MONDAY,  JULY 6,  2009

TO YOUR GOVERNMENT-DETERMINED MINIMAL HEALTH - AT 8:05 P.M. ET:  It may be symbolic, but the president is in Moscow just as his legions in Congress are trying to introduce a brand of socialism to the American health-care system.  Ah, maybe Barack and Michelle can visit some of those healthy Muscovites, and ask how they like government control of their livers.  Or, maybe Mr. Obama can fly on to Britain and symbolically put his name on a waiting list for an operation.  Should be available a bit before the end of his term.  Or, even more tingling to the legs of the left wing of his party, he can jet into Cuba and see the marvels of free medical care.  Just don't ask about any other freedoms.  This new administration "understands" other cultures.

What chills us is that we're having a debate without information.  What precisely is the problem in our health-care system?  Does it need an overhaul?  Or patches?  Why should the government be involved?  If saving money is the goal, when has the government ever saved any health-care dollars?  And perhaps most important, does independent research, including good journalism, support the claims made by the administration or its critics?

The press has been next to shameful.  There is little depth to the reporting on health care.  There are anecdotes and claims, but the kind of three-column story that would set the record straight is lacking.  Even the cable news operations, which have plenty of time, have only dealt with the facts of health care superficially.

Also lacking is plain common sense, a phrase that often panics the educated elite, who believe that all knowledge is contained in their sheepskins.  (Truth in packaging:  I actually qualify as part of that club, but I refuse to apply for a membership card.)  Often, especially when something as personal as health care is concerned, simple observation can tell us a great deal.

Example:  I recall, many years ago, that there were campaigns to get operations for children whose families couldn't afford the care.  The press loved them, often sponsored them.  "Get Johnny cured!"  "A new life for Annie!"  In a grim way, we were fascinated by these campaigns.  Write a check, save a kid.

But I haven't seen a campaign like that in decades.  Why? What does that tell us about our system?  And when is the last time you saw a story of anyone being denied medical care because he or she couldn't pay a bill?  I don't remember the last time.

What do these observations say about American health care?  The fact is, there are many programs available for people who can't pay medical bills.  Hospitals, often by law, are set up to handle cases where payment is in doubt.  It's far from a perfect system, and improvement is indicated.  But people do get care.  We do not see bodies in the streets.  Question:  Shouldn't we improve on this system rather than overhaul the entire medical delivery mechanism?  And is government the proper party to do this?  If there's a leak in one pipe in your home, you don't normally rip out all the plumbing.  You patch the broken pipe.

Some years ago I attended a seminar run by Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in New York.  They were thinking of putting on a medical information program.  The purpose was to encourage members of minority groups to seek medical care, which was amply available to them.  The dirty little secret of the health care system is that many people who don't receive care don't get it because they don't want it - either because they don't want to spend the money and think they can beat the odds, or because their culture doesn't put much emphasis on things like preventive care. 

And there's another point that requires mention:  Sometimes the tragedies that some commentators attribute to a defective medical system have nothing to do with medicine at all.  A few years ago I was commenting to a writer friend of mine, who lives in another part of the country, how few members of my high school class were deceased.  It was about five percent.  My friend replied that in his class, which was even younger, the number was closer to 35%.  I asked him what possibly could cause that disparity.  He answered, "You have to realize where we live.  It's guns, cars, and alcohol."  Lifestyle plays a role, sometimes a dramatic role. 

We need more facts, better reporting, more details, before we overhaul a medical system that, for most Americans, delivers quality service.  Here is where the press can excel.  It hasn't excelled.  But you can be sure that, if you tune in tonight, you'll get five more stories on the death of Michael Jackson.

July 6, 2009   Permalink       

REQUIRED LEGAL WARNING - AT 5:14 P.M. ET:  Urgent Agenda advisers are urged to read the stories coming out of Moscow with two eyes, and a third if you are so blessed.  The New York Times breathlessly reports:

MOSCOW — The United States and Russia, seeking to move forward on one of the most significant arms control treaties since the end of the cold war, announced Monday that they had reached a preliminary agreement on cutting each country’s stockpiles of strategic nuclear weapons by as much as one-third.

COMMENT:  The key words are "preliminary agreement."  The piece of paper has no details, does not even provide for verification, and is essentially just an expression of intent.  "Yes, Alphonse, I will marry you."  The marriage may or may not take place.

This agreement is not a treaty, is not yet ready for ratification, and may never be.  It's eyewash.  Follow the story closely and watch the details.  Watch what we're willing to give up to get the thing in final shape.  That will be the payoff.

July 6, 2009   Permalink 

CALIFORNIA, HERE I COME...WELL, NOT NOW - AT 8:41 A.M. ET:  The California mess - it's our largest state, after all, with a population similar in size to Canada's - is going to be felt around the country.  Kevin Hassett, at Bloomberg, believes it may kill off Obamanomics itself:

July 6 (Bloomberg) -- Last week, we discovered that the state of California will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

With California mired in a budget crisis, largely the result of a political impasse that makes spending cuts and tax increases impossible, Controller John Chiang said the state planned to issue $3.3 billion in IOU’s in July alone. Instead of cash, those who do business with California will get slips of paper.

The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat.

COMMENT:  I don't think most Americans, and maybe even most journalists, recognize how deep the economic decline has been.  California's troubles have been chronicled.  Other states are also in serious trouble, and so are large cities.  Unemployment continues to rise.  We're assured by the usual suspects that it isn't rising as fast as before, and so we should smile a bit.  That's like saying the Titanic isn't sinking as fast as it was sinking an hour ago. 

There is a new load of foreclosures coming.  And this time they're coming in the prime real-estate market.  And other countries are showing reluctance to back our debt.  We'll get through the summer doldrums, but it will be an exciting fall.

July 6, 2009   Permalink

SARAH - THE ANALYSIS - AT 8:28 A.M. ET:  Moderate conservative Ross  Douthat, in The New York Times, argues that Sarah Palin's troubles began when she accepted the vice presidential nomination on the Republican ticket last year.  Douthat is right.  It was after Sarah's acceptance that the wild-eyed attacks on her began.

And Douthat makes another point, echoing something from our own Angel's Corner over the weekend - that the assault on Palin was, at least in large part, cultural:

Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

But, while conceding correctly that Palin has made serious mistakes, Douthat notes that the attacks on her have been stunning, overwhelming, and vicious:

All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.

Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.

But her unhappy sojourn on the national stage has had a different moral: Don’t even think about it.

COMMENT:  Douthat's op-ed colleagues - Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd - have been among the most despicable in their attacks on Sarah Palin.  Douthat is new to The Times, and his comments took some spine to write.  Good for him.

July 6, 2009   Permalink

MIDEAST MACHINATIONS - AT 7:48 A.M. ET:  The news out of the Mideast becomes more and more intriguing.  In the last few days Vice President Joe Biden has said that the U.S. could not prevent Israel, a sovereign nation, from doing what it needs to do to defend against a nuclear weapons-developing Iran.  At the same time, the Times of London reported that Saudi Arabia had agreed to let Israeli jets overfly Saudi territory on a run into Iran.  That second report has been officially denied, but of course it has to be.

Now we learn that military plans in Israel are underway, and the target is pretty obvious.  The Jerusalem Post reports:

On the day that US Vice President Joe Biden seemed to give Israel a green light for military action to eliminate Iran's nuclear threat, The Jerusalem Post learned that the IAF plans to participate in aerial exercises in the US and Europe in the coming months with the aim of training its pilots for long-range flights.

And...

IAF (Israel Air Force) planes will take part this year in a joint aerial exercise with a NATO-member state that cannot be identified.

In addition, later this month, the air force will send F-16C fighter jets to participate in the Red Flag exercise at the Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. At the same time, several of the IAF's C-130 Hercules transport aircraft will participate in the Rodeo 2009 competition at the McChord Air Force Base in Washington state.

Defense officials said the overseas exercises would be used to drill long-range maneuvers. Last summer, more than 100 IAF jets flew over Greece in what was viewed as a test-run for a potential strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Hmm.  We shouldn't jump to conclusions, of course.  It could be that the U.S., working with Israel, is simply sending a tougher message to Tehran, but will back down later.  On the other hand, maybe Israel has made plain that it will act without American approval if it feels it must neutralize the Iranian nuclear program.

Stay tuned.  This is getting very interesting.  And remember that the missile shield the U.S. wants to place in Eastern Europe, and which already has Polish and Czech approval, is directed at Iran.  As we noted in our story below, Obama is in Moscow right now, and the Russians want that shield cancelled. 

Will Obama cancel in order to get some other piece of paper with Moscow?  Lots of interrelated developments here.

July 6, 2009   Permalink

SUMMER AT THE KREMLIN AT 7:32 A.M. ET:  President Obama, the first lady, and a cast of thousands, have arrived in Moscow.  Great things are said to be in store.

The trip is grimly reminding some observers of President Kennedy's meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961.  Kennedy got badly rolled, something he admitted, and Khrushchev came away believing the new president was weak.  It's widely thought that this belief led directly to Moscow's attempt to place missiles in Cuba in late 1962, ushering in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Now there are fears that another young president doesn't quite get the game.  Jennifer Rubin, writing in "Contentions," notes a New York Times piece reporting that Obama, as a college student, was enamored of the nuclear-freeze movement: 

Those who suspect the president is engaged in a bit of dangerous self-delusion and denial about certain unpleasant realities regarding the threats from rogue states won’t be heartened to read that his current non-proliferation fetish stems, at least according to the New York Times, from his college infatuation with the nuclear freeze movement. Apparently, youthful Obama did not focus on the results from Ronald Reagan’s refusal to buy into the fantasies of liberals –namely the fall of the Soviet Empire. That lesson has entirely eluded now-president Obama. Is it any wonder his critics find his posture fraught with peril and entirely out-of-touch with the threats we face?

As the Times reports:

“This is dangerous, wishful thinking,” Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Richard Perle, an architect of the Reagan-era nuclear buildup that appalled Mr. Obama as an undergraduate, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. They contend that Mr. Obama is, indeed, a naïf for assuming that “the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces.”

COMMENT:  It's being reported that the U.S. and Russia are within range of an agreement to limit nuclear weapons and delivery systems.  Problem is, the Russians are insisting on a compromise in our plan to place missile defense systems in Eastern Europe as the price for the arms-reduction pact.

President Reagan turned down a similar demand from Mikhail Gorbachev, stunning the treaty-at-any-price crowd in Washington.  But Reagan's firmness on missile defense convinced the Soviets that this president could not be rolled and that the Cold War was essentially over, and that it was ending in an American victory.

President Obama seems incapable of embracing concepts like "victory," except when he's running for office.  We have reason to be concerned about what may be cooked up in this Moscow meeting.

July 6, 2009   Permalink

SUNDAY,  JULY 5,  2009

MIDEAST INTRIGUE - AT 10:40 A.M. ET:  Fascinating report on a possible Israeli strike against Iran, from London's Sunday Times:

The head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran’s nuclear sites.

Earlier this year Meir Dagan, Mossad’s director since 2002, held secret talks with Saudi officials to discuss the possibility.

The Israeli press has already carried unconfirmed reports that high-ranking officials, including Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister, held meetings with Saudi colleagues. The reports were denied by Saudi officials.

“The Saudis have tacitly agreed to the Israeli air force flying through their airspace on a mission which is supposed to be in the common interests of both Israel and Saudi Arabia,” a diplomatic source said last week.

COMMENT:  Maybe the Obamans, who've been telling us that the key to solving Iran is to solve the Israel/Palestine crisis first, should start revising their thinking.

July 5, 2009   Permalink

DECLINE OF A STATE - AT 9:55 A.M. ET:  At Urgent Agenda we emphasize national and international affairs, but occasionally the follies within a state catch our attention.  One of the great political tragedies occurring right now is the decline of New York State and the virtual collapse of its state government.  It's important because, historically, New York has had a significant influence on the rest of the country.  Virtually the entire American social "safety net" that Ronald Reagan spoke about, and respected, originated in New York.   The once-great New York City public school system served, for decades, as an urban model.

Not so anymore.  Today New York is a train wreck, its government paralyzed, its coffers empty, and gripped by ethnic divisions that we'd hoped would be eased by the election of Obama.  False hope.

No one knows New York politics better than the New York Post's respected Fred Dicker. Today he writes a virtual obituary for the state he's covered for decades.  It's worth reading as a warning to other states.  Please note this section:

During the long years of Republican control, the all-white GOP "conference" would regularly bemoan its lack of diversity, and make extra efforts to recruit minority Senate candidates and hire minority staff.

During the first five months of this year, with the Senate under the control of its first African-American majority leader, Malcolm Smith, top Democrats bemoaned the lack of minority Senate staffers.

But instead of trying to recruit new hires, they fired nearly 200 almost exclusively white workers and replaced them with a large number of minority employees, many of whom were seen by their fellow workers to be unskilled at their new jobs.

The move produced severe racial tensions, made worse by the fact that, as a high-level Democratic staffer confided, "We've been told to only hire minorities.''

COMMENT:  That is racial politics at its worst, and it can happen elsewhere.  New York has been heavily financed by tax revenues from Wall Street.  They are way down, and the state seems to be going the way of California. 

This is my state, and we are heading for very hard times.

July 5, 2009     Permalink

IRANIAN CLERICS DISSENT - AT 9:31 A.M. ET:  The dissent in Iran continues, and may even be growing, with no coherent American response from the Obama administration.  From The New York Times:

CAIRO — The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.

A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult — if not impossible.

COMMENT:  We've noted before that the 1979 revolution, which regrettably brought the mullahs to power, took months to develop.  This is not over. 

We await some American plan to help the dissidents.

July 5, 2009   Permalink

MORE ON SARAH - AT 9:10 A.M. ET:  Sarah Palin has used her Facebook page to give a further explanation of her curious action in resigning as Alaska's governor, as AP reports:

''I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint,'' the former Republican vice presidential candidate wrote in a posting on her Facebook page. Palin's spokeswoman, Meghan Stapleton, confirmed Palin wrote the entry.

Rumors have been flying that Palin is the subject of an FBI investigation, but the FBI knocked them down:

''There is absolutely no truth to those rumors that we're investigating her or getting ready to indict her,'' Special Agent Eric Gonzalez, the bureau's Alaska spokesman, said.

Stay tuned for the next chapter.  Endlessly fascinating.  Name another political figure who can knock Michael Jackson off the front page.

July 5, 2009   Permalink