaries are how bad candidates are weeded out. There was no primary here because this is a special election. Had there been a special election, Hoffman would have run against Scozzafava and probably won. But he might have lost. But that would be it. Then the Conservative Party would have gotten in gear.
This is where Brookhiser's comment is fascinating. Brookhiser: "I have been voting in New York state all my adult life, and I campaigned in them even earlier (I sold candy bars for Jim Buckley in 1970)." Bill Buckley's brother. "The contest in NY 23 is what the New York Conservative Party was made for. The state's cross-endorsement policy means that the Conservatives (and its left-of-center mirror images) generally function as pressure groups," not third parties, "supporting major party candidates they like or undermining those they don't. But sometimes the major party picks a candidate so egregious that the minor party must and can go all out. So it was with James Buckley vs. Charles Goodell --" Roger Goodell's father "-- in 1970, and with Al D'Amato vs. Jacob Javits in 1980 (early Conservative support helped D'Amato win the GOP primary, leaving Javits to run only on the Liberal line). So it is in NY 23 now. Vote for Doug Hoffman."
So the Conservative Party is not a third party. They join the Republican Party when the candidate's good. They oppose when not. Now, James Buckley was a senator from New York, and he was the brother of William F. Buckley Jr. He opposed Charles Goodell in 1970, Roger Goodell's father. Charles Goodell was a Dede Scozzafava type of Republican, a Republican-in-name-only. James Buckley ran on the Conservative Party ticket because Goodell was the less-than-true Republican, and of course Buckley won. Which I don't know if Roger Goodell still carries a grudge against conservatives because of what happened to his father, but hell's bells, folks, anything's possible.
Oh. The name of the book, Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley and the Conservative Movement. Richard Brookhiser. As a powerful, influential member of the media, he sent me an advance copy. It's been out awhile. It is written from somebody close up and a true disciple believer of conservatism and William F. Buckley Jr. I'll tell you, if you liked the Reagan sound bites from his Goldwater speech yesterday, treat yourself to Brookhiser's book because it's a trip back to the foundations of conservatism today and it will inspire you and motivate you.
Story #6: Andrew Revkin Will Have to Wait Another Day
RUSH: You know, I just realized, I forgot to mention today Andrew Revkin, the New York Times reporter who's thinking seriously about capping families at one child to reduce carbon emissions. I had urged him, "Show us how it's done, you know, go die." And he was profoundly offended by this and I was going to address it today, but I forgot. I got it right here, so I'll put it on top of tomorrow's stack.
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