Voting

The New Neo Posted on by

I voted by absentee ballot yesterday.

I’m not one to do that, ordinarily. I like going to the polls on voting day. I like the atmosphere of civic duty. I like the people standing around (even in the rain) with posters, hoping vainly to influence somebody at the last minute, or just drinking in the attention. I like the fact that I often meet people I know there from the community, since it’s one of the few things we do as a group any more.

I like the solemnity of going into the booth and drawing the curtain to maintain my privacy. I like to stand there for a moment and savor what I’m about to do, and the fact that I have the right to do it. I’m such a sentimental sap that sometimes there are even tears in my eyes, and not just if my candidate is likely to lose.

I remember noticing as a young child that school was closed on election day because our building was used as a polling place. This gave me a warm feeling about elections right from the start, since I disliked school rather intensely. They’d haul the machines in the day before, with their arcane levers and apparatus that looked a bit like the insides of a piano. It all seemed very adult to me, and I looked forward to the day when I, too, would be a grownup and voting.

But this year I’m going to be out of town on Tuesday, November 2. So yesterday I got an absentee ballot. I felt a grim satisfaction in marking that long row of Republican names, although a couple of the Democrats running are my friends. Straight Republican ticket this year, for obvious reasons.

I’m hoping for a Republican landslide. And then I’m hoping the winners do right by the hope we have invested in them. I say “hope,” because it’s certainly not trust.

Judge says multi-state anti-HRC lawsuit can proceed

The New Neo Posted on by

Federal Judge Roger Vinson has just announced that the anti-HRC lawsuit mounted by 20 states will be allowed to proceed.

An excellent decision, IMHO:

The judge questioned whether the administration was correct in arguing that all Americans are active participants in the health care system regardless of whether they choose to have health insurance and are therefore subject to penalties under the government’s authority to regulate commerce.

This case is potentially huge, and whatever the verdict is, it will almost undoubtedly end up in the Supreme Court, where it rightly belongs.

James Fallows: O’Donnell more dangerous than Palin

The New Neo Posted on by

Two-thirds of the way into O’Donnell’s debate with Coons last night, it occurred to James Fallows that she could be more dangerous than Sarah Palin. Why? Because:

…she has the idiot bravado of the talk show regular.

To echo Bob Schieffer in another context, is that the best Fallows can do to critique her performance? If so, she must have been pretty articulate.

The holidays are coming: click through neo-neocon to Amazon

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember those Amazon widgets on the ride sidebar (four—count ’em, four)? Please use any of them to click through and buy your holiday gifts. Or use them any time you want to purchase books or any of the other gazillion things Amazon now sells.

I believe that I may be performing a real public service (other than obvious and shameless self-promotion) by reminding you in mid-October that it’s only a little over two months until Christmas and about six weeks till Chanukah, which begins extremely early this year on the evening of December 1.

I have always been a procrastinator, the sort of person who remembers a mere week before the holidays that, oh yes, it’s all almost here, and I need to buy some gifts pronto. I then race out and scramble madly. So if I can save you from a similar fate, I will have done some good in this cold cruel world.

[WARNING: I may run this again at least once more before the holidays.]

So sorry, the doctor isn’t in

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a doctor shortage, in case you hadn’t noticed. And it’s likely to get worse as a result of Obamacare:

This disease can be traced back to 1997, when Congress, anticipating a doctor surplus, included a section in its budget-balancing law that froze the number of Medicare-sponsored residency positions.

But instead of a surplus, a shortage soon developed, and has worsened over the years, now reaching epidemic proportions. The Association of American Medical Colleges Center for Workforce Studies just reported an anticipated shortage of 90,000 doctors of all kinds over the next decade, with half of them being primary care physicians and the other half surgeons and specialists…[What’s more,] the new health care law, known ironically as the Affordable Care Act, is promoting and extending the kind of low co-pay and low deductible insurance that is easy to overuse, overwhelming doctors further and leading to an upward spiral of health care costs.

I recently had the need to change my primary care doctor, and let me tell you it wasn’t easy to find a new one. Helpful friends gave me names of doctors they knew and liked, but when I called the offices, I got the repetitive answer: not taking new patients, and no idea if or when they ever will.

And I’m not even a Medicare recipient. I hear that for them it’s worse, and getting lousier all the time.

It reminds me a bit of the old Soviet system, where a person could go to a restaurant and see a menu that was largely delusional. That’s the stuff we would be serving, the stuff we’d like to serve—if we had it, which we don’t. What’s actually on the menu? Well, there are the potatoes. And then there’s the potatoes. And oh, have we told you we have potatoes?

My doctor problem was solved, for now, by the intervention of a friend who knew a certain doctor well, and who pleaded with him to make a kind exception and take me on as a new patient, which he did. When I arrived at the office, the receptionist was stunned when I told her I was here as a new patient, “Wow, you’re very lucky. He’s a wonderful doctor, but he’s generally not taking any new…”

This particular doctor is in his early 60s, and I’m starting to hope he doesn’t want to retire any too soon. I’m not eager to enter the doctor fray again in a few years. By then, who knows how tough it might be? I got a foretaste today because I’ve also been dealing (unsuccessfully so far, I might add) with trying to phone the DMV to ask a simple question.

Good luck, I know. Fifteen phone numbers and an hour or two later, I’m still waiting for an answer.

Stop the presses: Joe Biden blames Republicans

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s getting almost amusing. Should Republicans say, “I’m rubber, you’re glue, bounces off me and sticks to you”?

Take a look:

We have seen this movie before,” Biden told an enthusiastic crowd of about 200 people during a luncheon at the Hotel Fort Des Moines. “It is a horror movie. Putting these people in charge is like making an arsonist the fire marshal.”

One thing I’ll say for Biden: in the past, unfortunately, it’s true that the Republicans have been fiscally irresponsible as well—although not nearly as irresponsible as the Democrats have turned out to be.

In related news, the polls continue to look good for Republicans. Caveat: don’t get cocky. It’s just polls. The only poll that counts is you-know-when. And then afterwards, the Republicans actually have to deliver the fire marshal goods.

Schieffer and Axelrod on the Chamber of Commerce and foreign donations

The New Neo Posted on by

Bob Schieffer (Bob Shieffer!) asks Axelrod whether throwing a heap of excrement against the wall and seeing what will stick is really the best way for the administration to help the Democratic Party in next month’s election.

No, he doesn’t actually say those words. But watch him ask about the unsupported allegations that the Chamber of Commerce is using foreign donations to help fund Republicans, and watch Axelrod’s answer:

Anyone who has followed Obama and Axelrod should be unsurprised at these tactics. The only surprise is that they have become more transparent (and not in a good way), and that some in the MSM are no longer supporting them.

Unfortunately for Obama as leader of his party, in 2010 there are too many hotly contested battles to be able to dig up sufficient salacious divorce papers on opponents, or to disqualify their signatures on petitions and knock them out of the races, as in the past.

And speaking of the past, remember this?:

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged…

In recent weeks, questionable contributions have created headaches for Obama’s accounting team as it has tried to explain why campaign finance filings have included itemized donations from individuals using fake names, such as Es Esh or Doodad Pro. Those revelations prompted conservative bloggers to further test Obama’s finance vetting by giving money using the kind of prepaid cards that can be bought at a drugstore and cannot be traced to a donor.

The problem with such cards, campaign finance lawyers said, is that they make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals, donors who have exceeded the limits, government contractors or others who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.

Careful, Axelrod and Obama. You know what they say about people who live in glass houses. This could come back to haunt you.

[NOTE: And in semi-related news, George Soros says, “I don’t have enough money to buy this one.”

No; what he actually said was this: “I’m not in a position to stop it. I don’t believe in standing in the way of an avalanche.”]

Finally, Obama is inspiring me

The New Neo Posted on by

President Obama admonishes us to “keep believing that change is possible.” He adds:

Let’s show Washington one more time, change doesn’t come from the top. Change happens because of you! Change happens because of you! Change happens because of you!

Just watch, Mr. President. On November 2, the American people are poised to vote for a big change. And you probably won’t like it, not one little bit.

Yes, we can.

CAMERA conference: getting the word out about Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I attended the first day of a conference in Boston held by CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (see this for the list of speakers).

The usual crew of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian demonstrators was there, bright and early, to greet the attendees as we arrived at 9:00 AM. Hoarsely shouting in a sing-song chant, and beating a rhythmic drum, they stood with unfurled banner as they serenaded us in the bright and chilly Sunday morning air.

Attendance was enormous, and security tight and visible. The theme? Truth is powerful—if you can get it out above the din of false information that is constantly generated and disseminated about Israel.

Alan Dershowitz began by stating another theme of the day, which is that criticism of Israel often features a double standard. The country is customarily judged by far stricter rules than apply to any other nation. He told the following story (about Jews in general rather than Israel itself) illustrating the way it works:

President Lowell of Harvard was going on about how bad Jews are and how their presence was not welcome at the university because, after all, “Jews cheat.” Judge Learned Hand, to whom he was speaking, pointed out that non-Jews cheat, as well. Lowell replied, “Quit changing the subject; we’re talking about Jews now!”

And so the world does—on and on and on.

A highlight of the conference for me was the appearance of Philippe Karsenty, the Frenchman who successfully defended himself against the charge of libel for helping to expose the lies of France2 and well-known French reporter Charles Enderlin in perpetrating the al Durah hoax. Four years ago I went to France to report on a related trial, and met and spoke with the intrepid Karsenty there (see this for some of my posts on the subject).

Karsenty is a charming and elegant speaker (the accent doesn’t hurt, either), but also a clear and incisive one. He is one of France’s modern-day Dreyfuses—a man on a mission, and with the heart to stick with it. One of the new developments he revealed is that Enderlin is still defending himself, having just written and released a book called (in French) “A Child Is Dead.”

Other highlights of the CAMERA conference were the remarks by Anne Bayevsky, who detailed the sorry record of the UN as well as its Orwellian Human Rights Council; Gerald Steinberg on the anti-Israel slant of NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, and how their “witnesses” are accepted as unbiased by the press; and Melanie Phillips, who spoke blisteringly of hardened anti-Israel attitudes in Britain and the general decline of Britain itself.

During the speeches and question-and-answer periods, I was struck by the descriptions of the depth and breadth of the deceptive demonization of Israel—not just in the Arab and Muslim world, where it has found an especially receptive home and eager practitioners, but in the press, academia, and among the international “peacemakers,” the NGOs, and many churches.

CAMERA has its work cut out for it.

Joan Sutherland: “The birds could trill,…

The New Neo Posted on by

…, so why not I?”

Joan Sutherland, Australian bel canto soprano, dead at 83.

I’m neither an opera fan nor knowledgeable about the subject. But Sutherland was one of the first opera singers I ever saw or heard, back on the old Ed Sullivan show, which brought culture—high and low—to us masses.