Is Gielow a RINO?

Jenna outs my state representative for introducing a bill establishing "socialized" medicine in Wisconsin. Peter and Dad29 and, I'm sure, others express their dismay.

I haven't pored over the plan but the idea seems to be to solicit bids from insurers to provide policies that would have to provide certain coverages but which could apparently differ in some ways. The bill appears to fix the deductibles that can be permitted under the policy and eliminates deductibles for certain type of care. The state would credit each resident with an amount sufficient to buy the low cost policy and, if you wanted a higher cost policy, you'd have to pay the difference.

The plan certainly is "socialized medicine" in the sense that it would be publicly funded (although how it would be funded is not specified) and would seem certain to mostly, if not completely, take employers and out of the health insurance business and to force state residents, at least for basic care, into a policy provided under the plan.

It's not "socialized" in the sense that you would have private insurers to choose from but it's not clear how much they would really be expected to differ.

Although some folks might be surprised that a Republican would co-sponsor a bill like this, I'm not. There is a growing consensus among business people that employers ought to get out of the health care business and there are strong arguments based in market efficiency that they are right. Say you are a 51 yr old and you've got a great idea to start your own business. If you were 25, you might decide to go without health insurance. At this age, that would not be wise. But, particularly if you have some adverse history, you may not be able to buy affordable coverage - or any coverage at all. You might have an idea for the best mousetrap ever, but you'll stay put.

An efficient market wouldn't throw up this barrier to entrepreneurship.

There are other examples. A company with a mature work force is going to have higher costs than a company with younger employees. This either puts it at a competitive disadvantage unrelated to its quality and efficiency or creates pressure to lay off the older workers; something that it is illegal and that may well diminish both its quality and efficiency.

I don't know that this bill does it and, in fact, I'm not sure that it makes sense for the problem to be tackled at a state level. While I'd like to think that a more or less unrestricted free market approach would work, there are some huge market imperfections residing in the fact that 1) for a good portion of their lives people may rationally decide that they won't need insurance, 2) people are not well positioned to judge among health care providers and to make the same trade-offs between dollars and consumption as they are with goods and services upon which their survival does not depend and professional expertise is not required, and 3) we are not willing to allow people to suffer and die for the lack of personal resources or foresight.

I think the solution is going to require some type of mandatory purchase of at least high deductible insurance by everyone and perhaps some restrictions on underwriting by risk profile.

The UCC: How great are we anyway?

Professor McAdams takes note of the new "edgy" (their own description)commercial that is about to be put up by the ultra-liberal United Church of Christ. The commercial shows a traditional looking American family (boo! hiss!) who are joined in a pew by a collection of people who score high on the left's scale of "preferred" diversity. The "people of diversity: are then ejected from the pew.

But, the UCC assures us, we don't do that. We are down with people who make "you" feel uncomfortable. As for people who make the UCC uncomfortable, like conservatives, traditional Christians or, as the good Professor points out, Jews who support Israel, don't ask.

Actually, if I were the UCC, I wouldn't eject anyone from the pews either. Its pews are empty enough as it is.

The UCC is replacing the cross with the "comma" as part of its "Stillspeaking" campaign. The UCC wants to say that God is still speaking which is uncontroversial enough, but, for the UCC, that often means that God is changing His mind.

That's possible, but you've got to wonder whose voice the UCC is listening to?

God Talk

Xoff returns to the left Cheddarsphere's upset over Scott Walker's admission that he prayed over his decision to leave the gubernatorial race and became convinced that his withdrawal was God's will.

I think a lot of the fun poked at Walker by adamant secularists stems from positing a cartoonish view of religious people and what it means for them to pray "for" something. Unfortunately, this view is encouraged by too many Christians, including "prosperity-focused" TV preachers like Joel Osteen and faith healers like Benny Hinn.

Walker doesn't have to believe that God is partisan or "pulling the strings" in the Governor's race to conclude that it is "God's will" that he withdraw. What I suspect Walker was after, in his prayer, was discernment of how he could best serve God in the circumstances in which he found himself. Christians believe that this discernment is aided by prayer. It doesn't mean God wants Mark Green or Jim Doyle to be Governor, but that God does want Scott Walker to use his gifts to serve the Kingdom in the best way that he can and, given the circumstances, that this does not mean running for Governor at this time.

This informs my reaction to these back and forth studies on whether intercessory prayer "improves" people's medical outcomes. We pray for the people we love to get better because we can't help it, but the more fundamental prayer (and the one that will always be answered) is for the strength and grace to bring Christian witness to whatever might happen.

ACLU vs. the First Amendment

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) with the endorsement of the ACLU has proposed legislation regulating the advertising of pregnancy counseling centers that do not offer abortion. While the ostensible purpose is to prevent people from saying that they offer abortion when they do not, my guess is that what proponents really want is for these services to explicitly identify themselves as pro-life, rather than call themselves something neutral like "Crisis Pregnancy Center." There would apparently be no requirement that abortion mills identify as such.

It is no longer odd to see the ACLU supporting restrictions on free speech. Its notion of what should and should not be a civil liberty is thoroughly grounded in a leftist critique of society (even when they do things like represent Nazis; you look to the principles that they do and do not support; not the clients they represent.)

Maybe it ought to consider truth in its own advertising.

If it's cold, don't blame me

Using an on-line smug calculator, Patrick McIlheran has calculated that his family produces 22.9 tons of carbon each year. He is a tree-hugging, granola eating, pony tail wearing hippie! My wife and I serve up 61.6 tons per annum. Our house is too big, we fly too much and the Reddess is one of those little women in a big SUV. When it comes to our carbon footprint, we are Sasquatch.

What are we going to do about it?

I'll get back to you.

Here's my "mean-spirited" rejoinder

The Journal Sentinel editorial board thinks that it is not a coincidence that Milwaukee has a high rate of child poverty and a high rate of teen pregnancy.

I agree.

But they've got causation backwards. The board says:

It's clear, the single best preventive measure to combat teen pregnancy is eliminating poverty. That means meaningful, targeted economic development that can get at pernicious joblessness and hopelessness.

A better way to put it would be that eliminating teen pregnancy and the social dislocation that flows from it would result in an employable population that could escape pernicious joblessness and hopelessness. As it is now, no amount of "targeted economic development" is going to benefit folks who are virtually unemployable (that's part of the critique of W2) because they have not finished school and have been trapped in a generational cycle of dysfunction.

It may well be, as the paper suggests, that these kids just don't have the knowledge of, or access to, contraception. I guess I'd like to see some proof of that. Poor people are generally not as ineffectual and clueless as white liberals like to think they are. If a person can obtain "access" to designer shoes, Starter jackets and all manner of illegal drugs, he can probably also "access" a condom. I am not convinced that the problem is that teens don't know how babies are made as much as it is that they do.

It may be that what needs to be "accessed" is middle class values and repudiation of the notion that those values are "acting white."

Sie arbeiten!

Via the indispensable Brussels Journal

One of the great things about Europe is that it continually shows us where an untethered left would take us. In Holland, for example, we can watch militant feminism implode. A leading MP in the leftist Dutch Labour Party is proposing that stay-at-home Moms (and, she added later, Dads) be required to remimburse the state for the cost of their education which is presumably being frittered away on raising Dutch children. Her party, poised to actually take over the government, defends her, arguing that caring for one's family is "destruction of capital." What is bought by the collective is owned by the collective.

So, in the left's Amsterdam, you can sell your body, destroy it with drugs, even decide to kill your self with the state's assistance. But if you want to be the one who raises your children, you're going to have to pay.

Remember the First Amendment?

Via Jessica McBride.

A Winnebago County judge has shut down a blog and enjoined the blogger from operating any "similar sites" because some comments placed on it are alleged to have defamed the clerk of courts.

This order sure looks like a constitutionally suspect prior restraint. Maybe you could order the guy to shut down comments, but how can you possibly tell him to shut up? This is, more or less, the equivalent of shutting down a newspaper because it is alleged to have published a defamatory article.

It is also surprising that the judge apparently did this as a temporary restraining order, i.e., without even a preliminary evidentiary hearing.

Maybe there are some extraordinary facts that justify this, but it's hard to even imagine what they could be.

Call to Censure Bush Is Answered by a Mostly Empty Echo

So says the New York Times in the headline for it's report on Feingold's censure hearing. Let's see which Dems on the Judiciary Committee avoided saying anything at the hearing: Kennedy, Feinstein, Durbin, Biden, Kohl and Schumer. In fact, other than Kohl(who, the Journal Sentinel tells us, wandered in for a few minutes), this bunch didn't even show, leaving us with Russ and the Senator from the People's Commune of Vermont.

Maybe the rest of the Dems on the Committee forgot their Congressional ID pins. Too bad Cynthia McKinney wasn't around to run interference through security.

Maybe they all just took a long weekend. The integrity of the Republic may be at stake and all, but the Final Four starts today.

Or maybe they just saw the whole thing as the political equivalent of Mad Cow disease.

White like Eddie

Young Jenna is incensed (and properly so)at the concept of "white privilege." The problem, I think, isn't so much that her teachers take an ideological position but that, based upon her link to the excerpted material, they do it in such an insipid fashion. There may be something called white privilege but who would think so based upon the material that was apparently assigned to Jenna and her classmates. It paints with such a broad brush as to be incredible.

A lot of this stuff reminds me of the old SNL bit "white like Eddie." Eddie Murphy puts on "white face" and finds out that the world is a party and money is free.

All he really had to do was read some of the stuff that passes for social science "literature."

Goldberg: They sure are nice down there.

Jonah Goldberg, in town to speak at Marquette, has posted the following about our area:

I think this is my fourth or fifth visit to this part of the country in the last year or so alone. And every time I come out here the more impressed I am with the people. Politics aside, the people seem to be one standard-deviation nicer than people elsewhere. The college kids I meet tend to be sharp, but also very decent. Normal workers -- flight attendants, cab drivers, store clerks, waiters, etc -- all seem to be just slightly more professional for professionalism's sake. I don't want to live out here -- Milwaukee is hardly a garden spot and Madison has very high level of lefty zomboid infiltration -- but I always leave with just a bit more respect for the people than when I arrived.

I would like to argue that Milwaukee is a garden spot, but I suppose I can't (although it's alot nicer than Jonah implies). What strikes me about this is that I have the same reaction when I go to Iowa (where we have a plant). Kind of dull and pedestrian place, but the people sure are nice.

Is there an inverse relationship between the superficial "attractiveness" of a place (e.g., the night life, scenery, trendiness, fast paced professional life) and the decency of the people who live there? If so, why is that?

Jill Carroll

Is it just me or do you see Jill Carroll and think Stockholm Syndrome?

GPS Monitoring of Sex Offenders

I may be missing something, but I'm not sold on the legislation for GPS monitoring of sex offenders. It seems fairly expensive at 10k/offender and I suppose that's a result of the need for new staff to actively monitor these guys. I wouldn't think the system itself would cost that much.

The problem I have with that is that it seems unclear that monitoring would have a direct preventive effect because I don't know that it is all that obvious where an offense would take place. You could keep these guys away from obvious danger zones like schools and playgrounds but that really isn't sufficient to keep them away from kids. Unless you have someone constantly watching each offender's movement (or develop an incredibly sophisticated program to kick out "suspect" movements), I'm not sure that you get the bang for the buck.

It may be that "passive" monitoring is a better deal. These guys would know that, in the event of an offense, the cops would know exactly where they had been. That may deter some from offending and would certainly make apprehension of those that do easier.

On the other hand, maybe the compulsion to offend is so strong that the certainty of capture doesn't matter.

Maybe the program has more merit than is immediately apparent to me, but as someone committed to controlling the cost of government, I want new initiatives to be rigorously justified. Turning this proposal into a referendum on whether a legislator agrees that sexual predators are sleazebags makes little sense.

Heckler's veto

More signs that irrational and violent outrage does pay.

First, a major bookseller won't stock an issue of a magazine that shows the Mohmammed cartoons.

And NYU refused to allow a student group to show the cartoons at a long planned event unless it excludes "non-NYU" guests. The event with on with speakers discussing the controversy accompanied by a set of blank easels.

Absolutely shameful.

On the border

My own inclination on the illegal immigration issue is that we should move toward regularizing the status of those who are here. But that alone won't solve the problem. We had a broad based amnesty program 20 years ago (I represented a few amnesty applicants; nice people)but then did nothing to control the border.

No immigration reform proposal is serious unless it addresses border security and addresses it in a radical way. Open borders are not a good thing as this column shows. Our border areas should not be subject to this type of lawlessness and social disarray.

Drum Circle Left Update

Literally.

I am informed that the Walworth County Week reports that, on Saturday at 6:30 pm in Walworth, there will be a drum circle for peace, apparently at a place called "Drumming for Peace and Fire Circle Drums" at 408 Howard Street. You are asked to bring your own drum although some will apparently be available for the drumless among us. I can't say for certain, but I am confident that hemp will be involved in some way. My guess is that one will be free to chant as well as to drum. Levitation will be optional.

"Maybe if we drum hard enough, man, we can stop this war."

The Jude jury

While I agree with Owen and others that it is unwise to fetishize the racial composition of a jury, it's impossible not to believe that the selection of an all-white jury in the Jude case is unfortunate.

It would have helped community perception if, instead of just reporting the judge's "unhappiness" and statement that "we are stuck with the law," the paper would have explained the law we are stuck with.

Lawyers get a certain number of peremptory challenges when a jury is being empaneled. You just strike who you do not want. You don't have to explain why and, in practice, the reasons are usually pretty subjective. You might not have liked an answer during voir dire (the questioning of the jurors). You might not have liked the tone of an answer. Or how somebody looked. It is not uncommon for lawyers to rely on stereotypes in exercising these challenges. Recently, my priest was called for jury duty. I told her that she was unlikely to be selected and she wasn't. Either she would be viewed by the prosecution as too apt to "forgive" or by both sides as too risky because she might have extraordinary moral authority in the jury room. Lose her and you lose everyone. That's not very scientific, but that's the way it is.

However, you can't exercise these peremptory challenges to purposefully exclude jurors on the basis of race. So once the challenges had removed the last two African-Americans from the panel and the issue was raised, the defense lawyers did have to explain why they exercised these challenges. They did so and the judge was convinced, not that the challenges were the best a lawyer could make, but that they were not exercised for the purpose of excluding blacks.

Once he found that, the inquiry was over because no one has a right to a jury of any particular racial composition.

Still, this is not going to help race relations if the defendants are acquitted. That's just a sad fact.

The I-word

The game of "hawks" and "doves" which I refer to below is aided by euphemism. Pro-abortion groups have long tried to make that debate about liberty by resolutely avoiding the word "abortion." No one likes to speak out against freedom. Few people are willing to defend abortion. If someone were to awake from a forty year coma, she'd have no idea what most pro-abortion discourse was actually about. All she'd hear is words like "choice," "women's health" and, occasionally, "reproductive rights."

Are we seeing the same thing in the debate over illegal immigration? As others have pointed out, the issue is almost always framed as being about immigration generally rather than immigration that is illegal. The term "undocumented immigrant" suggests someone who forgot her driver's license at home, not someone who has entered the United States in violation of the law and probably remains through fraud.

Proposals, like Sensenbrenner's bill or the proposal to build a wall, may be impractical but are attacked, instead, as "racist" and "hateful." My fellow community columnist Maria Flores (who is a bright and delightful young woman) recently likened the bill to the fugitive slave act and the Holocaust.

Calling people who support the enforcement of our immigration laws as "racist" or "fascist" is a ploy to create doves.

Much of what we are hearing from the left on immigration is bunk. There are few, if any, countries in modern history who have been indifferent to the security of their borders and who is and is not permitted to live within them. Immigration reform may be in order, but trying to find some way to enforce the laws we have is nothing like genocide, slavery or any other inapposite metaphor that proponents of illegal immigration might choose.

10 grand for everyone

Charles Murray is a libertarian scholar who jump started the welfare reform movement with his classic book Losing Ground. Later he (with a co-author) wrote a controversial (and somewhat misunderstood) book called The Bell Curve which suggested a strong correlation between a person's intelligence and level of prosperity. It also argued that intelligence was largely genetic and not evenly distributed.

Now he's proposing that we abolish the welfare state and replace it with a cash grant of $ 10,000/year to every American. You must use $3000 for health care (maybe you have to buy a policy at age 21 and then keep it place thereafter). The government will give you nothing else. Ever.

I seem to recall that this was part of George McGovern's campaign for President in 1972. He was going to give everyone a basic grant, although he was not proposing the abolition of all other social welfare programs.

I don't know that I agree with this, but Murry is always interesting. He puts forth the details and considers objections in a new book.

Gay marriage and polygamy

Folks who are critical of the suggestion that gay marriage will affect the way in which we view marriage may want to consider the impact that the debate has already had. For the first time, I suspect, in American history (outside of Utah), we are having a debate about polygamy. The reaction to HBO's Big Love (which self consciously echoes the gay marriage debate) is not "how awful" but "why not?"

Maggie Gallagher sees this as an example of the academic game of "hawks and doves". Increasingly, those committed to nontraditional lifestyles have become "hawks," aggressively insisting on not only tolerance, but approbation. Those who disapprove become "doves," keeping silent to avoid conflict. Hawks not only dominate doves; they turn doves into hawks.

In a related post, Gallagher writes:

Just as gay people were inspired and informed by black civil rights leaders, who had no intention of endorsing a movement to normalize homosexuality, much less gay marriage, polygamists are being inspired by the gay marriage movement to come out of the closet, and their arguments now strike many cultural elites (such as the editors of the New York Times Arts page) as plausible, worthy of being entertained, because of the way they echo the gay marriage arguments.

This in itself marks a cultural shift. It’s ultimate importance and power of course are yet to be determined. I don’t believe polygamy is an inevitable result of the gay marriage debate. But I think the push for gay marriage has already visibly altered our public culture of marriage. Things that were taken for granted, now must be discussed and defended.

She concludes:

I’m not saying you should be against gay marriage because of this. I am saying, you know, culture happens. Claiming that you can strip marriage of its one virtually universal rule (marriage is a union of male and female) and that cultural consequences are improbable, strikes me as well, head in the sand fantasy, the anti-intellectualism of intellectuals.