Update of yesterday’s post on the Anthropogenic Californian Burning (ACB), 6.00 am Pacific Time, Tuesday, November 13, 2018:

At least 44 people have been killed by the fires, 42 in the northern “Camp Fire” – the deadliest wildfire in Californian history. The number of deaths is expected to rise. Over 7,000 buildings had been burned down by Monday evening, most of them homes. Some 15,000 more structures are under threat of burning. Some 117,000 acres are burnt to ash. The “Woolsey Fire” and the “Hill Fire” are burning northwest of Los Angeles.

Could California be worse governed? In addition to the neglect which led to the fires, the devastations caused by the Democrats in power are everywhere visible in the major cities. They are the stinking sites of camps of the homeless, whose numbers grow daily – since they are enticed by handouts of tax-payers’ money. These tent slums stretch for miles along streets smeared with human feces and stained with urine. The local councils shelter  – give “sanctuary” to – foreign criminals who don’t get deported even if indicted for robbery, rape and murder. The terrorized citizens, for the dubious pleasure of living in these places, pay staggeringly high and ever rising property taxes. Despite which their water is rationed, their roads are potholed, their schools fail. The unrealistic ideologically-determined pensions of retired public servants build an ever increasing burden of debt.

And yet, US News reported yesterday: – Democrats have won two Republican-held California State Senate seats in the Central Valley, giving the party veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature.

The vast majority of those same terrorized over-taxed citizens who live with the stink of Leftist lunacy in their nostrils, go on voting for the Democrats who are ruining their state.

What is the socio-pathological explanation? Surely some unintelligible professor at Berkeley or UCLA knows the answer.

The earth of California burns as a result of human activity – or rather of the inactivity of environmentalists. 

The Washington Post reports and comments:

The wildfires scorching California in the past few days have been vast, bringing their destruction and lethality to numerous communities across large swaths of the state, including  one in Los Angeles County and another gigantic burn along the northern mountains.

The Camp Fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills north of Sacramento, is now the most destructive individual wildfire in California’s history. As of Saturday, it already had destroyed nearly 7,000 structures in and around the mountain town of Paradise and has been blamed for 23 of the 25 overall deaths, though more could come.

“This event was the worst-case scenario,” Butte County Sheriff Kory L. Honea said. “It’s the event that we have feared for a long time.” …

There are reports of about 110 people missing. …

in Southern California, authorities said two bodies were found, both burned, in Malibu in a vehicle that had been in the path of the wildfire …

About 200,000 people were displaced by the Woolsey Fire, which began mid-afternoon Thursday near Simi Valley, even as fire departments were responding to a second wildfire, called the Hill Fire, just west of Thousand Oaks. The Woolsey Fire proved to be explosive, expanding within 24 hours to some 35,000 acres. It raced from the Conejo Valley to the Pacific Ocean, across Highway 101 and the Santa Monica mountains, at speeds that impressed veteran fire officials. …

On Saturday, President Trump made his first comments on the wildfires, alleging mismanagement of the forests.

There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!

The Californian authorities – Democrats all, and passionate believers in man-made global warming – blame President Trump (and global warming – see below) for the fires, claiming that he does not provide sufficient federal funds for the vital work of neglecting the forests.

And what’s more, they say, he’s heartless:

A spokesman for Governor Jerry Brown (D) said that more federal forest land has burned than state land, adding that the state has expanded its forestry budget while the Trump administration has cut its budget for forest services. …

Brian Rice, president of the California Professional Firefighters, also responded to Trump’s earlier tweet.

The president’s message attacking California and threatening to withhold aid to the victims of the cataclysmic fires is Ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines. The president’s assertion that California’s forest management policies are to blame for catastrophic wildfire is dangerously wrong . . . nearly 60 percent of California forests are under federal management, and another two-thirds under private control. It is the federal government that has chosen to divert resources away from forest management, not California.

Who is right?

Matthew Vadum writes at Canada Free Press:

As huge wildfires continued to devour forests, homes, and businesses across California over the weekend, President Trump lashed out at the destructive, deadly policies long pushed by environmentalists that set the stage for the Golden State’s now-routine fiery catastrophes.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” President Trump tweeted Nov. 10 at 3:08 a.m. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

On Nov. 11 at 4:40 a.m. he followed up with: “With proper Forest Management, we can stop the devastation constantly going on in California. Get Smart!”

In-between the two tweets, Trump used Twitter to urge people in the affected areas to “evacuate quickly”, praised the “more than 4,000” who are fighting the Camp and Woolsey Fires in California, and expressed sympathy for the fire victims.

Idiot celebrities and clueless politicians weighed in across the fruited plain, eager to attack Trump. …

California Governor-elect Gavin Newsom (D), a strong supporter of the no-growth economic policies that caused the deadly fires, tweeted:

“Lives have been lost. Entire towns have been burned to the ground. Cars abandoned on the side of the road. People are being forced to flee their homes. This is not a time for partisanship. This is a time for coordinating relief and response and lifting those in need up.” …

But as usual Trump is right … and his critics are wrong.

Years ago environmentalist lobbies ideologically opposed to economic growth put the screws to California’s once-thriving wood-harvesting industry. New federal and state regulations came into effect make it increasingly difficult for the industry to operate.

“As a result, timber industry employment gradually collapsed, falling in 2017 to half of what it was 20 years earlier, with imports from Canada, China, and other nations filling domestic need,” Chuck DeVore, Vice President of National Initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, writes at Forbes.

As timber harvesting permit fees rose and environmental regulations intensified, industry employees left the field and “the combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees”.

With all that kindling piling up on forest floors, today’s devastating wildfires were not hard to foresee.

Back in 2005 experts were predicting “larger, more devastating fires—fires so hot that they sterilized the soil, making regrowth difficult and altering the landscape,” DeVore writes. They saw the rise of “fires that increasingly threatened lives and homes as they became hotter and more difficult to bring under control. Federal lands have not been managed for decades …”

For decades before the election of President Trump …

… threatening adjacent private forests, while “federal funds designated for forest maintenance have been ‘borrowed’ for fire suppression expenses,” DeVore writes. “The policies frequently reduce the economic value of the forest to zero. And, with no intrinsic worth remaining, interest in maintaining the forest declined, and with it, resources to reduce the fuel load.”

Two decades ago there used to be an orderly burning of wood waste – including brush and smaller trees cleared by thinning efforts— from timber operations. … That waste fed “renewable biomass powered electric generating plants across the length of the state”, but taxpayer-subsidized solar power coupled with California’s air-quality regulations and less wood waste to use forced biomass generators to shut down.

“What used to be burned safely in power generators is now burned in catastrophic fires,” he writes. “Including the growing capture and use of landfill methane as a fuel, California’s biomass energy generation last year was 22% lower than it was 25 years before.”

Outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown (D) pigheadedly blames global warming for the fires but as Cato Institute meteorologist Ryan Maue noted on Twitter back on Aug. 5:

Please take a deep breath and read up on California’s forest management issues that are decades in the making. Governor Brown blames climate change for wildfires and avoids any meaningful conversation on policy solutions.

… Arms of the federal government which have long been under the influence of the same left-wing enviro-radicals who run California, are [also] largely to blame.

As always, government does badly what it takes it upon itself to do. As always, private enterprise does it much better:

In charge of 190 million acres of land, the U.S. Forest Service can’t manage land to prevent fires or protect property after blazes begin, Robert Smith, a distinguished scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said …

Private owners cannot afford to let their forests die of disease, insect infestations or wildfire. They are on the job 24 hours a day, unlike 9-5 government bureaucrats. If private owners fail they go bankrupt. If Forest Service managers fail, at worst they are transferred to another forest.

But though enviro-radicals in the federal government must bear their share of blame, President Trump’s accusation against the Californian government is not misplaced:

Smith laid some of the blame at the feet of radical environmentalists for preventing the Forest Service from managing woodlands by taking away the old or dead trees that are most likely to catch fire. The [Californian] government’s refusal to open roadways in forested areas also makes fighting fires unnecessarily difficult … 

The evidence, Vadum says, is on the President’s side.

Paradise lost

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 100 years ago TODAY, the First World War came to an end.

But Europe did not recover from it.

The death of Europe – its slow suicide which is now well underway – began with the outbreak of that unnecessary war.

An entirely unnecessary war it was. It wasted a generation of young men. Ten million of them died and millions more bore life-altering injuries.

The suffering of the doomed young men – many if not most in their teens – was intense. Variously, they were shot; they felt the cold steel of bayonets piercing into their bodies; their lungs, throats and skins were blistered by mustard gas; they were blinded; they lost limbs; they lived and died in mud.

For what? For the vanity of rulers, most of them monarchs. That was all. Nothing more profound or complicated than that.

But the First World War and the Armistice itself necessitated the Second World War.

And the Western powers, Britain and America, deemed it necessary to fight it in alliance with Stalin, an ally as tyrannically oppressive and cruel as the axis powers they defeated.

Because of Stalin’s alliance, Eastern Europe was saved from one tyranny only to fall under another. The iron heel of Nazi Germany was lifted from that half of the continent, and the iron heel of Communist Russia came down upon it.

American generosity helped the economic recovery of the Western European nations. But their future is short.

The Western European peoples are letting themselves die out. They have few children. And they are giving their lands away to mostly poor, alien, uneducated settlers, whose customs and laws derive from the dark ages. 

These Third World migrants pour in at the invitation of the governments, and have many children. It is a form of conquest by the will of the conquered.

Before long the foreign colonists will be numerous enough to use the European system of democracy to gain power, and then, if they so choose, they can abolish democracy and replace it with their own systems of oppressive tyranny.  

For this the soil of Europe was soaked with the blood of its peoples in the wars of the last century.

For those who survived, for their dwindling descendants, is that eleven o’clock the bells are striking?

One of the most important political scholars of our time, David Horowitz, founder of the Freedom Center, wrote a letter to Philip Hanlon, president of Dartmouth College, which encapsulates all that has gone wrong with most American universities.

Horowitz demands an apology for the treatment he received at Hanlon’s academy. It is clear that he deserves it.

We quote from the letter (a must-read-in-full):

On October 23, I spoke at your college. I was invited by members of College Republicans and Students Supporting Israel. They probably wanted to hear what I had to say because I am one of the most prominent conservative intellectuals in America …

Despite my credentials –

Extremely impressive credentials, of which he gives a summary –

– and even though these conservative students pay the same tuition – $75,000 per year – as your leftwing students, I was forced to raise the money to underwrite my visit and lecture. This was particularly galling to the Dartmouth conservatives who invited me, because the previous spring Dartmouth’s “Office of Pluralism and Leadership” sponsored a visit by notorious anti-Semite and terrorist supporter Linda Sarsour – who has no academic credentials to speak of – underwriting her expenses and paying her a reported $10,000 honorarium for her talk.

Linda Sarsour is a genuine, fanatical, total bigot: outspokenly anti-Semitic, an agent and defender of the terrorist organization Hamas, a propagandist for intolerant Islam, she is a prime example of the vicious and immoral type of person idolized by the Left in this era of Western decadence.

My hosts were also probably interested in what I had to say because over the preceding decades, Dartmouth has purged conservative intellectuals from its faculty so effectively that the students could only name two Dartmouth liberal arts professors who were conservative. This reflects a collective faculty attitude that intellectual diversity is dangerous and unwanted. This is a disgraceful fact of academic life, which could easily be remedied, which prevents Dartmouth students from getting a decent liberal arts education, where all issues are controversial and intellectual diversity is the only guarantee that students are being educated rather than indoctrinated, or that there are reasonable checks on unchallenged leftist professors going off the deep end. As it happens my visit elicited a professorial outburst showing just how far leftwing bigotry and anti-academic discourse can go on your campus. …

He describes the outburst in some detail. It was aggressive, arrogant, lying, unjust, savage.  

And it was encouraged to be what it was by faculty staff.

Leading the pack of Dartmouth character assassins who mobilized to combat my presence was Professor Annelise Oreleck, an out-of-control Gender Studies professor who tweeted:

Long-time hater, Islamophobe and anti-intellectual David Horowitz is speaking today in Rocky 3 at 6pm. He is a hater of the first order. If you’re so inclined, support students who are organizing a protest – Bring signs. Turn your back. Stage a walkout.

… There were several Dartmouth administrators overseeing this event, including Keysi Montás, the Director of Safety and Security who was in charge. Unfortunately, they were not there to enforce an educational decorum but to encourage the protesters by tolerating their antics and refusing to eject them. …

You had no personal role in these travesties, but you are president of the institution that made them possible. I’m not going to ask you to have your “Office of Pluralism (how Orwellian is that)” sponsor a return visit from me, since it might well provoke a faculty riot. I just want you to think about these signs of a damaged institution. and the warping of the educational experiences of your students.

And –

I would like an apology from you on behalf of the Dartmouth community. …

Will he get an apology?

If he does, it will mean that there is still a trace of moral responsibility in at least one highly-paid Big Cheese of the educational establishment.

What if anything is the Trump administration’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, doing to stop this rot in the mind-nurseries of the nation?

This is the video that made Brandon Straka love Donald Trump – and start the #WalkAway movement.

https://youtu.be/Tab5vvo0TJw

Straka writes:

I walked away from the Democratic Party in 2017. But I couldn’t even consider becoming a Republican or embracing Donald Trump. I went on a long journey of unraveling the lies that I had been fed by the liberal media. The more I researched the more I began to like Trump. And then I found this … and that’s when I knew I LOVED Trump.

(Hat-tip to our commenter Zerothruster)

So the Democrats won the House yesterday.

A bad thing.

Or not so bad?

Apparently there is a bright side, even a very bright side, and conservative commentators are looking on it.

John Hinderaker writes (in part) at PowerLIne:

One striking feature of this year’s elections was the absence of a policy agenda from the Democrats. The party’s young upstarts are open socialists; otherwise, what platform did Democrats run on? Hating Republicans, basically, along with scaremongering on health care.

Nancy Pelosi won’t be able to get much done in the House, but she probably doesn’t intend to achieve anything other than harassment of the President through investigations and, perhaps, articles of impeachment. The Democrats are already talking about subpoenaing President Trump’s tax returns. Happily, from Pelosi’s perspective, such petty harassment seems to be all her base wants. But it doesn’t shape up as a recipe for long-term electoral success. …

Come to the silver lining!  Show us the silver lining!

The Democrats’ takeover of the House offers a possible silver lining. When President Trump signed the bloated omnibus spending bill in March, he said he was doing so because it increased spending on military preparedness, which was needed. But he vowed that he would never sign another spending bill like it. Few took Trump seriously, but I am not sure why not. He has a good record of doing what he says he intends to do.

It would be hard for Trump to veto an omnibus spending bill cobbled together by Republican majorities in both houses. The story line would be that the Republicans can’t get their act together. But if the Democratic House and Republican Senate pass compromise spending bills, Trump can assert fiscal responsibility by vetoing them. The battle then becomes Trump vs. Pelosi, and the increasingly addled Pelosi is an ideal foil. So maybe a Democratic House will give President Trump an opportunity to address what so far has been the Achilles heel of his administration, unconstrained spending and deficits.

Maybe.

The big consolations are that the Republicans still have the Senate – even a bit more securely – and President Trump has the power of veto.

But silver should not be wasted on a lining.

Now, just before the mid-term election in November, 2018, the enthusiasm for Donald Trump’s leadership seems to be greater than ever, to judge by the size of his rallies, the rapturous applause that greets him and his every statement. People wait through the night to get into a stadium where he is to speak the following night. Tens of thousands get in, more tens of thousands watch him on screens and listen to him outside. Though the weather is cold. Though the mainstream media tell voters that he is as bad as the worst dictator who has ever lived, this generous, unaffected, extremely capable businessman, with a star’s charisma and all the right values, has won the love and trust of at least half the American people.

And thousands are walking away from the Democratic Party, discovering, probably to their surprise, that they are Trump supporters. They have formed a movement called #WalkAway, founded and led by Brandon Straka.

Brandon Straka

How the revelation that Trump Is Right came to this former Democrat, Jani Allan records at the Epoch Times:

When you are a gay, strikingly handsome cosmetologist, hairdresser, singer, and a theater actor in New York City, chances are you’re also a Democrat.

On the night that Trump won the presidential election, Brandon Straka wept; there are pictures of him crying.

He said:

I was devastated. I still believed the media! … They told us that Trump was a racist, a bigot, and a homophobe. I thought he would harm black, Jewish, and gay people; he was “dog-whistling” to hate groups. We were told that hate crimes were spiking and that Vice President Mike Pence was going to advocate conversion therapy for gays. …

The Democratic party was my tribe.

Then he began to notice a discrepancy between what the media said and what was actually happening.

A friend showed him a compilation video of the media trashing Trump. …

I saw all the moments that were replayed by the mainstream media. Remarks taken out of context. Black people edited out of audience shots. Endless fodder for the Trump-haters. Then the Charlottesville rally happened. I had had my eyes opened to how dishonest the media is and how they manipulate people’s behavior and then, they twist the narrative again. At Charlottesville, I saw clearly that Antifa are the aggressors. They become violent, but the media never denounce the violence of the left. More recently, there was the Kavanaugh lynching. There is no level to which the left will not stoop. [To them] the ends justify the means.”

Last year he wrote, produced, and sang Resist: A Rock Revolution. What began as a demi-opera — something written by a liberal devastated by Trump’s election — grew into Straka’s personal journey to conservatism. …

A friend warned him about speaking out.

Which made him all the more determined to speak out.

There is a reason it’s called the silent majority. There are reasons people don’t speak out and say, “Something is very wrong here.” They are afraid of being shunned by their friends, losing work, being considered crazy because they are no longer part of the hive-mind. Look what they did to Kanye West when he went to the White House. I wish I could reach out to him! But it just needs one person to speak up, one person to say, “The emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.”

Straka speaks as though slightly amazed …

Then, one day, I was jogging in Central Park and it came to me in a flash. I am not going to be silent! As a gay man, especially, I am going to be the unsilent minority.

That’s when  he decided to do the #WalkAway Campaign and make a video to launch it.

I wrote the script in 20 minutes. It was as if there was a printer in my mind. After I finished, I thought, “Everybody needs to hear this! … I’m an actor and a singer. I am good at setting a stage and telling a story. …”

A friend pointed the camera at him. This is what he said:

Once upon a time I was a liberal, but the Left has devolved into intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, ignorant, narrow-minded and, at times, blatantly fascistic behavior and rhetoric. Liberalism has been co-opted and absorbed by the very characteristics it claims to fight against. The Left has allowed themselves to become hypnotized by false narratives and conclusions perpetuated by social-justice warriors who misrepresent and misconstrue facts, evidence, and events, to confirm their own biases that everyone who does not comply with their prejudicial conclusions and follow their orders is a racist, a bigot, a Nazi, a white supremacist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, and alt-right extremist. 

It was May 26 when he posted the video, which he edited himself, on social media.  

Five months later, Straka has more than 97,000 followers on Twitter, and his Facebook video has been viewed a million times.  

The movement has been endorsed by Sarah Palin, Dinesh D’Souza, Tomi Lahren, Roseanne Barr, and Robert “Buzz” Patterson (who walked away after serving as the senior military aide to President Bill Clinton). 

Straka has become a cynosure of attention. … People like Candace Owens, from the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA, are contacting him.

I didn’t think when I released my video I would be celebrating at a fancy hotel wearing an “I Love Trump” top hat and tuxedo.

Then this happened, to Straka’s immense delight:

On Oct. 27, he received a tweet from the president himself:

#Walkaway. Walkaway from the Democrat Party movement marches today in D.C. Congratulations to Brandon Straka for starting something very special. 

On Saturday October 27, 2018, “Straka and his ‘unsilent minority’ took the #WalkAway movement to Washington” and he led a march of thousands. 

The event was totally ignored by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, ABC’s Joy Behar, and the late night comedians. In fact, apart from Fox and the New York Post, none of the mainstream media covered the event.

Still, everyone [who knew about it] agreed that the #WalkAway from the Democratic Party D.C. march was a “YUGE” success.

So what lies ahead for Straka? That is, apart from his newfound political clout.

He said:

I want to make documentaries about American culture … I want to make it cool to be a patriot and an American.

Which can only mean an American who honors and will defend the Constitution. A citizen of the Constitutional Republic of the United States.

Americans are bound into a nation by the Constitution. Nothing else.

The fastest way to reduce a nation from free to unfree is for its government to take charge of its health.

It may also be a reliable way to shrink the nation. Countries with national health services also have low fertility rates.

It’s a pleasant enough state of affairs for some members of the medical profession in such countries in this twilight of the West. True, the underpaid general practitioners are worked half to death, but obstetricians and pediatricians take early retirement, and geriatricians take long vacations from their stints of duty on the death panels. Undertakers buy stately homes.

If central government takes over health care in America, nothing will be different. Just bigger. To treat the only large demographics, young adults and the able-bodied middle-aged – in other words, those who escaped the abortionist’s scissors and are not yet old enough to be denied all curative measures – the inflictors of medical care will need large accommodations.

Justin Haskins discusses the prospect of a US national health service at Townhall :

Until recently, only the far left of the Democratic Party openly called for … socialized medicine. Few remember that when the Democrats last had control of the House of Representatives, in 2010, most Democrats chose to reject pushing for a single-payer health care model, despite the fact they had control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Even then-President Barack Obama, a longtime supporter of enacting a single-payer scheme, told members of his party that it would be better, at least temporarily, to pursue a more moderate course.

Fast-forward to 2018. Emboldened by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s success in pushing his “Medicare for All” single-payer model while running for president in 2016, many congressional Democrats have radically changed their tune. Not only has single-payer health care become one of the defining issues for Democrats today, in many respects, it seems as though it’s the party’s only issue … other than calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, of course.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to federal elections. Many gubernatorial candidates are saying it’s time for government to take over the health care marketplace. For instance, in “purple” Florida, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, the Democrats’ choice to recapture Florida’s governorship, has been a vocal supporter of Sanders’s single-payer scheme, although he admits it would be difficult for Florida to enact single-payer on its own.

But while the cries for socialized medicine have grown louder in the United States, across the pond, England’s national health care program, the National Health Service, is facing huge difficulties liberals in America don’t want you to know about.

Earlier in October, reports emerged that the National Health Service’s forthcoming 10-year plan will include a policy change that will make group appointments with primary care doctors the “default” option for those with long-term health problems. Under the new model, patients will be expected to meet with doctors in groups of 15 to save money and time. …

During these group primary care visits, which will reportedly last about two hours each, patients will be expected to share their health care concerns as they would normally in more traditional one-on-one appointments.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Who would ever want to discuss sex, obesity, hemorrhoids, or any other deeply personal health care problem in front of a group of 14 other strangers—or, even worse, neighbors? But fear not! The government masterminds in England have a solution: Groups will be formed based on common health problems, such as diabetes and erectile dysfunction, because, you know, all people with diabetes and erectile dysfunction are basically the same. And to ensure no one in the group discusses the ailments of others when the group primary care session ends, each person will be required to sign a confidentiality agreement pledging not to share what they heard with people who weren’t present for the appointment.

It’s astonishing the faith politicians and bureaucrats have in pieces of paper! They believe a sheet or two can forestall every peril from gossip to war.

I can’t think of a more bizarre and insulting way to treat patients suffering from serious and sometimes embarrassing diseases than to force them to discuss their problems in front of a group of their peers, but this is the sort of thing that happens when the good of collective matters more than the rights of the individual.

This isn’t the only controversy facing the NHS, either. For several years, critics of the health care system have complained that it’s wildly underfunded and, as a result, suffering from long wait times for patients. …

No one denies the United States has plenty of health care problems of its own, and the Obamacare model imposed on Americans by the Democrats in 2010 has only made things significantly worse. But the solutions to those flaws in our current system can’t be found in the government-controlled systems of Canada or Europe because government almost always creates more problems than it solves …

This isn’t revolutionary thinking. Why would we put the same people who can’t operate the Postal Service, Amtrak, or the DMV in charge of the health care system?

The Dems’ proposal for an American national health service requires a wage decrease for doctors. Do the proposers understand that they may be launching a doctor shortage?

Will the American ill-paid doctors see people with similar conditions in batches of 15? As the population here is much bigger than in Britain, they may need to see them in batches of, say, 50. Row after row of examination tables in examination halls where the naked patients lie, hearing each other groan, seeing palsy shake each other’s few last grey hairs, or how youth has grown specter thin, and where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs. (Not original. Quoting John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale.)