Here we are in the middle of a recession, and instead of focusing on fixing the economy we are about to embark on a huge and perilous social experiment.  Even before the recession, we were being warned about the fiscal doom awaiting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.  So, now, here we are about to massively expand the government’s role in health care, instead of healing the economy and shoring up the programs that already exist.  This is — in a word — nuts.

There are lots of things that Congress could do to fix the health care system short of a massive government takeover that will plunge us all into a deeper pit of debt and taxes.  First, insurance companies could be forbidden to discriminate based upon pre-existing conditions.  Second, insurance companies could be forbidden to raise a person’s rates when they leave their job, so insurance would be portable.  Third, insurance companies could be allowed to compete across state lines.

But instead of common-sense measures like this, the government is on the brink of taking over a sixth of the economy.  Decreasing the number of uninsured in this country is a wonderful goal.  So, why not give every person a voucher, if the person pays half?  That way people would have an incentive to get the biggest bang for their buck when they go out to use the voucher to buy insurance.  Instead, the government is about to penalize anyone who doesn’t get insurance, which would cause many people to buy token lousy insurance at a very cheap price, which is a problem that Congress would in turn “solve” by requiring that a minimally acceptable insurance policy have certain government-mandated characteristics (which gets us into support for abortion, death panels, massive bureaucracy, public options, et cetera). 

The path we are on is a path to disaster, as far as I can tell.  Let’s hope I’m wrong.

But if you are Sarah Palin, and if you are actually speaking to third graders, and if you say that the president of the United States Senate is “in charge of the United States Senate”, then prepare for scorn and mockery from George F. Will. Today, Will concludes that Palin has “confusion about the office for which she is auditioning.” Here are Palin’s perfectly appropriate remarks that Mr. Will pompously derided today:

In 2006, George Will urged Obama to run for President, so what should we expect from Mr. Will but mindless insults for the current Republican nominees? One thing is for sure: Palin knows a lot more about the vice-presidency than Joe Biden does.

Of course, Mr. Will also includes in his column today his usual defense of unlimited and unregulated campaign contributions: “One excellent result of this election cycle is that public financing of presidential campaigns now seems sillier than ever.” Never mind that Obama has broken his word, has skewed the entire presidential race, and has likely raked in tens of millions of dollars in dirty money:

Does George Will even care if folks like Gaddafi are trying to finance Obama’s campaign? I just hope Americans have enough good sense to vote next week unlike George Will will.

This issue could be a real winner for John McCain. McCain has a can-do plan to build “45 new nuclear reactors by 2030, a huge increase since there are only 104 reactors in the country today.” A President Obama would not let that happen. The price of energy may be going down right at the moment, but we’ve recently had a taste of the future if we don’t prepare.

Nuclear energy currently supplies about 20% of electricity in the United States. Compare that to 80% in France. Technology is available right now to make new plants much safer than they used to be. We’ve come a long way since Three Mile Island, and public opinion is now much more supportive. McCain offers leadership, while the most liberal senator in Congress — Barack Obama — lets ideology cloud his judgment.

John McCain has also been pushing for clean coal and other forms of clean energy, while Sarah Palin’s natural gas pipeline from Alaska would help too. And let’s not forget the plan of T. Boone Pickens to harness wind-power for 20% of electricity in the United States. But many more nuclear plants must be on the table as well, and only a President John McCain would make that a reality.

Senator Obama long ago released what is known as a short-form birth certificate from Hawaii. However, he has not released his long-form birth certificate from Hawaii. Why not release it? John McCain’s is already publicly available. I’m 99% sure that Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, but it’s strange that he’s refusing to prove it.

National Review’s Andy McCarthy has weighed in about this, and so has Greta Van Sustern of Fox News. And here’s a recent news report about it:

If you are nominated for President in 2008 and your major opponents agree to forgo private funding in the general election campaign, will you participate in the presidential public financing system?

The lie:

OBAMA: Yes.

Obama broke that promise, and now he has so much money that he’s dishing it out to blast Republicans out of office nationwide, according to this news report today:

With so much money, Obama has been making sizable contributions to Democratic parties in key battleground states. He distributed more than $7 million to party committees, including $1.7 million to the Florida party and $1 million to the Ohio Democrats. Among other state parties receiving $400,000 or more were those in Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Missouri. Virginia’s received $390,000.

For Obama, the ends justify the means, and promises matter not at all. Why bother to give him an oath of office, if an oath is meaningless?

“There are elections in America now. Along came a black citizen of Kenyan African origins, a Muslim, who had studied in an Islamic school in Indonesia. His name is Obama. All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man. They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency.”

I don’t know or care if Obama was ever a Muslim. What worries me much more is Gaddafi’s discussion of foreign “contribution campaigns” from the Middle East and Africa. Those “contribution campaigns” that Gaddafi spoke of would have been averted if Obama had not become the first major-party presidential nominee since Watergate to turn down public financing. John McCain spoke about this today, saying that the gigantic amounts of money raised by the Obama campaign jeopardize post-Watergate reforms. Last month alone, Obama raised $150 million. So far, the identities of donors who gave more than $200 million to Obama haven’t been divulged because they’re below $200 apiece.

Today, McCain said on “Fox News Sunday” that this breaking of the dam may be very dangerous, and he’s right. Obama declined public financing, whereas McCain accepted it, and that’s one of many solid reasons to vote for McCain, IMHO.

It seems that for Senator Obama, the ends justify the means. If he is elected, expect much more of the same.

I’m really hoping that Sarah Palin will be presiding over this guy in a few months. Probably not, but maybe….

Liberals like Biden and Obama do not understand that when they take a cavalier attitude toward the Constitution, they are taking a cavalier attitude toward the glue that holds this country together, and to the ideals that brave Americans have been shedding blood for over the course of hundreds of years. Indeed, they are taking a cavalier attitude toward the principles that western civilization developed over the course of thousands of years, and which our framers wisely codified, and which have been carefully modified by constitutional amendment in order to weed out the bad and preserve the very best. All of that is out the window with people like Biden and Obama in charge. The Constitution becomes whatever Biden and Obama and their judicial appointees say. Anarchy might well be better.

Here’s hoping that McCain does what he does best!

Cross-posted at Confirmthem.com.

Pelosi blasted Republicans for relying “on budgetary recklessness, on an anything goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system”. No mention, of course, about the Democratic role in encouraging massively irresponsible lending by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which is what got this whole mess started.

Pelosi blasts the “failed economic leadership” of the incumbent president, while denying any role of her own party. Personally, I would have had no hesitation voting for the rescue plan today, but I can certainly understand why a GOP fence-sitter would have been negatively influenced by her speech.

Using this worst possible choice of words, Pelosi may have paved the way to a much larger economic disaster. I hope not.

Sure, Biden will make things interesting, but I don’t see how he will really help the Democratic ticket very much. Yes, Biden has some foreign policy expertise, but let’s face it: Biden is not exactly known for spotless integrity or discretion. He is known for bloviating, so in that sense he kind of complements and reenforces the presidential nominee. Plus he can probably deliver Delaware, which is a loss that Senator McCain will have to somehow cope with. Anyway, we’ll now have to wait and see who McCain picks.

Military Says It Set Rules For Obama Hospital Visit

The Pentagon told the Democrat that no media or campaign aides could come along, its spokesman says. Obama canceled plans to see wounded troops in Germany.

By Peter Spiegel and Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

July 26, 2008

U.S. military authorities told advisors to Barack Obama this week that he could not bring press or campaign staff on a visit to wounded troops from Iraq and Afghanistan at a hospital in Germany, a Pentagon spokesman said Friday.

After advisors learned of the restriction, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee canceled his scheduled visit Friday to the military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in southern Germany.

UPDATE (July 26, 5:34 PM EST): Good for the McCain campaign:

Let’s start with this one: “Mr. McCain has endorsed, in action if not rhetoric, the theory of the ‘unitary executive,’ which leaves the president unconstrained by Congress or the courts.” But, the “unitary executive” concept involves who in the executive branch wields power — not how much power the executive branch has, as both Jonathan Adler and Ilya Somin have pointed out in response to Barr’s column.

Barr also suggests that McCain does not mind the judicial philosophies of Bill Clinton’s Supreme Court nominees: “He has never paid much attention to judicial philosophy, backing both Clinton Supreme Court nominees – Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” Again, Barr does not know what he is talking about. Ann Althouse properly criticized the Obama campaign for the same kind of accusation against McCain (and so did I). Althouse correctly said:

The role of the President and the role of a Senator are very different when it comes to Supreme Court appointments. The President’s nomination identifies one person from the pool of possible nominees and therefore has a tremendous amount of latitude in searching for someone who he thinks will decide cases to his liking, who shares his ideology.

Barr bounces from one outrageous statement to another, in his WSJ column. Consider this one:

[M]any Republicans, like Mr. McCain, are just as result-oriented as their Democratic opponents. They only disagree over the result desired. Judge-made rights are wrong because there is no constitutional warrant behind them. The Constitution leaves most decisions up to the normal political process.

In actuality, Barr seems to be describing himself rather than describing McCain. You wouldn’t know it from his disingenuous column today in the Wall Street Journal, but Barr is a wholehearted supporter of the theory of an imperial judiciary that can legalize any activity that it wants as long as the activity occurs in private. Take, for example, the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas. That decision purported to legalize sodomy, and Barr wholeheartedly supported that decision. The Court’s reasoning in that case was no different than in other judicial travesties such as Dred Scott and Lochner. The result in Lawrence - viewed as judicial legislation - was far more reasonable and compassionate than that of either Dred Scott or Lochner, but the legal reasoning was the same utter, dangerous nonsense. And yet Barr said: “I thought it was a very sound decision based on privacy.” By the exact same legal reasoning, the Court could concoct a right to adult incest, Russian roulette, and heroin, not to mention abortion, spousal abuse, and dog fighting. The list is endless. But, of course, this isn’t about legal reasoning at all: it’s about legislating from the bench.

Cross-posted at ConfirmThem.

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