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Near death, aided by ghostly companion

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Emails Discovered from Major Muslim Nidal Hassan to Al Qaeda UPDATE: OBAMA WITHHOLDING INFO PERTAINING TO HASAN'S JIHAD

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Political Wisdom: Is the House Health Bill Too Small?

After a few days out of town, I’ve discovered that the obsession with analyzing health care hasn’t abated—nor should it have, considering the House’s historic vote to pass a reform bill on Saturday.

But the final House vote count seems the only fixed item in online analysis of where things stand now. Many write about conservative Democrats sweating over whether the bill calls for too much government and too much money, but Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic argues pretty much the opposite. He thinks the bill would be better if it were actually bigger, and kicked in faster. “Ideological arguments about socialized medicine and government takeovers don’t have much appeal beyond the conservative base,” he argues. “The rest of the population just wants relief (from rising health care costs) and security (from medical or financial hardship). If reform accomplishes that, they will be happy, no matter how long or complex the actual bill was. But does Saturday’s vote make that more likely? In many crucial ways, yes.”

Still, he says, “the transformation would be slow. In order to keep the total federal outlays for coverage at around $1 trillion over 10 years, the House bill wouldn’t create the new insurance exchanges…or start offering subsidies for several years. While it would offer more financial assistance and stronger insurance protection than its Senate counterpart is likely to promise, it wouldn’t do as much to reduce the cost of medical care in the long run…To be clear, the House bill is a great start. It should just be faster, stronger, and–really–bigger.”

Time’s Jay Newton-Small, writing on the Swampland blog, gives an on-the-other-hand view. He wonders whether House leaders asked too much of their Democratic rank-and-file followers by demand ing a vote now: “After the August protests there had been much speculation that the House would wait for the Senate to act….So why push through a bill now, the week after twin gubernatorial losses in New Jersey and Virigina and a day after the country hit 10% unemployment? Most members said, the leadership felt the time for debate had come to an end — after all (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi had originally wanted to pass the bill before August recess but deferred in deference to anxious freshmen. They worried if the process wasn’t jump started, the Senate might falter and fail. But, having forced her vulnerables to take a hard vote on climate change, was it rash of Pelosi to rush a vote on health care — espeically if the Senate ends up not including a public plan in their bill (though as it stands right now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says it will be in)? Many vulnerable Dems headed home this weekend feeling a bit battered and fearing what it means to go it alone, as Dems clearly are these days. ”

Debra J. Saunders of Townhall.com argues—perhaps a bit cynically—that Democrats have found a way to get young people to support a health overhaul. “The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee health care bill includes a provision that would allow parents to keep their children as dependents on their health care policies until age 26. Not to be outdone, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced last month that, as Congressional Quarterly reported, the House bill ‘will allow young people to stay on their parents’ policies until age 27.’ Do I hear age 28? Why not 30? As long as Washington is giving away private health care coverage, why not eliminate the age cap entirely?…Eureka. Pelosi has found the way to get young adults behind health care reform — have mom and dad (or their employers) pay for it. Of course young adults are jumping on the bandwagon.”

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Enemies of the People -- By: Benjamin Zycher

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City Streets a Mortal Threat to Pedestrians

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NY Times Portrays Catholic Medal of Honor Winner as Muslim -- By: NRO Staff

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Shocking numbers: Real unemployment tops 22%

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iPhone-Windows 7 sync bug with Intel chipset fixed for some

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Nidal Hasan’s calling card explained

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Two Profiles in Class -- By: NRO Staff

This past weekend, Americans were treated to two completely different profiles in class. First there was former president George W. Bush. On Friday night, George and Laura Bush traveled by car to Fort Hood to meet with the devastated families of last week’s tragedy. They specifically asked the base commander not to alert the press, and spent hours simply doing what they could to comfort the grief-stricken families.

The story was eventually uncovered, as these moments tend to be, but clearly President Bush did not see this as a personal opportunity, nor did he want to upstage the current president. The former president saw his interactions with wounded soldiers and their families as private moments.

Twenty-four hours later, President Obama was not at Fort Hood, but rather on Capitol Hill lobbying a private meeting of Democrats, who must not have known his position on health care. Obama told the lawmakers, according to Democratic congressman Earl Blumenauer in the New York Times: “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit [Democratic voters] and it will encourage the extremists.”

Let’s dissect that statement. First, President Obama incorrectly states that conservatives are “anti-government,” which simply is untrue. Conservatives are in favor of the government’s performing its duties efficiently and effectively. Conservatives are not in favor of the government’s running a new national health-care entitlement that will surely fail. (The House passed a bill that costs $2.4 trillion, raises taxes by $700 billion, and massively expands a bankrupt Medicaid program -- all while the nation’s unemployment rate stands above 10 percent.)

More disturbing is President Obama’s labeling his opposition as “extremists” and falling just short of using the profane “teabag” epithet that is popular among dismissive liberals. This is simply beneath the office he holds. When tens of thousands of multigenerational families descended onto Capitol Hill last week, they were protesting runaway federal spending and government control. They understood that while reform of our health-care system is necessary, the answer is not to compound the problem while ignoring uninsured Americans. These are not extreme views.

President Obama won a short-lived victory this weekend on health care, but he clearly misread the tea leaves if he believes that conservative Democrats will get more support in their home districts for supporting this disastrous plan. These electoral matters are not helped by the president’s demonization of a respectful and vigilant opposition to this government intrusion into their lives.

While President Bush was at Fort Hood consoling the victims of real radical extremism, President Obama was in Washington calling American families who don’t support his health-care plan “extremists.” A more enlightening profile of the two men could not be found.

-- Rory Cooper is director of strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation.

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After the House Vote -- By: James C. Capretta

One, Obamacare will impose substantial new costs on the already insured middle-class. The bill approved by the House establishes one-size-fits-all insurance rules which will drive up premiums and raises taxes on the health-care sector which will be passed onto middle-class health-care consumers.

Two, Obamacare will destroy jobs. The House bill would impose an 8 percent payroll tax on all but the smallest employers who do not offer health insurance and a 5.4 percent income tax surcharge on higher income individuals who also own small businesses. These taxes will discourage hiring and force layoffs when the number one concern of most American voters is job creation.

Three, Obamacare will ration care. The House bill relies almost exclusively on arbitrary, across-the-board payment rate reductions for health-care providers to achieve savings. If passed, that would just be the beginning of it. Despite all of the talk of painless efficiency measures, the Democratic sponsors really have no plan to control costs except with price-setting. Always and everywhere, price controls drive out willing suppliers of services, leading to queues and waiting lists.

Fourth, Obamacare is entirely unnecessary. We can fix the problems in U.S. health-care without a government takeover by pursuing sensible, targeted reforms. With properly structured high-risk pools and insurance regulation, pre-existing conditions could be insured at reasonable costs. With tax credits and small-business reforms (such as those implemented in Utah), most of the uninsured would have access to coverage. And the competitive model used to deliver Medicare drug coverage should serve as the basis for controlling costs.

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Could Encasing Cities in Giant Domes Be an Energy Solution for Our Future?

Back in 1979, Winooski, Vermont, a town that often experiences -20 degree weather in January, proposed building a giant dome over their city to help reduce energy costs and keep warm throughout the winter. Thirty years ago, we were experiencing an energy crisis with rising oil prices, and people were looking for solutions to reduce their costs. Nowadays, while we’re also looking to reduce our carbon footprint in addition to costs, the concept is still applicable. By doming off the small city of 7,000, Winooski could stay warm all year round, reduce energy costs and emissions, grow food all year, and ban cars inside the dome. Environmentally, it seems like it has potential.

What do you think?

Read the rest of Could Encasing Cities in Giant Domes Be an Energy Solution for Our Future?

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Post tags: carbon emissions, city dome, dome, geoengineering, reduce emissions, reduce energy costs, vermont, winooski

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18-year-old ‘mentored’ by Nidal Malik Hasan says Fort Hood Victims Got What They Deserved

The government has one job, ONE, to defend this nation - everything else they do and take from us  is the booty that they have stolen from the American people,. Recklessly we let them because, first and foremost, they have kept us  safe. Until now.

No more.

Why are these Muslim  invaders allowed to carry on freely in this country - protected by outreach, Obama, and PC mental illness. Sharia law must be outlawed. JIHAD must be outlawed and criminalized severely. If adherents to Islam won't reform their deadly, violent ideology, then they can't stay here. ZERO TOLERANCE FOR JIHAD.  Let them destroy themselves in their own countries.

With four out of five mosques in the US preaching hate, mosques must be monitored. This is the defining issue of out time. There will be a rout in 2010.2012, the right best get behind a leader that gets it. And will fight it unafraid. It's two minutes after midnight.

18-year-old ‘mentored’ by Nidal Malik Hasan refuses to condemn the shooting spree

By Jack Bremer

Questions were being asked in Texas this weekend about the friendship between the US Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people in a shooting spree at the Fort Hood military base last Thursday, and a young man called Duane Reasoner Jnr. Interviewed by the BBC on Friday, Reasoner said he felt no pity for Hasan's victims because "they were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims".

A tape of the interview, conducted by Gavin Lee of the BBC, has ended up on YouTube and other sites and is getting an angry response from Americans still shocked by Hasan's deadly rampage.

Reasoner is 20 years younger than Hasan. The pair became friends through the local mosque in Killeen - the nearest town to the vast army camp - where Hasan regularly prayed and where Reasoner, who was brought up as a Catholic, was completing his conversion to Islam.

According to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, Reasoner is a substitute teacher whose parents work on the Fort Hood base. He was being mentored by Hasan in the ways of Islam. But the older man, who is single, would also treat him to dinner at the Golden Corral steakhouse in Killeen and on two occasions invited Reasoner to his apartment - the second time being last Wednesday night, just hours before Hasan went on his killing spree.

Hasan once gave a lecture about Islam to fellow doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded

Reasoner was quoted in the New York Times as saying that Hasan had recently been told he would be sent to Afghanistan on November 28, and he did not like it.

"He said he should quit the Army," Reasoner said. "In the Koran, you're not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christian or others, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell."

But when he was interviewed by Gavin Lee of the BBC, he went further.

Reasoner: "I'm not going to condemn him for what he did. I don't know why he did it. I will not, absolutely not, condemn him for what he had done though. If he had done it for selfish reasons I still will not condemn him. He's my brother in the end. I will never condemn him."

Lee: "There might be a lot of people shocked to hear you say that."

Reasoner: "Well, that's the way it is. I don't speak for the community here but me personally I will not condemn him."

Lee: "What are your thoughts towards those that were victims in this?"

Reasoner: "They were, in the end, they were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims. I honestly have no pity for them. It's just like the majority of the people that will hear this, after five or six minutes they'll be shocked, after that they'll forget about them and go on their day."

Evidence has also emerged to suggest that Hasan himself was not just a "devout" Muslim, but was more extreme in his beliefs than reported on Friday. Several former colleagues have come forward to say he would tell them: "I am a Muslim first and an American second".

The Daily Telegraph claims that when he was still at the Walter Reed medical centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before being transferred to Fort Hood this summer, Hasan once gave a lecture about Islam to fellow doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.

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Your Attendance is Required!

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Second-Guessing Stupak -- By: Ramesh Ponnuru

It would have had significant downsides. It would have created a serious problem among Republicans with many rank-and-file pro-lifers, who would have wondered why Republicans weren't voting for an important pro-life measure. Pro-life Democratic congressmen would have felt betrayed: All year Republicans had been egging them on to fight the abortion subsidies in the bill, only to desert them in the middle of the fight? Democrats would have gotten a new talking point: They would have said that the vote proved that Republican objections to the bill were phony, since Republicans weren't willing to support amendments to address those objections. Their charge that Republicans were merely playing political games to deny the Democrats a victory would look more credible. Press coverage about the Republicans' insincerity would have been brutal.

And all of these reactions--from pro-life voters, pro-life Democratic congressmen, partisan Democrats, and the press--would have been justified. Oh, and one more thing: The likelihood that we would end up with a bill with abortion subsidies in it would be much higher.

I wonder what the advocates of this tactic think pro-life groups should have done? Should they have refrained from urging congressmen to cast a pro-life vote on the most important abortion-policy question before the House this year in the interest of affecting the outcome of a bill that is outside their bailiwick? Pro-life groups sometimes get slammed as arms of the Republican party, but people who want to craft strategy for Republicans ought to keep in mind that there are actually a lot of people in the party who care about abortion.

Thankfully, almost all congressional Republicans did the right thing.

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ABC: FBI knew Hasan tried to contact Al-Qaeda

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Nuts -- By: Mark Steyn

So who's nuttier?

The guy who gives a lecture to other military doctors in which he says non-Muslims should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats?

Or the guys who say "Hey, let's have this fellow counsel our traumatized veterans and then promote him to major and put him on a Homeland Security panel?

Or the Army Chief of Staff who thinks the priority should be to celebrate diversity, even unto death?

Or the Secretary of Homeland Security who warns that the principal threat we face now is an outbreak of Islamophobia?

Or the President who says we cannot "fully know" why Major Hasan did what he did, so why trouble ourselves any further?

Or the columnist who, when a man hands out copies of the Koran before gunning down his victims while yelling "Allahu akbar", says you're racist if you bring up his religion?

Or his media colleagues who put Americans in the same position as East Germans twenty years ago of having to get hold of a foreign newspaper to find out what's going on?

General Casey has a point: An army that lets you check either the "home team" or "enemy" box according to taste is certainly diverse. But the logic in the remarks of Secretary Napolitano and others is that the real problem is that most Americans are knuckledragging bigots just waiting to go bananas. As Melanie Phillips wrote in her book Londonistan:

Minority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority.

To the injury of November 5th, we add the insults of American officialdom and their poodle media. In a nutshell:

The real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn’t a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization’s craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer.

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Paging the AMA: Wake Up -- By: Jason Fodeman

Last week the American Medical Association became the latest special-interest group to line up behind President Obama in support of Obamacare. The AMA is the largest physicians’ organization in the country, and many laymen think of it as the impartial voice of the profession. But moves to the left such as this are precisely why the group has seen its membership plummet to the point where today only 18 percent of practicing physicians are members. Despite the AMA’s support, a recent IBD/TIPP poll found that 65 percent of doctors oppose Obamacare. Most doctors agree that reform is needed -- just not Obama’s prescription.

The AMA has evidently decided that it’s better to be sitting at the table than to be on the menu. While this self-serving approach may be in the best interests of the organization itself and its board members’ appointment prospects, it is difficult to envision how the AMA’s position serves the constituency it purports to represent.

AdvaMed, the trade lobby representing medical-device manufacturers, made the same erroneous calculation. It supported a bill that most likely is not in the industry’s best interests . . . or anyone else’s, for that matter. AdvaMed thought it was limiting its losses by signing on with the Democrats’ plan, but before it could even receive a thank-you note, Senator Baucus threw the industry under the bus with a $40 billion tax on medical devices. Unfortunately, it is only a matter of time before doctors meet a similar fate.

Obamacare is brutal for doctors and patients. Any bill with a public-plan option based on Medicare’s sub-market reimbursement rates will significantly deplete physician income, but the detriment to physicians transcends dollars and cents. The bills being debated will strip away doctors’ autonomy and drown them in bureaucracy and paperwork. This will allow them to spend even less time with patients and will drain whatever satisfaction remains from the field.

The current Democratic regime has engaged in unprecedented arm-twisting with those reluctant to toe the party line. It has brought to K Street a style of politics usually reserved for the back streets around Wrigley Field -- from waging a full-scale assault on average Americans exercising their First Amendment rights at town-hall meetings to requiring insurance-company executives who refuse to play ball to testify before Congress. It would be naïve to think that when push comes to shove, the administration would refrain from using such hardball tactics against those in white coats.

A time will come when costs soar as more patients join the system, and liberal pipe dreams of huge savings from preventive medicine and electronic health records fail to materialize. Ultimately the savings will have to come from somewhere, and most likely it won’t be from trial lawyers.

Perhaps then the AMA will regret its opportunistic cynicism, but it will be too late to prevent physician services from being discounted to blue-plate-special rates.

-- Jason D. Fodeman, M.D., is a former health-policy fellow at the Heritage Foundation and author of How to Destroy a Village: What the Clintons Taught a Seventeen-Year-Old.

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'Diversity,' 'Tragedy,' and the Army -- By: Roger Clegg

As I’ve said many times in the affirmative-action context, there’s nothing wrong with diversity, but its advantages are greatly exaggerated, and they certainly do not justify the discrimination that routinely takes place in its name. Likewise, even if there are some nice things about having a diverse Army, it is hardly “a shame” if the Army becomes somewhat less diverse in order to keep our soldiers from being killed. “A diverse Army gives us strength” only if it is non-diverse when it comes to things like loyalty and reliability. This does not mean that Muslim soldiers are inherently disloyal or unreliable -- of course that is not true -- but it does mean that the scrutiny of soldiers’ loyalty and reliability ought not be discouraged because it has, horrors!, a politically incorrect “disparate impact” on some demographic groups. And nobody should be intimidated from doing the right thing because someone may say it’s discrimination.

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'Diversity,' 'Tragedy,' and the Army -- By: Roger Clegg

As I’ve said many times in the affirmative-action context, there’s nothing wrong with diversity, but its advantages are greatly exaggerated, and they certainly do not justify the discrimination that routinely takes place in its name. Likewise, even if there are some nice things about having a diverse Army, it is hardly “a shame” if the Army becomes somewhat less diverse in order to keep our soldiers from being killed. “A diverse Army gives us strength” only if it is non-diverse when it comes to things like loyalty and reliability. This does not mean that Muslim soldiers are inherently disloyal or unreliable -- of course that is not true -- but it does mean that the scrutiny of soldiers’ loyalty and reliability ought not be discouraged because it has, horrors!, a politically incorrect “disparate impact” on some demographic groups. And nobody should be intimidated from doing the right thing because someone may say it’s discrimination.

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It’s Business Time for Business-Method Patents

At long last, business-method patents will have their moment in the spotlight. The Supreme Court on Monday will take up the issue, holding arguments in the In Re Bilski case, which has been on our radar screen for nearly two years. Click here, here, here and here for LB background.

The WSJ’s Supreme Court correspondent Jess Bravin has a curtain-raiser today on the case, which raises this rather straightforward question: When can a business method be patented? Click here, as well, for a writeup from last week over at Scotusblog.

Business-method patents, of which Amazon’s one-click checkout and Priceline’s reverse auction represent two examples, have been kicking around for over a decade, ever since the Federal Circuit’s State Street decision, which expanded the scope of processes that could be patented.

The Supreme Court must now determine whether such swaths of modern business activity deserve patent protections, thereby opening the door to infringement lawsuits, or belong in the public domain, depriving their inventors of monopoly profits.

One large group of companies, among them those that develop software and pharmaceuticals, like IBM and Novartis, are urging the Supreme Court to maintain “patent protection for broad categories of cutting-edge innovation” rather than link the protection to “primitive physical technology,” as one of the briefs puts it.

But other companies, including Google, Symantec and Transamerica, are telling the justices that expanding the scope of business-method patents could expose them to infringement lawsuits over, as one brief says, “the very mental processes and ideas that are the building blocks of innovation.” (The NYT editorial page over the weekend largely sided with this perspective.)

Still, business method patents were relatively rare until the 1998 State Street decision, after which “a flood of business method patents came through the door,” says Jon Dudas, a former director of the Patent Office who is now a partner with Foley Lardner.

One such application came from Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw, two friends who worked together in the 1990s at the natural gas utility in Pittsburgh. The two wondered whether there was a way to hedge transactions against weather patterns so that a middleman could offer uniform prices to consumers and providers alike. The duo devised mathematical formulas for managing the risks on both sides, and filed a patent application describing a business method built around those formulas.

The Patent Office denied the application, saying the invention “merely manipulates [an] abstract idea and solves a purely mathematical problem.” The federal circuit upheld that decision. Writing in October 2008, Chief Judge Paul Michel reined in his court’s sweeping 1998 language, holding that to be patented, a process must be “tied to a particular machine or apparatus” or transform “a particular article into a different state or thing.”

Now it’s up to the Supreme Court to decide.

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Catching the Mass Murder Disease -- By: Michael Ledeen

As a very smart friend of mine said last night, that's like saying that an oncologist can get cancer by treating cancer victims.

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The Obama Family vs. the Family of a Natural Born Citizen

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Yes, I'm still here. But I'm generally a lurker.

Bob