Most recent thoughts...

A Back to the Future
Jeffersonian Liberalism
How the Democrats can thrive in the Information Age

by Terry Michael | January 25, 2010

Hopes dashed by the first-year bumblings of Barack Obama and three big GOP victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, Democratic campaign strategists, policy-mongers, and populist fire-breathers are touting formulas for party renewal. Nothing new here. Re-branding has been a cottage industry for Democrats since Lyndon Johnson dashed liberal dreams of wealth redistribution with his war in the 1960s, and mush-mouthed Democrats abandoned the toxic “L” word and started calling themselves “progressives" in the 1970s and 1980s.

While short-term thinking, focused on the November election, will dominate Beltway chatter about re-tooling Obama's legislative agenda, Democrats desperately need a new informing ideology to replace the 19th and 20th Century brand of statist programmatic liberalism rejected by the political center, in a choice-demanding information age.
..... Read all here:
Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

************

An Obit for Health Care Reform
....drowned in liberal Kool-Aid

by Terry Michael | January 22, 2010
(in The Washington Times)

Health Care Reform (HCR) died Jan. 19 in Massachusetts, shortly before his 19th birthday. He was a victim of a mass suicide pact by economic left-liberals swilling Kool-Aid ..... Read all here:
Original Washington Times Link or PDF File

***********************************

by Terry Michael | January 3, 2010

Climate and AIDS Denialists,
and Politicized Junk Science.

Losing a debate about one of your most cherished beliefs? There’s a handy way to shut down such discourse, to discredit intellectual enemies employing pesky reading-and-fact-based arguments. Just call them out as deniers or denialists, as in the epitome of earthly evil, Holocaust Denialism.

Demonize your critics, to stop them from criticizing your demons. It works really well for talking heads, like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, observed in December on Cable Noise Network putting down the global warming “deniers,” as he called them (while hawking the tree-killing paperback version of his latest opus magnum, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution.”)

Not convinced? Then consult preachers at The Al Gore Church of Greenhouse Gas Bags, or medical science experts in The HIV-AIDS Industrial Complex. Listen to them shout about the apocalyptic meltdown being wrought by global warming denialists. Hear them exhort against the killer AIDS denialists.

The “tricking” of tree ring “data” revealed in the Climategate emails should be instructive to all free minds. Many scientists are just politicians with advanced degrees. They play their expertise card to propagandize for less-than-fully-baked theories--just like the best and the brightest domino theory’d us into Vietnam, those brilliant neo-con-artists WMD’d us into Iraq, and our super smart president fooled himself (and us) into the Afghan abyss.

As I tell my political journalism students, accept no received wisdom, especially when it comes from figure-ers who lie, and liars who figure.

For the past quarter century, the “denialist” epithet has been hurled at credible, well-motivated biologists, bio-chemists, physicians, epidemiologists, investigative science-and-health journalists, and other intelligent outliers with the temerity to question the scientific consensus behind the single pathogen theory of what caused AIDS.......
Read all here:
PermaLink to this Site Article

******************************

(Terry Michael Picto-Graphic)

published at....

CHANGE,
in which we can bereave.
December 2, 2009

by Terry Michael

A year ago, some of us believed we were electing an anti-war president. Complete with a George W. Bush-style speech at West Point, we got the opposite--change in which we can bereave, as the bodies of more American boys will be flown home in boxes from the tribal hills of a non-nation, a graveyard of foolish imperial powers, a geographic entity, a sort-of-country called Afghanistan.

Nominated because he opposed an elective war and elected because he opposed an old warrior, a young president has been unable to resist the lure of the military industrial complex, about which we were warned the year Barack Obama was born by retiring soldier-President Dwight David Eisenhower.

Even sadder, President Obama has been unable to stand up to the war hawk “liberal internationalists,” as they like to call themselves, in his own party--who more accurately can be described as “Neo-Con Lites.” I know them well. They are from my generation of Democratic operatives. Political careerist baby boomers with draft deferments, who raged against the Vietnam madness in the 1960's, but as they approached their own sixties forgot the lessons of that tragedy as they devised political strategies to make us look tougher, so we could win presidential elections by wooing back the Nixon and Reagan Democrats, the World War II “good war” voters, who are now mostly not voters....because they are mostly dead.

President Obama, half-Kenyan, half-Kansan, from an apostate Muslim father, and himself now a Christian dad, is a fascinating study in human compromise. Like the larger-than-life Superman action figure in front of which he once posed for a picture in Metropolis, Illinois, he is able, with great speeches, to leap tall differences in a single bound. It’s why we elected him. But a politician’s strength can be a policy-maker’s weakness, as he succumbs to the drum beats of American exceptionalist war-makers in both of our political parties.

Assembling a team of rivals, Obama learned too much from history--or at least too much from a popular historical biography of a fellow Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln. Making Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State, he all but chained himself to a mid-1980's Democratic Party foreign policy/national security political strategy, which prescribed “tough on defense” as the key to keeping Democrats in The White House. And by retaining George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, the new president sealed his fate, tethering himself to what is now his own elective war, without an American purpose.

America has “The Power Problem,” as Chris Preble of the Cato Institute has explained in a book with that title. It is a field of defense industry dreams, military dominance built over a Cold War half century, demanding to be used because it’s there, not because it makes us more safe, more prosperous, or more free. And we have developed “The Cult of the Presidency,” defined in a work of that name by another Cato scholar, Gene Healy, a grandiose vision that mis-leads Leaders of the Free World to believe their place in history comes from projecting all that hard power.

All this comes at a time when the nation is sick and afraid, with unemployment of the young in double digits, with retirement plans of the old on hold, with fathers and mothers wondering whether they can hang onto their homes. How would we even pay for another elective power projection?

It is time for Congress to accept its Constitutional responsibility to impede Executive war-making. Are you listening, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are you ready to speak against this disaster from the House floor? Are you willing, Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin, to call back from the Afghan abyss the youthful fellow Illinois colleague you touted to lead us?

This is not the highway appropriations bill, health care re-structuring, or bailing out banks and auto companies. It’s life and death.
________________________________________________

An Illinois native and former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, Terry Michael is founder and director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism.

TheStreet.com link

*******************

Obama and the Afghan Abyss
Why it's time for the U.S.
to get out of Afghanistan

Terry Michael | September 26, 2009

As President Barack Obama ponders the moral case against tossing more young American soldiers into the Afghan abyss, he faces several political obstacles, including some of his own making.

In a classic primary gaffe to fix a verbal stumble, Obama opted to sound tough on Afghanistan and Pakistan after asserting he'd talk to dictators. His chief opponent—and current Secretary of State—Hillary Clinton, pounced. So in the next news cycle he sounded tough as nails. Compounding the error early this year, Obama sent more troops and a new commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, but left the mission open-ended, thus appearing to fill an implied campaign promise.

Now Republicans are painting the young president as naive for suggesting he might downgrade the mission. And the GOP war hawks are setting McChrystal up for hero status in the same way they elevated David Patraeus in Iraq, implying that control over mission, strategy, and tactics should be in professional military hands, instead of those of the Commander-in-Chief—who has that constitutional obligation.

The second dilemma Obama faces in trying to alter course is a gotcha press corps, especially the talking air heads of cable babble, who are always ready to hold an official to every word he uttered in the silly season of a campaign. As someone who teaches college journalists about politics, I take the watchdog role of the press seriously. But I also worked in electoral politics, including a presidential primary, plus 8 years on Capitol Hill. The heat of a primary race is no place to formulate sound policy.

Candidates are pulled every which way by operatives and consultants, not to mention the press pack, who see no farther than the next news cycle. An often young and inexperienced press corps, especially talking-points babblers on ideologically polarized cable networks, make it excessively difficult for an elected official to change course in office—even when it makes infinite good sense to do.

Third, finally, and most importantly, Obama faces the intra-party impediment of a Democratic foreign policy establishment, which thinks the party still looks like a bunch of Cold War era, national security weaklings compared to the toughness of "Reagan Democrats." Never mind that the Cold War is over, and the Reagan Democrats are mostly dead! Replacing the "good war" (WWII) and Depression era center of the 1980s' electorate are the 21st century sex, drugs, and rock & roll non-interventionist Baby Boomers and Gen X'ers.

The "neo-con lite" wing of the Democratic Party, headquartered at the so-called Democratic Leadership Council, was started by the military-obsessed, Southern wing of the party way back in 1984. These self-styled "Democratic" foreign policy wizards colluded with George W. Bush and the neo-cons in promoting the Iraq tragedy, instead of saving us from it!

You can also find these neo-con lites on the editorial pages of the "liberal" Washington Post, which aggressively supported the Iraq madness and has tried ad nauseam to defend its discredited position. Now, the neo-con lites seek to compound their foolishness by working to maneuver Obama into sending more troops to the Graveyard of Empires.

Mr. President, your decision about Afghanistan is not a political choice. This isn't a highway appropriations bill or even your healthcare reform plan, open to tinkering here and marginally adjusting there.

There are potentially thousands of young lives at stake, individuals who you will send to die and be maimed. And the choice of stepping up this horror—rather than drawing it down—will engender bitter hatred from Afghans caught in the crossfire.

Do not listen to the Washington foreign policy establishment and its brother institution, the never-ceasing military industrial complex, which believe that America, because we have big hard power, has to intervene and use that power for nation-building and the hallucination that geographic entities like Iraq and Afghanistan can develop liberty-loving democracies. There have to be indigenous movements for that to happen, and there are no such movements in the tribal, theocratic cultures of the Middle East—with the possible exception of Iran, unless our war hawks drive the young people there into the nationalist arms of the loonies who now run their country.

Do the right thing, Mr. President. We kicked out the Taliban eight years ago. It is long-since time to hugely scale back our effort and troop commitment.

While many congressional Democrats are still afraid of their Cold War shadows, you have our party's base massively favoring withdrawal, and a majority of independents are solidly with you. Get us out now.

A former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, Terry Michael is director of the non-partisan Washington Center for Politics & Journalism.

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

*************************************

The Case for MichelleCare

Why Obama should let his wife
handle health care reform

Terry Michael | July 29, 2009

It didn't go so well the first time around, when a president assigned his wife to reform health care. But instead of mucking things up with intrusive, expensive health care "reform," President Barack Obama could do a lot worse than putting Michelle in charge of wellness promotion. Michelle Obama understands wellness, choosing to grow fruits and vegetables—not just roses—on the White House lawn.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." That admonition, the first words of Michael Pollan's enlightening In Defense of Food, could be the bumper sticker promoting MichelleCare. Pollan makes it clear that America's high levels of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes—which trigger the heavy medical care costs of late-life sickness—are the result of the "western diet," with its food-like processed products, much of which is synthesized from cheap corn and soybeans. We are obsessed with "nutritionism," but the sum of the unpronounceable substances on content labels don't equal the benefits of real food, like grains, nuts, fresh fruits, and vegetables. Don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food, Pollan counsels. I haven't done justice to the 200 pages of Pollan's cleverly-written wisdom. Read it yourself. In fact, a free copy to every American who wants it (or DVDs for those averse to books) should be a part of MichelleCare.

The political stand-off certain to develop between cost cutting on the one hand, and expanding coverage to the 47 million uninsured Americans on the other, will make reform a chimera sure to please no one. The resulting legislation is likely to be a grab bag of unfunded government goodies spawning bigger deficits, just as Medicare and Medicaid have done over the past four decades.

To understand why "reform" is more an exercise in political theater than a serious attempt to cut costs and improve care, consider how we got here. It started during World War II, when wage and price controls led to a labor union-government agreement allowing tax exempt employer-paid health care to act as a substitute for pay raises. That tax exemption was the genesis of much of the problem we now face; it divorced decisions about consuming care from consideration of price, making doctor and hospital visits appear free.

The next big step was Medicare and Medicaid, which have grown like fat kids, especially with George W. "LBJ" Bush's free prescription drug benefit, a Karl Rove legacy of big government conservatism.

But the most important development in the politicization of health care came in 1991 in the special election of Sen. Harris Wofford (D-Penn.), an interim appointee after the helicopter crash death of Sen. John Heinz. Two little-known consultants took charge of Wofford's seemingly hopeless challenge.

The fast-talking pair was Paul Begala and James Carville. When they signed on, Wofford was 40 points down—he won by 10. Begala and Carville became the geniuses-du-jour among hired political guns, landing them jobs as gurus to the faltering 1992 Clinton campaign. Their formula: Focus on "the economy, stupid" and create a populist clamor for "health care reform," tapping into resentment of big bad insurance companies, over-charging hospitals, rich doctors, and evil pharmaceutical companies.

This eventually came back to bite the Clintons after the election, leading to the "HillaryCare" that pegged Clinton—a "New Democrat"—as another big spending liberal. That begat Republican control of the House in 1994. The wily Clinton dropped health care and took up another issue from his campaign, welfare reform, signed a House GOP bill, and took credit for it.

Health care reared its head again in 2008, when initial presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton made it her signature issue, forcing competitors—including Obama—to come up with their own "reform" plans. The rest is (contemporary) history. With a disastrous recession and two wars to contend with, Obama still allowed himself to be maneuvered into "reforming" health care.

Like McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform," something called health care reform may pass Congress and get signed into law. But it won't be effective reform, anymore than attacks on free political speech managed to suppress the influence of political money. Whatever gets past the phalanx of insurance and provider lobbyists—not to mention liberal politicians ready to federalize more health care as another free lunch—will bloat the budget like the processed foods that have added tons to the American waistline.

So give Michelle Obama a bigger platform to promote health and wellness-producing meals. That's reform we can live with. And our lives will be longer, healthier, and we'll be billions richer, too.

___________________________
Executive Director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism (WCPJ), Terry Michael writes from his perspective as a "libertarian Democrat." His opinions here and at his personal web site, www.terrymichael.net , are his own, and not those of WCPJ or its board.

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

*************************************

Swine Flu Fantasies
A testing epidemic, spread by media ignorance

by Terry Michael | June 2, 2009

Two very unfortunate realities explain the recent frenzy of public mask wearing, cable TV fear marketing, and the waste of probably a billion tax dollars worldwide in flu virus surveillance. First, there are the tunnel-visioned infectious disease prevention bureaucracies, which tout their epidemiological monitoring as the frontline protecting human health. Then there are their half-witted media propagandists, who wouldn't know the inside of a biology lab from a Labrador Retriever, and who avoided Statistics 101 like the plague.

I write while traveling late May in the South Pacific, where tens of thousands of passengers like me are greeted daily by an army of health ministry workers in New Zealand and Australia, collecting special health report forms from generally healthy passengers, and even video-capturing each face that passes by their airport control points. Late May. That's over a month since it should have been obvious to anyone with elementary logic skills that the pig flu is no uglier than hundreds of its viral cousins.

What separates H1N1 or "swine flu" (pity the poor pork producers) from other genetic code written in nucleic acid and wrapped in a little protein—the definition of a virus—is not an epidemic of illness or death. It's an epidemic of testing.

If you do a Google search for news from the first week of the "epidemic," you will find that Mexican health authorities counted 159 deaths as of April 28, as reported in The New York Times. A month later, when you might expect that number to be appreciably higher, the Associated Press listed the death toll in Mexico at 89—with the AP conveniently forgetting to report the nearly 100% disparity from the earlier statistic. That same AP story noted that the "world's death toll" was 108.

By April 29, Mexican health authorities were triumphantly heralding the discovery of "patient zero," a little boy in the town of La Gloria, who had suffered some flu-like symptoms a few weeks earlier and had fully recovered—again, according to the Times. In the same story, however, the Times also reported that, "Before Édgar fell ill, another person in San Diego may have been affected, said Dr. Miguel Ángel Lezana, Mexico's chief government epidemiologist." So much for patient zero.

Within a couple of weeks of that triumph of Mexican epidemiology, we learned no virus had been detected by testing swine at the pig farm near little Édgar Hernández's home. (Pity the poor little boy and his tearful mother, who lamented the world's fingering her son as the source of the Great Swine Flu of 2009.)

A few more than 100 deaths in the past month would be no more than a fraction of those who die each day in the U.S., Mexico, and the rest of the world from the amorphous disease described by the medical term of art, "the flu."

Indeed, the New York school children who tested positive for it in late April yet suffered nothing more than sniffles and tummy aches, provided early confirming anecdotal evidence that H1N1 was no killer bug.

So why the pig flu panic? Thanks to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO)—and all the health ministries they influence, like those in New Zealand and Australia—the world was subjected to frenetic surveillance of a single "new" flu strain.

If similar resources were used to check for other strains of virus causing other cases of flu-like illness during the same time period, mothers around the globe would have been panicked by some other viral code, though perhaps one with a less scary and dirty-sounding name.

But the well-funded CDC and WHO, not to mention those health ministries in New Zealand and Australia, wouldn't have had the necessary threat to yield them even bigger budgets from politicians pandering to a panicked public. And that panic, of course, has been provoked by science-challenged "news" organizations that propagandize for the virus-obsessed health agencies.

Epidemiologists studying communicable diseases are not the first or even second line of defense for our health. Strong immune systems are. It was their immune systems—not the CDC and WHO, not doctors, not drug peddling pharmaceutical companies—that protected those school children in New York, a few of whom had been to Mexico, where, like much of the developing and third world, poor nutrition and exposure to drinking water polluted by old bacterial pathogens weakens natural immunities to disease.

But proper nourishment and clean water don't have public relations advisors like the CDC and the WHO. So what we might call "flu-ism" spreads, a psychological phenomenon that can make us stupid as pigs, but not actually very ill.
_____________________

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

***********************************************

The War on Drugs
is No Laughing Matter
It's time for Barack Obama to take legalization seriously

by Terry Michael | March 27, 2009

Alcohol did not create Al Capone's gang violence in the hometown of our current president. Prohibition did.

Marijuana does not create murderous drug cartels in Mexico. America's War on Drugs does.

Surely President Barack Obama, one of the smartest men to inhabit the White House, must understand that truth—even if he chooses to laugh-off those of us who want to get serious about the need to end the social insanity of neo-Prohibition by legalizing marijuana and other psychoactive chemicals.

French essayist Georges Bernanos wrote, "The worst, the most corrupting of lies, are problems poorly stated." It is an outrageous lie, one that corrupts intelligent public policy discourse, when we talk of "drug violence." The official corruption and murderous mayhem in both Mexico and on our side of the border are not a result of dried leafy vegetation and white powder. They are the consequence of a lucrative black market, spawning profits for which bad people are willing to kill and die, directly resulting from federal and state laws that prohibit the sale, use, and possession of drugs........

Read all......
Original HTML Link  or   Acrobat PDF

***********************************************

Illinois' Culture of Reform
Inspired by Paul Simon

By: Terry Michael
December 16 , 2008

If Illinois politics has been a hotbed for corruption, it has also benefited from a culture of reform, a meme stream that flows directly to President-elect Barack Obama from the late Sen. Paul Simon, through generations of journalists and politicians Simon has inspired.

Like most everything in life, politics is physics. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And the patronage, vote-buying and bribes that were hallmarks of the Cook County Democratic machine and the corruption in Springfield stimulated a Progressive Era-inspired reform movement led by a young weekly editor and future state legislator, lieutenant governor, U.S. representative and U.S. senator.

Among those whom Simon has mentored and influenced have been Obama himself, plus two of his inner circle: Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a Simon protégé, and Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, a former Chicago Tribune political writer who was press secretary for Simon’s first U.S. Senate campaign in 1984........

Read all..........

Original Politico HTML Link  or  Politico PDF

***************************

Legislating Freedom from the Bench
The case for legalizing gay marriage
by "judicial decree"

Terry Michael | October 28, 2008

As a 61-year-old, un-partnered, gay, atheist libertarian, I react with mixed emotion but some agreement to arguments against activist judges imposing same-sex marriage.

Such a case was published recently by one of the most persuasive libertarian-minded essayists in daily print journalism, Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman. "Massachusetts, California and (just this month) Connecticut have all legalized gay marriage the wrong way—by impatient, unpersuasive judicial decrees," Chapman wrote. "Now California voters have the chance to do it the right way—by the free consent of the governed."

Part of that makes sense. With fewer divisions than the Pope, courts can ill-afford to jump too far ahead of the culture. To do so invites rebellion by activists, like those in California who initiated Proposition 8, which was placed on the ballot this November in an effort to nullify the state supreme court's May decision allowing same sex couples to wed......

Read all.......

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

***************************