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Today's posts - Obama - Healthcare reform - Mark Steyn - Women - Children - Michelle O - Music - Books - Media bias - Culture
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When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia. Mark Steyn
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Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Post mortems of Obama's first-year failures

This article on Obama's dysfunctional staff is interesting, as are the linked stories:

President Obama Day 386: What's happened to him? by Andrew Malcolm

In the last few days at least three major outlets have published well-informed evaluations of Obama's first year in office. All are well worth reading. The dominant themes: disappointment and disillusionment with the Chicago way.

In one respect it's not surprising that a capitol city with its own style of take-no-prisoners politics should find a professed outsider's style of smoother-spoken take-no-prisoners discomforting.

But now, no less than the Huffington Post headlined its Obama evaluation by Steve Clemons: "Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama presidency." [Also posted here.]

The devastating Financial Times report by Edward Luce: "A fearsome foursome"

And the Washington Post story by Ann Gerhart: "A year later, where did the hopes for Obama go?"

The Post story focuses on a handful of Obama supporters, so fiercely motivated and hopeful in 2008 and through the inauguration, now largely drifting back to normal lives lacking fulfillment of so many promises.

The other two fascinating accounts examine Obama's close-knit team of Chicagoans: confidante Valerie Jarrett, who's so intelligent she once hired Michelle Obama; Rahm Emanuel, the diminutive, acid-tongued chief of staff with overwhelming energy and ambition; David Axelrod, the ex-Chicago Tribune politics reporter-turned-consultant who's been coaching Obama forever; and Robert Gibbs, who isn't from Chicago but that's OK because he's only the mouthpiece and the others keep a close eye on him.

Clemons focuses on how dead-on the Luce piece is and how the FT Washington bureau chief had to assiduously hide his sources as everyone was properly so fearful of retribution from the quartet around the mayor, er, president.

And Clemons attributes the lack of online link love to the Luce item Monday to the same fears among D.C. journalists dodging disfavor from the same four.

Quoting "administration insiders," Luce says "the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. 'I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,' says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently."
One quote from the Clemons piece:
But this Luce piece is unavoidably, accurately hard-hitting, and while many of the nation's top news anchors and editors are sending emails back and forth (I have been sent three such emails in confidence) on what a spot-on piece Luce wrought on the administration, they fear that the "four horsepersons of the Obama White House" will shut down and cut off access to those who give the essay 'legs.'
The four horsepersons

More analysis of these articles here.

Related post here, which references two other pm's:

Congressional Democrats point finger of blame at Rahm Emanuel on healthcare
Alexander Bolton

Who Killed Obamacare?
David Catron


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Video: Pam Geller, speaking sense to the senseless

Pamela Geller makes subjecting oneself to the inanities, cheap shots, and distortions of abrasive Joy Behar and simpering/sniping Ron Reagan worth it. They fear Sarah Palin like NOW fears motherhood. All they've got is ridicule. Pam calls them on their condescension. Video here.

Ron would make a perfect panelist for The View.

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Risky business

What we've witnessed over the past year is nothing but liberalism unleashed. Look back at the kitchen sink of a stimulus, for example. As soon as mom and dad left for the weekend, the Democrats in Congress let loose and crammed the bill with every pet pork project they had ever dreamed of, and more.

Along these lines, I Was a Teenage President by Greg Lewis:

The Obama administration resembles nothing so much as a big house in the suburbs where the parents are away for the weekend. In the absence of any responsible person to take charge, the Teenager-in-Chief is letting the rest of the adolescents run wild.

They've maxed out their parents' credit cards and have begun working on their overdraft lines in earnest, as the T-I-C's budget, which proposes a $1.5-trillion deficit for the coming fiscal year, attests. With "what, me worry?" aplomb worthy of a Mad Magazine cover boy, Barack Obama delivered to Congress a bloated document which proposes that more than 40 percent of federal spending be done with borrowed money, and some of the rest courtesy of renewed taxes on America's "rich" -- those people and small businesses making unholy annual incomes greater than $250,000.

And although there are several carloads of bullies pulling into the driveway who are about to enter the premises, the partiers inside remain oblivious to potential threats. They're wrecking the furniture, eating their parents out of house and home, and in general carrying on like there's no tomorrow. [. . .]

I mean, jeez, what more do you want? The T-I-C is already working harder than he ever thought he would have to. He barely has time for golf and pickup basketball games and date nights any more, and you know how important those are to any teen. So of course he's angry.
Read the rest. Here is where I'd link to a video of Tom Cruise jumping around in his underpants. But I can't stand him. So just imagine it for ten seconds and move on.

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Blaming Rahm Emanuel for the failure of Obamacare

What has prevented the passage of Obamacare? Here's the blame it on Rahm explanation reported by Alexander Bolton of The Hill:

Democrats in Congress are holding White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel accountable for his part in the collapse of healthcare reform.

The emerging consensus among critics in both chambers is that Emanuel’s lack of Senate experience slowed President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority.

The share of the blame comes as cracks are beginning to show in Emanuel’s once-impregnable political armor. Last week he had to apologize after a report surfaced that he called liberal groups “retarded” in a private meeting.

While Emanuel has quelled that controversy by meeting with advocates for people with disabilities, on Capitol Hill he’s under fire for poor execution of the president’s healthcare agenda in the Senate.

"I think Rahm ran the play his boss called; once Obama called the play, Rahm did everything he could to pass it, scorched-earth and all that,” said a senior lawmaker, who added that Emanuel didn’t seek a broader base of Senate Republicans. “I think he did miscalculate the Senate. He did what he thought he had to do to win." [. . . ]

A liberal House Democrat who served with Emanuel during his entire career in Congress said: "I don't think the skills that are attributed to him — muscling things through — are well-suited to the Senate.

"The House is like an Australian-rules rugby match,” the lawmaker added. “The Senate is like a march at a men’s club in imperial Britain. They're a bunch of barons over there."
Brute force, indiscriminately applied, seems to be the modus operandi of this White House. No doubt Emanuel's heavy hand was at times a detriment to the cause. Other opinions on who botched what and how are presented in Bolton's piece, including a view that too much time was wasted on faux bipartisanship, and another that Obama didn't spend enough time promoting his pet project on the stump (though he seemed to do little else but campaign and speechify).

No mention is made of the fact that the content of each and every misbegotten, gargantuan piece of legislation crafted by Congress was solidly unpopular with the American people. And guess what -- now they're angry. Obama didn't see that train coming but he's going to jump out of the way now by morphing into a "populist," which consists of trying to trick Americans into thinking they're mad at someone else -- Bush, "obstructionist" Republicans, various "fatcats" and "special interests," "Washington," Rush, cable news and "the blogs" -- anyone but him. Good luck with that.

A few days ago I quoted from David Catron's piece on what went wrong with Obamacare. It's now ancient history by internet standards (Feb. 5) but we might refer back to it as the post-mortems roll out:

Wh0 Killed Obamacare? Obama did it himself, and here's how:
He has broken virtually every campaign promise he made concerning reform, presided over a series of shady back room deals, and treated the voters like an irritating group of poorly behaved and dull-witted children.
Read the rest.

*Updated to add another explanatory article about the failure of Obama's first year:
A fearsome foursome by Edward Luce

Linked at Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy) -- thanks!

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Monday, February 8, 2010

More snow for DC and Baltimore

Well now, this is just a bit much:

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC
304 PM EST MON FEB 8 2010

...WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT FROM NOON TUESDAY TO 7 PM EST
WEDNESDAY...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN STERLING VIRGINIA HAS ISSUED A
WINTER STORM WARNING FOR...WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM NOON TUESDAY
TO 7 PM EST WEDNESDAY.

* PRECIPITATION TYPE...SNOW.

* ACCUMULATIONS...10 TO 20 INCHES.

* TIMING...MID-AFTERNOON TUESDAY THROUGH WEDNESDAY.
We've already got 24-30 inches on the ground and thousands of people are still without power. On the bright side, the federal government will be closed again tomorrow.

But Baltimore meteorologist Jim Kosek is going to have a hard time topping this performance.

*Update: Watch this cool time-lapse of previous storm.

*Update: Jonah Goldberg puts this absurd winter into perspective. John Miller concurs, and invokes "Snoverkill," the name of choice for the next storm.

They didn't mention the state of the roads, which are god-awful. It's not so much the snow and ice as it is the patchwork, ever-changing nature of the surface. On main roads, bare or merely wet pavement is succeeded without warning by huge puddles, ice when those puddles have frozen, piles of mushy snow, deep ruts, and the dominant surface we found on the Beltway on Sunday, packed snow with a washboard surface. Toss in disappearing lanes, unexpected snow blockades left by the plows (who have to put it somewhere), and drivers who are in an unseemly haste, and it's pretty hazardous. It's not pleasant to imagine what another layer will add to this mess. Or what the heavy winds predicted will do to the trees and the power lines.

#4 daughter wished, vocally and repeatedly, for "three feet of snow" because we had gotten next to nothing in the past several winters. Not superstitious, so I don't blame her. But I hope she's happy.

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The Green Police

Someone may have miscalculated with this one:



On a second viewing, the Audi Super Bowl ad is pretty stunning in the way that it makes environmentalists look like out-of-control... well, Liberal Fascists, I guess you could say.

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Monday various & sundry

Listening to this now:

Ricochet Podcast Episode 2: News with Brioche
February 5, 2010
Rob Long and Mark Steyn are joined by guests law professor John C. Yoo and Breitbart.com's Andrew Breitbart. Topics covered include Miranda rights for terrorists, a report from the Tea Party convention, the joyless MSM, Al-Qaeda's potential new bomb making strategy that may be particularly problematic for certain parts of Los Angeles, and some unconventional Super Bowl picks.
I've just gotta say it: I heart Yoo.


Carol Lee on Obama the scold:

Rep. Tom Price, a Georgia Republican, thinks Obama has just taken a Democratic trait to a new level. “They want to tell you exactly how to eat, where to live, what light bulbs to purchase, what car to purchase, what house to purchase — down to the minute detail,” Price said.

But to some extent, it’s an approach that comes naturally to the former University of Chicago law professor, even if it might not always be effective. “The fatherly scold doesn’t work well, at least in part because he’s one of our youngest presidents,” said presidential scholar Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution.

Age hasn’t stopped the president, who, at 48, is at ease urging the Obama way — on a range of issues — onto those a lot more experienced than he is. He is at once Americans’ president and their additional dad, teacher, preacher, nutritionist, life coach and financial adviser.

Some of Obama's advice, though obvious, is perfectly sound -- encourage your kids to read more, and spend more time with them. But the article is packed with examples of Obama giving advice that he either doesn't follow himself or is unqualified to advise on due to ignorance. Love this conclusion featuring Harry Reid:

After Obama told Senate Democrats to turn off the computer and the TV, Reid said he took the president’s advice.

“Mr. President, you’ve told me, suggested: Don’t pay any attention to the blogs, don’t listen to talk radio, don’t watch cable TV,” said Reid. “And I follow that advice pretty good.”

Heh.


Mark Tapscott isn't reassured by Geithner:
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is reassuring Americans that the huge deficits and spiralling nationa debt "will never" damage the country's sterling credit rating because investors will continue to view the U.S. as a good investment.

And in other news, Roman Emperor Romulus Augustus reassured his citizens that they should not worry about those hordes of barbarians gathering outside the city.

Rome is too big to fail, so they will never invade Rome," the Emperor said. "Besides, if they were to sack Rome, where would they go for our fine entertainments, including the orgies, drama productions with real executions, and, let's not forget, our incomparable gladitorial contests in the Coliseum."

German barbarian leader Odoacer was asked for comment, but would only say through a spokesman that he would soon confer in person with the Emperor about his future status.


Jennifer Rubin on the possibility of Supreme Court changes:
The quiet buzz of anticipation is bubbling up into news accounts: one or more Supreme Court justices may step down this year. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has not been in good health, and Justice John Paul Stevens will be 90 in June. With a wave election anticipated and more Republicans on the way to the Senate, now may be the time for “liberal” judges to step down in hopes of having their spots filled by equally “liberal” justices.

What is interesting in all the buzz is the candor with which the Left now admits that Sonia Sotomayor was a dud. . . .

Some liberals complain that she isn’t liberal enough. Others delicately put it that she is not a “trailblazer” or a “Scalia of the Left.” Translation: she lacks the intellectual firepower to go toe-to-toe with justices who rely on judicial originalism and to sway Justice Anthony Kennedy to their side. She was Latina but not very wise, they now concede.

She links to this WSJ report.


There's no limit to the number of holes to be found in the rancid swiss cheese that was global warmism:

Africagate: Corn crop predictions unfounded, and a warning that the IPCC just might "lose all credibility." That ship has sailed, no?

IPCC report riddled with errors: See article for details.

Ed Morrissey notes:
The IPCC doesn’t do science. They do advocacy, mainly for the idea of international control of energy and manufacturing, with a healthy dose of redistribution of wealth. These revelations should put an end to any reliance on IPCC work for American policy, and the UN should be pressured to fire everyone involved in this sham, starting with railroad engineer Rajendra Pachauri.
Mr. Pachauri seems to be cracking under the pressure, suggesting we rub asbestos in our faces. (Maybe he should stick to soccer and novel writing.)

From Doug Ross: Obama's palm pilot.

Dying of boredom: It can happen.


Linked at Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy) -- thanks!

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George Will on Ryan's Roadmap

George Will believes Rep. Paul Ryan's Roadmap (pdf here) is the way to get the country to solvency on entitlements. Features of Ryan's 99-page plan summarized by Mr. Will:

Funding entitlements -- especially medical care and pensions for the elderly -- requires reinvigorating the economy. Ryan's map connects three destinations: economic vitality, diminished public debt, and health and retirement security.

To make the economy -- on which all else hinges -- hum, Ryan proposes tax reform. Masochists would be permitted to continue paying income taxes under the current system. Others could use a radically simplified code, filing a form that fits on a postcard. It would have just two rates: 10 percent on incomes up to $100,000 for joint filers and $50,000 for single filers; 25 percent on higher incomes. There would be no deductions, credits or exclusions, other than the health-care tax credit (see below). . . .

Ryan would eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains, dividends and death. The corporate income tax, the world's second-highest, would be replaced by an 8.5 percent business consumption tax. Because this would be about half the average tax burden that other nations place on corporations, U.S. companies would instantly become more competitive -- and more able and eager to hire.

Medicare and Social Security would be preserved for those currently receiving benefits or becoming eligible in the next 10 years (those 55 and older today). Both programs would be made permanently solvent.

Universal access to affordable health care would be guaranteed by refundable tax credits ($2,300 for individuals, $5,700 for families) for purchasing portable coverage in any state. As persons younger than 55 became Medicare-eligible, they would receive payments averaging $11,000 a year, indexed to inflation and pegged to income, with low-income people receiving more support.

Ryan's plan would fund medical savings accounts from which low-income people would pay minor out-of-pocket expenses. All Americans, regardless of income, would be allowed to establish MSAs -- tax-preferred accounts for paying such expenses.

Ryan's plan would allow workers younger than 55 the choice of investing more than one-third of their current Social Security taxes in personal retirement accounts similar to the Thrift Savings Plan long available to, and immensely popular with, federal employees. This investment would be inheritable property, guaranteeing that individuals will never lose the ability to dispose of every dollar they put into these accounts.

Ryan would raise the retirement age. If, when Congress created Social Security in 1935, it had indexed the retirement age (then 65) to life expectancy, today the age would be in the mid-70s. The system was never intended to do what it is doing -- subsidizing retirements that extend from one-third to one-half of retirees' adult lives.

Compare Ryan's lucid map to the Democrats' impenetrable labyrinth of health-care legislation. Republicans are frequently criticized as "the party of no." But because most new ideas are injurious, rejection is an important function in politics. It is, however, insufficient. Fortunately, Ryan, assisted by Republican Reps. Devin Nunes of California and Jeb Hensarling of Texas, has become a think tank, refuting the idea that Republicans lack ideas.

Sarah Palin likes Rep. Ryan, too:

Paul Ryan -- I'm very impressed with Paul Ryan. . . . He's good. Man, he is sharp. He is smart, articulate. And he is passionate about these commonsense solutions that America has got to adopt to get us on the right road.

Related: Unsustainable but untouchable

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Sunday, February 7, 2010

In 2012, how about a president with some accomplishments?

Two from Jen-Ru:

But He was the Harvard Law Review Editor!

His floundering is not surprising, considering that Obama never ran a state, a city, or a business, and during his brief time in the U.S. Senate, he was never front-and-center in any significant legislative undertaking. Yes, he’s touted as an author, and he won the presidency (beating two flawed candidates who ran awful campaigns). But it turns out that all this was insufficient preparation to be chief executive and commander in chief.

In 2012, Republicans will look for a standard-bearer to retake the White House. And while a grounding in conservative principles will be essential to winning the nomination, Republican voters might do well to consider what experience and what talents are essential for a successful presidency. They might look for candidates who have done something – other than graduating from Ivy League schools, writing memoirs, and giving frothy speeches. By 2012, the country might be ready for someone who knows how to get something done.

Hmm. Segue to our Sarah, who picks up on the experience gap in her Tea Party address:

Palin at the Tea Party
We “need a commander in chief and not a law professor” in the war against “radical Islamic extremists” she declared. (In purposefully using a phrase that the president eschews, she, of course, reinforces her point.) She fingered the closed-door deals and non-transparency in Washington, asking mockingly, “How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?” And she hit the themes that have galvanized the populist activists and around which establishment conservatives have rallied. She criticized the president’s apologetic foreign policy and his failure to support human rights and democracy advocates, called the massive debt “generational theft,” advocated domestic energy development, and urged a return to more limited government and low taxes (noting Ronald Reagan’s birthday). And she also skewered Obama for incessantly blaming George W. Bush and for striking out in three big elections (”When you’re 0-3, you’d better stop lecturing and start listening”). . . .

Palin has followed no rule book and no pundit’s advice in the last year. She quit the governorship, sold millions of books, got a million and a half Facebook fans, broke through the health-care reform debate with her “death panel” critique, and now has endeared herself to a grassroots movement. Pundits will ask, “But is that enough?” Well, it’s a lot for a year’s work.
Read the rest of both.

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Unsustainable but untouchable

Mark Steyn on the trouble we're in:

National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.” Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001
2008, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP average 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

But, if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?


We are in serious trouble and if Americans don't know it, they certainly sense it. From Tim Rutten's The Winter of America's Discontent:
A national Washington Post/ABC News poll found that just 24% of Americans, fewer than 1 in 4, trust congressional Republicans, like Shelby, "to make the right decisions for the country's future." (Wonder why?) The House and Senate Democrats didn't fare all that better, and are trusted by just 32%. Forty-seven percent of those polled -- still less than half -- have confidence in Obama's ability to make the right decisions.

When people's mistrust of their elected officials and the parties reaches these levels, there is little for political leaders to do but take counsel from their own anger and anxieties -- and, these days, the popular mood fairly seethes with both those things. Discontent with the present and apprehension about the future have become the background noise of our politics, yet both sides of the congressional aisle seem deaf to the din.

In one of his magisterial explorations of German politics between the wars, the historian Ian Kershaw mused that "there are times -- they mark the danger point for a political system -- when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing."
This was made obvious by the uncomprehending and even hostile attitudes displayed by so many of our "representatives" toward their own constituents at the town meetings of August '09. And it has been underscored by the ram-it-down-their-throats tactics practiced by Congress and still advocated by the president, who attributes the unpopularity of his agenda to our inability to grasp its wisdom.

We may desire representatives who deign to listen to us and can be induced to serve our interests, but what we want more than that are candidates and public servants who are actually of us (as in government of the people), who know and share our concerns and values because they live in our world. That basic desire, to be represented by someone who is representative of us, runs deep beneath the cynicism of many Americans. That's why politicians try so hard to fake their man-of-the-people image, and why we're all agog when we perceive the rare "authentic" politician. What an indictment of the norm, frauds and elites being so much the usual thing that a man or woman who appears to be one of us -- She shops at Walmart! He drives a truck! -- strikes us as something of a miracle.

Mr. Elmendorf warns of the consequences of continued hemorrhagic government spending:
“I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he said. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”
We don't think so. Or as Steyn puts it, "Dream on, you kinky fantasist." The government acts, all right, by spending more. (Visual aid here.)

Maybe this is what the tea party movement is all about: a visceral recognition that our government just plain does not represent us, and an urgent need to intervene before the very, very bad thing happens.

But the cultural shift that would need to take place in order to pull back from the precipice may be beyond what even tea-partying small-government advocates have in mind. In other words, it may be too late for good leaders to save our economy. The entitlement monster is just too big. John Hinderaker:
I think, on the contrary, that it is unlikely that Congress will take effective action--as opposed to seeking political cover--before grave damage has been done. In his written testimony, Elmendorf implicitly explained why:

The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services that people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are prepared to send to the government to finance those services. That fundamental disconnect will have to be addressed in some way if the nation is to avoid serious long-term damage to the economy and to the well-being of the population.

We need deep and fundamental cuts in federal spending, which means, above all, Medicare and Social Security, because that's where the money is. The whole concept of an "entitlement" was a mistake--really, a disaster--that must be repudiated. But for the foreseeable future, there will be no political will to make such changes. So we're going to see a race between political will and economic collapse. It's hard to be optimistic about the outcome unless a drastic change in our political culture takes place, soon.
Yes. But Obama's spending mania and attempt to make us all entitled via a takeover of the healthcare system have so highlighted the entitlement problem that we are at least talking about it. So maybe there's a little bit of water in the glass?

Follow-up: George Will on Ryan's Roadmap
(Thanks to Mr. Will for his column which he might have called "Paul Ryan's Roadmap for Dummies.")

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