We are libertarian conservatives, “minarchists”, emphatically not anarchists.

Having a libertarian bent, we like much of what John Stossel writes in an article at Townhall:

Here’s my fantasy: Libertarians are elected to the presidency and to majorities in Congress. What would happen next? Well, if libertarians were “in charge,” you’d have more freedom and prosperity.

Freedom frightens some people. They say if no one is in charge there would be chaos. That is intuitive, but think about a skating rink. Before rinks were invented, if you proposed an amusement in which people strap blades to their feet and skate around on ice at whatever speeds they wish, you’d have been called crazy. There’s got to be speed limits, stoplights, turn signals. But we know that people navigate rinks safely on their own. They create their own order, with only minimal rules.

Society would work the same way — and does to a large extent even today. “Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government,” Thomas Paine, the soul of the American Revolution, wrote. “It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. … Common interest (has) a greater influence than the laws of government.”

Yes. Common interest is the wellspring of morality.

If libertarians were “in charge,” there would be laws to protect us from foreign enemies and those who would steal from us or injure us. Today, by contrast, under the rule of Democans and Republicrats, we’re drowning in rules — 160,000 pages’ worth. Micromanagement kills opportunity and freedom.

Maybe if there were a way to have more competition among governments, things would be better. Competition forces people to become more efficient and to get rid of stupid rules. What if we let people take over some unused land in America to create areas with fewer rules, simpler legal systems, smaller government?

Stossel quotes Michael Strong , who with his wife Magatte Wade founded the Free Cities Project.

Strong said, “We want to encourage thousands of people to create new governments that have different rules, each competing for customers with the best education and best health care, the most peace and prosperity you could imagine.”

We expect that where government interfered least with the economic life of the people there would be the greatest prosperity. Where it had nothing at all to do with education or health, the people would stand the best chance of being well educated and effectively cured. Where it most strongly protected liberty, they would probably endure the least crime. Where it armed the people most formidably they might least expect to be invaded.

Are there any free cities along the lines Strong and Wade envision?

“Hong Kong and Singapore are the best examples,” Strong said. “Now they are among the wealthiest places on earth.”

True – and proof that small government, doing little more than enforcing the rule of law, works well.

And there is a free city in Dubai because the emirate wanted to create a financial sector …

And did, though the emir had to abandon sharia law in the free city to achieve what he wanted:

“Dubai was brilliant,” Strong said. “They looked around the world. They saw that Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, Chicago, Sydney, London all ran British common law. British common law is much better for commerce than is French common law or sharia law. So they took 110 acres of Dubai soil, put British common law with a British judge in charge, and they went from an empty piece of soil to the 16th most powerful financial center in world in eight years.”

It’s what libertarians have said: Freedom works, and government, when it grows beyond the barest minimum, keeps people poor.

As liberty is most likely to bring prosperity, why are libertarians a political minority?

Is it because many people fear it, and if so why?

Some want governments to be parental and care for them “from the cradle to the grave”. They think such welfare governments can guarantee that they’ll  be fed, housed, educated, medically treated all through their lives.

They could not be more wrong. The welfare states of Europe are rapidly going bankrupt.

And besides, what a government provides a government can withhold. To put yourself wholly in the power of a government is to put yourself not into safety but into danger. You are most safe when you control your own life, and the government does no more than guard your liberty. (And as everything governments do they do badly, it is wise to own a gun.)

Some need to feel that there is “someone in charge” – a king, a chief, a Secretary-General of the Communist Party, a powerful president, a Father in Heaven.

We don’t want someone in charge. Neither on earth nor “in heaven”. Throughout our earthly lives we want the rule of law, that wholly abstract authority, emotionless, fixed. (As Lord Denning, the British judge, said: “Be you ever so high, the law is above you”.)

And we delight in a universe that does not have and does not need “someone” to make, maintain, rule, watch over, manipulate, or give a damn about it.

An inspector from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture raided the fish fry at St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church in Rochester. He had been there for his annual inspection of the church’s kitchen, but … he espied an elderly parishioner unwrapping some pies.  He swooped. Would those by any chance be homemade pies?

They were. Four ladies had made each her favorite pie. They’d brought them to the church to sell at a dollar a slice. The inspector stopped them doing so, telling them that if they did they’d be committing a crime. In Pennsylvania, it is illegal to bake a pie in a home kitchen for sale at a church fundraiser.

The inspector informed the ladies they could continue baking pies [for sale] at home if each paid a $35 dollar fee for him to come round to her home and certify her kitchen as state-compliant.

Mark Steyn tells the story in After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. He also tells this one:

Seven-year-old Julie Murphy was selling lemonade in Portland, Oregon, when two officers demanded to see her “temporary restaurant license” which would have cost her $120. When she failed to produce it, they threatend her with a $500 fine, and also made her cry.

And this one:

For their morning customers the Collins family had been putting a coffee pot and doughnuts on the counter of their hardware store for fifteen years…

But in California that’s an illegal act. The permit mullahs told Randy Collins that he needed to install stainless steel sinks with hot and cold water and a prep kitchen to handle  the doughnuts.

Mr Collins was submissive.

“We want to be in compliance with the law” [he said].

“Why?”  Mark Steyn asks.

When the law says it’s illegal for a storekeeper to offer his customer a cup of coffee, you should be proud to be in non-compliance. Otherwise, what the hell did you guys bother holding a revolution for? …

This is the reality of small business in America today. You don’t make the rules, you don’t get to vote for people who make the rules. But you have to work harder, pay more taxes, buy more permits, fill in more paperwork, contribute to the growth of an ever less favorable business environment, and prostrate yourself before the Commissar of Community Services – all for the privilege of taking home less and less money.

Mark Steyn calls it tyranny. It is.

Another example from a different source:

When California’s elected officials come back from their month-long recess they face a mountain of proposed legislation (almost 900 bills are lined up and waiting), including a new law (SB432) that would require hotels to eliminate flat sheets. Not having fitted sheets on hotel beds would now be a crime in California. This is not a joke.

California, the state trying to deal with a massive $26 BILLION dollar debt, is considering a law that some hospitality industry experts claim would add an estimated $15 to $30 million dollars in costs to an already hurting hotel industry. The low-end estimate of fifteen million is the projected cost to purchase new fitted sheets for the 550,000hotel beds in the state. Of course the hospitality industry is claiming that these added costs will hurt their business and put jobs at risk.

The fitted-sheet bill is the brainchild of State Senator Kevin De Leon (a Democrat from Los Angeles), whose mother suffered back pains while working as a hotel maid. Kevin has been quoted as saying this was “an issue close to my heart.” It is also a bill that has the support of Big Labor. …

We are now going to make it a crime in California not to use a fitted sheet? Really?

The desirability or undesirability of something is not a good reason to legislate for or against it. There should be no more laws than are frugally necessary (administered as rigorously as possible). To make thousands of petty laws that are easy to break through ignorance, incapacity, or bewilderment is to bring the law into contempt.

It’s debatable whether there should be any regulatory laws whatsoever. They are inevitably oppressive. They establish a niggling, nagging, tyranny-of-interference.

Tyranny American-style.

It is communitarian, a sneaky form of collectivization. It is job-killing, impoverishing. Enlarging the reach and power of the state, it is dictatorial.

And it  is Obama’s preferred method of government. He is using the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to implement his dictatorial will. The EPA is continually churning out thousands of regulations to complicate and hamper work in agriculture, animal farming, industry, construction … everything. With this Stasi-like agency, he by-passes Congress.

The only good point made by Jon Huntsman in a recent debate among GOP candidates for the presidency, was that the EPA must be abolished.

Airports are on high alert for al-Qaeda terrorists plotting to blow up jets using “body bombs” surgically inserted in them.

Attempts are being made to implant explosives into the abdomens, buttocks and breasts of suicide bombers so they can pass undetected through new airport body scanners.

US security experts have warned airlines and airport authorities about the new threat … They fear fanatics could inject a detonating chemical into themselves to trigger the bombs. … Potential bombers would carry a letter from a doctor claiming they have had surgery and need to carry a needle and syringe for medical reasons. It would be sufficient to clear security during check-in for a flight.

Terror experts confirmed small pouches of high explosives such as Pentaerythritol Tetra Nitrate could be implanted into the body. The wounds would be allowed to heal over and the bomb, which would be detonated in mid air by injecting a chemical into the pouch. Just eight ounces of PETN, the weight of a Rubik’s Cube, could bring down a plane …

But are there doctors willing to help the cause by supplying false certificates and performing the surgery?

One security source said there is concern that the US may harbour a significant number of medical students sympathetic to al-Qaeda.He said: “There are a large number of students from Arab countries studying medicine in the US. … All that would be needed is a basic grounding in rudimentary surgery to help implant a small amount of explosive.”

In fact, terrorist doctors, fully qualified in the profession, are not in short supply: a number of Arab doctors have prostituted their skills to serve the Islamic ideology of torture and murder.

Michelle Malkin writes:

Our homeland security officials have sent fresh warnings to foreign governments that “human bombs” may try to board planes with surgically implanted explosives. The ticking terrorists are reportedly getting help from murder-minded Arab Muslim physicians trained in the West. Infidels beware: Dr. Jihad’s version of the health care oath omits the “no” in “Do no harm.”

The death docs may be using their expertise to play “Hide the IED” in body cavities that bomb-detection equipment cannot penetrate. At least one Saudi operative has been nabbed with explosives in his bum, and British intel picked up on Arab website chatter last year about possible breast-bomb inserts. Officials are now said to be on the lookout for physicians’ notes requesting that passengers be allowed to carry syringes — which could carry detonation chemicals. …

There should be no shock at the role of purported healers in these and other hellish plots to destroy masses of innocent lives in the name of Allah. …

Medical charities have long served as front groups for jihad. Palestinian jihadists used ambulances owned and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) — subsidized with billions in American tax dollars — to ferry explosives and gunmen from attacks. Hezbollah terrorists used ambulances as props in Lebanon to stage anti-Israel propaganda and elicit sympathy from Western media.

Radical Islam’s bloody perversion of the medical profession traces back to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, the global terror operation that wooed wealthy young docs and other intellectual elites with cushy union benefits.

• Ayman al-Zawahiri, a surgeon from a family of doctors, was raised in the Muslim Brotherhood; helmed the murderous Islamic Jihad; and masterminded myriad al-Qaida plots before succeeding Osama bin Laden this summer.
• Former Hamas leader Abdel Rantissi, bent on wiping out the children of Israel, was a pediatrician.
• Convicted al-Qaida scientist Aafia Siddiqui studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis.
• Rafiq Abdus Sabir was a Columbia University grad who served as an emergency room physician in Boca Raton, Fla., before his terrorism conviction in 2007 for agreeing to provide medical aid and treatment to wounded al-Qaida fighters so they could return to Iraq to kill American soldiers.
• Rafil Dhafir, an Iraqi-born oncologist, practiced in New York before being convicted in 2004 on 59 criminal counts related to violating Iraqi sanctions and committing large-scale medical charity fraud.
• A den of well-heeled jihadi doctors from around the world was implicated in the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings. At least one of the convicted terror MDs worked for Britain’s National Health Service.
• Mahmoud al-Zahar, another bloodthirsty Hamas biggie and medical doctor, described his specialty to a New York Times reporter in 2006 this way: ”’Thyroids: I’m very good at cutting throats,’ Dr. Zahar said, drawing his forefinger across his neck as a rare smile spread across his face.”

And at least one Christian Arab could be added to the list: George Habash, a Palestinian Greek-Orthodox Christian, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of the terrorist groups that came together to form the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under Arafat’s leadership. He qualified as a doctor of medicine at the American University of Beirut in 1951.

Michelle Malkin goes on to remind us of the Muslim psychiatrist who carried out the Fort Hood massacre:

Closer to home, Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan starkly diagnosed the ideological fanaticism of every soldier of Allah in a Koranic-inspired PowerPoint presentation that concluded: “We love death more then (sic) you love life!”

Military officials plagued by political correctness ignored Hasan. Thirteen Fort Hood soldiers and civilian personnel, and one unborn child, paid with their lives.

How many more Dr. Jihads are operating in the open, exploiting our borders and tolerance, wielding medical licenses to kill?

It’s bad enough that Americans are lectured on what they should eat by Michelle Obama and her volunteer force of food police.

But there’s worse to complain of.

These reports come from various websites including the Australian Islamist Monitor and Islam Watch:

Here are some jihadi muslims who made the whole umma proud by serving kuffar [non-Muslims] with urine and feces.

[In Philadelphia, USA] Yasser made Allah happy by carrying his urine in bottles in his ice cream truck; and every time a little one bought an ice cream cone he sprinkled his urine on it. He carried frozen urine also for those big kids who wanted a big bowl of ice cream.

[In England] A man sprayed a mixture of urine and feces in two supermarkets, a pub and a bookshop. Sahnoun Daifallah, 42, a devout Muslim from Gloucester, is alleged to have caused damage estimated at £700,00. He pleaded not guilty to four charges of contaminating goods and two of damaging property. He also denied possession of material to contaminate goods and possession of an offensive weapon. The court heard he visited the Air Balloon pub near the village of Birdlip on 14 May 2008 where police were called after he asked a barmaid how much it would cost to rape her.

[Same story, another report] Daifallah appeared on charges he squirted a “foul-smelling” substance, later determined to be a mixture of feces and urine, over frozen chips and wine bottles at a Tesco in Gloucester – he then went on to shower and ruin 706 children’s books at Waterstones in Cirencester, Gloucs. Not quite satisfied with showering his human liquid waste concoction over just two stores, Daifallah proceeded to the Air Balloon pub where, after making offensive comments to the barmaid, he proceeded to sprinkle more feces and urine all over the pub food. This filthy defilement of property has cost the business owners considerable amounts of money to clean their establishment as well as replace the urine-fecal destroyed items.

[In Cardiff, Wales] Two muslim Bakery/Pizzeria owners were fined for selling chocolate cake – which had been sprinkled with human feces. A horrified customer ate the foul-smelling gateaux but noticed that it didn’t taste or smell “quite right” and handed the cake to public health scientists. The analysts soon established that the sweet treat was covered in feces and legal proceedings against the bakery owners were started. Owners Saeed Hasmi, 25, and Syed Jan Yadgari, 23, were fined £1,500 for selling food unfit for human consumption.

[In Dallas, USA] Behrouz Nahidmobarekeh, 49, a devout Muslim, is on trial for allegedly throwing feces on pastries at a Fiesta grocery store. Police said that during an investigation, they found a pile of human feces by his bed. Investigators believe Nahidmobarekeh would dry the feces, either by microwave or just letting it sit out, grate it up with a cheese grater and then sprinkle it at the store. A young boy was later seen on the surveillance tape, eating one of the defiled cookies. There were consistent complaints about foul smelling cookies and cakes which led to investigations and apprehension of the muslim pastry chef.

Islam can seriously damage your health.

From RedState:

From 2008 to 2009, Planned Parenthood received $363 million in government grants and contracts — our tax dollars. …

New footage released just this morning shows a Planned Parenthood manager in New Jersey coaching a man and a woman posing as sex traffickers on how to secure secret abortions and other services for their female underage sex slaves.

The Planned Parenthood manager explains to the “pimp” how to make their operation “look as legit as possible” and how to lie to avoid mandatory reporting laws.

Watch it all through. The worst comes towards the end.

To repeal Obamacare is to resist socialism and to choose freedom.

The House of Representatives’ overwhelming vote (245-189) to repeal the health-care bill which Obama and the Democrats foisted on the nation, is an act of resistance by the new Republican majority against the Democrats’ attempt to turn America into a socialist state. That is the most important thing about it.

As John Podhoretz writes at Commentary-Contentions:

So why bother? That seems to be the general question. The Republican-controlled House can pass it, but it won’t get through the Senate, and even if it did, the president will veto it. Why cast an unnecessary vote? Why have this debate now?

Simple: Where you stand on ObamaCare is now the bright line in American politics, the single issue that defines the difference between the two major voting camps in the United States.

And the Heritage Foundation is of the same opinion:

Last night, the House of Representatives, the legislative chamber of Congress closest to American popular opinion, voted to repeal Obamacare—the increasingly unpopular law which led directly to a change in the control of Congress just three months ago.

Many will tell you that yesterday’s bipartisan vote of 245 to 189 was an exercise in futility—an empty, symbolic measure. Liberals in Congress, the White House and their echo chamber in the media all insist, as NPR has duly reported, that “this measure will go no further.”

Don’t believe this for a single minute. The vote last night was an important step in the democratic process of protecting and conserving our constitutional freedoms.

Our country, it is increasingly clear, has arrived at a pivotal moment – perhaps the pivotal moment – in its history. Together, we face a choice between two futures. One is a collectivist future where the federal government claims ever increasing shares of our income and grants itself the authority to make decisions affecting virtually every aspect of our daily lives. The other future is built upon the idea that individual freedom trumps government authority, and that in those rare cases when solving a problem requires government, the government that governs best is the one that is smallest and closest to the people. That is the future that we should seek – reaffirming our individual liberty, strengthening private markets, shrinking the size of governments, and making decisions wherever possible at the local level rather than in Washington.

No issue joins this debate more dramatically than the question of Obamacare, and what to do about it. It’s not just about health care. The law redefines our centuries-old understanding of the reach of federal authority, indeed whether there are any limits at all to the government’s ability to intrude upon individuals, families, business owners, physicians and other health providers, and state and local governments. Little or nothing will be allowed outside the new regulatory scheme – no alternative state programs, no individuals or businesses that choose not to participate, no truly private market alternatives.

The debate boils down to one big question: Shall we govern ourselves, or let unelected bureaucrats rule us?

Which is to say: Shall we be free or not?

We must make the choice now. We must choose to be free.

Anyone for death?

A website named Compassion and Choices – deceptively, since it should accurately be named Pitilessness and Compulsion –  says this:

New Medicare regulations to take effect January 1 will include a provision physicians, social workers and families pushed for. The New York Times reports:

“Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.”

In truth, the consultation is not about forgoing treatment, as advance directives are equally suited to requesting life-sustaining treatment. Thus, this Medicare enhancement simply encourages communication, promotes choice, compensates doctors for important care and empowers patients.

Let’s examine this. Compassion and Choices is a leading pro-euthanasia organization. It is only sweet-talking about “life-sustaining” treatments. The NYT – which obviously agrees with Compassion and Choices – sneaks the word “aggressive” in front of the phrase, to warn you against opting for treatment if you’re old and in the way.

There are good arguments for euthanasia, provided it is always the choice of the euthanased (to coin a word). All sane adults can make that choice like any other – in advance if they want to, though doing so commits them to suffer action by others that they might not really want when the critical moment comes and communication may be difficult or impossible. One visualizes the possibility of desperation and panic in a struggle to cancel instructions given when death was not staring one in the face. Yeeow!

Why is it necessary for doctors to inform people that they can forgo treatment if they want to? And to be paid a special fee for doing so? This is statist thinking. The view from the left. Anti-free  as always.

Compassion and Choices goes on: “this Medicare enhancement [ah, an enhancement!] simply [“openly”, “innocently”] encourages communication, promotes choice, compensates doctors for important care and empowers patients.

So much good! Who can possibly object?

But why do people need to be encouraged to communicate? Are most Americans tongue-tied?

Does choice need to be promoted? The choice, remember, is between life and death. Who is unaware that as long as you live the choice of death is yours?

Why should doctors need “compensation” for telling people what they already know? Without being exceptionally sensitive, one can feel a creepy implication here!  Maybe because what doctor’s are really being urged to do is advise sick people to choose death? And maybe doctors are not usually willing to do that, so they need a little extra inducement, aka a bribe?

Finally, this program of nudging to death is said to “empower patients”. Watch that word empower – it stands out in bold capitals in the lexicon of the left. But no patient gains any more power by being told he or she can choose death than he or she has always had, so nothing changes … unless ….

Unless all this talk by Compassion and Choices is preparing a way to legal murder; a seeking for wording that could be interpreted as allowing something far worse than a death panel – a Law of Life-Limitation; the state claiming the right to raise a sign saying “Come In Number X, Your Time Is Up “.

What is sickening about these ever-so-compassionate choosers is their unresisted desire to meddle in the lives of the rest of us. Through a meddlesome state. All for our own good, of course, as always. They know best how we should live, and how and when we should die.

Like it or not, the old are to be routinely badgered to grant permission for their lives to be cut short as “this improvement to Medicare” is implemented pronto this month. Compassion and Choice are cock-a-hoop about it. It’s “a long-awaited response to those families who didn’t know their loved ones’ preferences when confronted with difficult decisions in an emergency”. Families have been begging, you see, for the state to make grannies and grandpas tell them to switch that thing off, and at last a reluctant state has acceded to the popular clamor.

With the coming of the New Year, Medicare will begin empowering seniors to consider the care that is right for them when they face the end of life, and better ensure their wishes control the care they receive.

Sure, they’ve only to lie there wishing and they’ll stay in control.

For all their openness and innocence, behind all the smiles, the Apostles of Death scratch at a little itchy spot of guilt.

So we learn from LifeNews, which brings us this information:

The Democrat who started the latest national debate over the inclusion of so-called “death panels” by the Obama administration into federal regulations now regrets doing so.

The office of Representative Earl Blumenauer, an assisted suicide advocate from Oregon who works closely with pro-euthanasia groups like Compassion and Choices, alerted supporters of the change the Obama administration implemented and worked to ask them to keep the news quiet.

“We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists e-mails can too easily be forwarded,” his staff wrote. “Thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it but we will be keeping a close watch and may be calling on you if we need a rapid, targeted response. The longer this [regulation] goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

The memo talked of a “quiet” victory and had the congressman worrying about how Republican leaders would “use this small provision to perpetuate the ‘death panel’ myth.”

But LifeNews.com reported on the new regulations and, weeks later, the New York Times got a copy of the memo Blumenauer wrote and the national dustup began.

Now, Blumenauer told The Hill that he regrets [not the program of murder, but] the secretive language used in the email, which he says he did not see beforehand. …

Still, he defended the controversial new regulation. …

Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council commented on the memo and said pro-life people need to understand the importance of Blumenauer’s role in the debate.

“Blumenauer is very important to this tale for it is with him that the legislative origins of the assisted suicide language begin,” he said. “The origins of the language are extremely important when you think about the motivation of the people behind it.”

“The original bill language would provide Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to doctors who direct people to take their own lives instead of seek treatment and was written by a group called Compassion & Choices, an offshoot of a group from the 1980′s that called itself the Hemlock Society, the nation’s leading advocate for assisted suicide,” McClusky explained. “Ultimately the language was not in the final passed bill, though many other factors leading to rationing were included.”

Although the advanced directives apparently can’t be used to facilitate an assisted suicide, there is concern physicians will pressure or persuade patients to make decisions that would ration care or withdraw lifesaving medical treatment.

So the language finally adopted does not [yet] allow actual “assisted suicide”; but it allows treatment to be “rationed” – ie withheld – which may amount to the same thing. Or worse – cold-blooded murder.

Contrary to the pro-Castro, anti-America propaganda put out by Michael Moore in his movie Sicko, health care in Cuba is bad, very bad (except of course for the Castro brothers, their henchmen, and those they choose to privilege.)

Jay Nordlinger has written an account of the true state of affairs on the island. It is detailed, convincing, and depressing.

He relates:

Hospitals and clinics are crumbling. Conditions are so unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is. If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper. And basic medications are scarce. In Sicko, even sophisticated medications are plentiful and cheap. In the real Cuba, finding an aspirin can be a chore. And an antibiotic will fetch a fortune on the black market.

A nurse says to a visiting journalist –

“We have nothing. I haven’t seen aspirin in a Cuban store here for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I’ll take them. Even if they have passed their expiry date.”

Diseases spread and the sick suffer helplessly:

So deplorable is the state of health care in Cuba that old-fashioned diseases are back with a vengeance. These include tuberculosis, leprosy, and typhoid fever. And dengue, another fever, is a particular menace. …

Read the whole thing here.

Barry Rubin has written the best piece of satire on the destruction of America that we’ve read since Obama started doing it.

It’s title is How to Kill Americans: A Guide to the Really Effective Ways.

Here are some of Rubin’s sure-fire recommended methods, far more effective than the piecemeal terrorist strikes that al-Qaeda goes in for:

Deny them liberty. Americans thrive on high levels of freedom. For them, the ability to make decisions for themselves is akin to oxygen. Reduce this ability to make their own choices and you have deployed the equivalent of krypton to weaken Superman.

Spend them into oblivion. Increasing deficits will saddle future generations with impossible debt.  Government spending and unfunded pension funds, among other methods, will so demoralize Americans that they will fall over like bowling pins. Increase government regulation. America has thrived on free enterprise, initiative, and entrepreneurship. It’s no accident that people speak of the economy being strangled, one of the most effective and popular ways of murdering people.

Teach kids to hate their own country. …

Read it all. Don’t miss it.

The essential messiness of socialist thinking is demonstrated by the Health Care Act. Obamacare was a mess in its conception, in its drafting, in its passing through Congress; and now it’s making a mess in the real world as its implementation becomes a desperate exercise in warding off disaster.

Wreckage of Obamacare is the title of an article by Grace-Marie Turner at Critical Condition, the National Review Online’s health-care blog:

The Obama administration is refusing to accept the disastrous dynamics it has set into play with its monstrous health-overhaul law.

Instead of recognizing the economic reality of what they’ve done, officials are railing at the companies and industries that are responding in perfectly rational ways to the incentive structures they have set up.

But the result is an avalanche of bad news for consumers who surely will not “be able to keep the coverage” they have:

840,000 Midwesterners to lose policies. The Principal Group announced its plans to drop health insurance from its roster of products, which the New York Times calls “another sign of upheaval emerging among insurers as the new federal health law starts to take effect.”

The Iowa-based company provides coverage to about 840,000 people who receive their insurance through an employer.

Principal is just the latest in a long list of insurers to announce plans to drop coverage. It may have done so anyway, but Obamacare undoubtedly accelerated the decision.

30,000 retail workers at risk of losing coverage — and likely millions more. The Wall Street Journal broke the story about 30,000 hourly workers of McDonald’s who are likely losing their insurance “as the law ripples through the real world.” …

McDonald’s  have since been granted a one-year waiver. So have dozens of other companies, as the New York Times reports here, explaining –

“The waivers have been issued in the last several weeks as part of a broader strategic effort to stave off threats by some health insurers to abandon markets, drop out of the business altogether or refuse to sell certain policies.”

Commenting on which, Peter Wehner has a good piece here. He says, in part:

This action highlights one of the great dangers of ObamaCare, which is that every health-care decision now has to run through the federal government. Private companies have to bow before its throne, asking for waivers and massively complicating their own lives. The federal government is now in a much stronger position to pick winners and losers and rig the game. This is the kind of expansion of federal power that many people feared and warned about – and it’s happening within weeks of the law taking effect.

The waivers are also the Obama administration’s attempt to minimize the negative impact of ObamaCare less than a month before the midterm election. It’s now clear that the new health-care law was very poorly constructed and is having enormous implementation problems. To issue waivers to undo the damaging effects of a new law is a very bad sign.

The avalanche is building. Grace-Marie Turner  continues –

Millions more policies are at risk for employees of Home Depot, Disney, CVS, Staples, Blockbuster, etc., the Journal reports.

22,000 New England seniors can’t keep the coverage they have. Harvard Pilgrim announced this week that it is getting out of the market for Medicare Advantage in response to the massive cuts coming to this popular program. …

Child-only policies vanishing: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is angry with a number of insurers for announcing they plan to stop offering child-only insurance policies. But does she really not get it? If you tell companies they must sell to anyone who applies, even if the children are already sick, then it simply is not a sustainable insurance or business model.

And when one company in an area announces its plans to stop offering the policies, that creates instant adverse selection for other companies that remain in the market, setting off a cascade of dropped policies.

The cascade began just a few days after Obamacare was signed into law when AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere, Verizon and several other large employers said the law would take a bite out of their future earnings. They were about to be hauled before the House of Representatives to explain their disloyalty until it became clear that they were likely to testify that they also are considering dropping employee coverage.

After that, we learned that retiree medical coverage was in jeopardy. Next, there was another casualty of Obamacare — the fledgling insurance company in Virginia, nHealth, that shut down after investors concluded it wasn’t possible to navigate the maze of new regulations and succeed.

And then Sebelius railed at insurance companies for explaining that the Sept. 23 mandates will indeed increase the cost of premiums for customers. …

Do they not understand that the wreckage is the result of Obamacare? This is only the beginning as thousands and thousands more pages of regulation will further disrupt virtually every aspect of our health sector.

One good effect of all this is that the failure of Obama’s attempt at socializing health care is now starkly obvious.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act must be repealed.