“Man Accused of spraying semen led a normal life. Suspect never had any issues. Showed no indication of bizarre behavior.”

You just read the headline and sub-heds for a story in the Metro section of last Sunday's (August 15, 2010) issue of the ink-on-dead-trees edition of The Washington Post. It led the front page of a section charged with reporting important District of Columbia news. It did so only four weeks until a local election, featuring a Post-endorsed young mayor who seems to think DC’s treasury is his personal piggybank for friends--though you wouldn’t necessarily know much about that from the meager space devoted to Mayor Adrian Fenty’s alleged transgressions. But I digress.

Just when I thought the Post couldn’t outdo itself in wasting space to pander to prurient interests, some genius editor decided to hype an account of a 28-year-old accused of spraying semen on “three women inside the Giant supermarket on Muddy Branch Road.” (“He’s never had any issues,” his mother...said in an interview. “He grew up in the church.”)

If you made it this far, you’ve either burst out laughing or you’re wondering, “Where the hell’s Terry going with this?” Stick with me, friends of journalistic excellence.

Two summers ago, it became clear to me that fewer adults were in charge of editing The Washington Post, one of the most politically influential papers in America--an arbiter of opinion, with clout to steer us away from disasters like Watergate, or encourage them, as in the Post’s neo-conservative boosterism of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In a twelve part July 2008 “Who Killed Chandra Levy?” series, the paper that brought down a corrupt president with investigative reporting by two local Metro desk staffers used its limited investigative resources to exploit the baser interests of a dwindling number of customers. Jesus may have needed 12 disciples to help him get the word out, but God published only ten commandments; so why, writing at the time I asked, do editors of The Washington Post require a dozen units of space to “investigate” the sad demise of a young woman?

This is not to say the Post didn’t, in the intervening time, also produce some fine investigative pieces, like Debbie Cenziper’s expose last October of the theft of $25 million by HIV-AIDS Industry “non-profits” colluding with the local DC HIV-AIDS administration to bilk taxpayers of millions, and Dana Priest’s “Top Secret America” this summer, exploring the frightening national security build-up since 9/11.

But the Post once again descended into tabloid hell this July, with “Lurking in the Schools,” wasting the investigative talents of three reporters and devoting hundreds and hundreds of column inches beating to death the story of a Virginia suburban sexual molester. Page after page was squandered on this anomalous tale, so far out of proportion to reality it reeked of the slimy Dateline NBC “To Catch a Predator” series, which fabricated news instead of covering it.

Sure, newspapers are in crisis, losing a business model that worked for decades, trying to find ways to attract revenue-producing readers. But the Post parent corporation is profitable, able to fund reporting that serves the purpose of the First Amendment, educating us for our civic responsibilities.

I remain a devoted reader and a fan of the Post and its great reporters and editors, like Dan Balz, the premier political journalist of his generation, and Marcia Kramer, a talented former Metro desk copy editor, who Ben Bradlee said “transformed [the Metro copy desk] into a first-rate, highly regarded organization.” I went to college with both, so I know them well. And I am sure more talent like theirs fills the newsroom.

But leadership has to come from the owners, sending signals to top managers that pandering is no substitute for quality journalism. And they need to lay down the law that flouting journalistic ethics will not be tolerated, as the Post unfortunately has done in the case of Mr. Ezra Klein and his band of “Journolist” liberal policy advocates masquerading as journalists. Apparently, the Post believes the telegenic Mr. Klein is just too cute to fail, because he’s still employed.

Maybe I’m just an aging curmudgeon. But I take seriously my 1969 Univ. of Illinois journalism degree, informed by news values from the Progressive Era. The Progressives were foolishly infatuated with social engineering by “experts,” but they sure as hell were right about the importance of fair, dispassionate and proportionate reporting.

Back to my digression above: Post editors, how about a little more serious reporting in the print edition about the paper’s endorsed candidate for mayor? I’ve been noticing that some of the really interesting stuff about Adrian Fenty only appears on your web pages.
________________________________

Terry Michael is director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, for the past 21 years teaching college journalists about politics. He is a former political press secretary. He writes opinion and analysis at his “libertarian Democrat” web site, http://www.terrymichael.net

Don't Eat the Rich,
President Obama

Terry Michael | July 31 , 2010

WASHINGTON -- Keeping the Bush tax cuts from expiring at the end of the year would be both good policy and good politics for President Barack Obama.

If he wants to avoid a double-dip recession, fend off double-digit unemployment and retain a Democratic majority in at least one house of Congress, the president needs to embrace tax policy focused on the political center. He can throw out a little populist red meat to his demoralized base, but he'd better not taunt the middle-class Tea Party monster ready to devour left-liberal congressmen. The president can skewer Wall Street, but not eat the rich.

There may be a good time to raise taxes on the super-wealthy, but Dec. 31, 2010, when the Bush tax cuts expire, sure as hell isn't one of them. Obama's market-savvy fellow Democrat and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D, N.D.) acknowledges that. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner understands it, even if he can't say it. Job-producing investment demands it.

Anybody with a lick of political economic sense knows the Great Recession was not caused by low tax rates. It was the mortgage meltdown, stupid! Housing-bust-driven loss of home equity and mutual-fund retirement savings are the caffeine that stimulated the aging Baby Boomer, vote-rich, amorphous Tea Party.

If Obama and congressional Democrats believe they can seduce independents by defining the rich as individuals and couples with incomes of over $200,000 and $250,000, they are using a stimulant stronger than that found in either conservative tea or liberal lattes. Upper-middle class, home-owning taxpayers are the motivated voters in this mid-term election, just as Clinton-hating Christian-and-economic conservatives were the righteous army in 1994 that overturned decades of Democratic control of the House. Recall the part health-care "reform" played in defining the Clintons as the Gingrich Revolution's enemy that year. The religious right was populated with economic conservatives, not just those who hated the sex, drugs and rock 'n roll lifestyle they imagined were embodied by Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Some Beltway Democrats think they can inspire their working-class base by beating up on those $250,000 rich couples. That's an aging Democratic populist political consultant's hallucination. The most reliable voters in the Democratic base are not the declining number of union members who can be rolled out by the AFL-CIO political action committee. Just look at not-so-big labor's disastrous wasting of members' dues trying to oust Sen. Blanche Lincoln in the Arkansas Democratic primary this year. The Democratic base is increasingly the well-heeled Baby Boomers, more moved by Obama's elective war in Afghanistan and failure to move faster on the liberal and libertarian cultural agenda than they are with the rich not being taxed more.

So what are the smart political and policy options for Obama and congressional Democrats? Pretty simple. Aim liberal demagogic fire not at The Rich, but against those "greedy Wall Street bankers who destroyed our economy ... blah, blah, blah" (you guys are tough enough to take the flak) while quietly giving Republicans enough Blue Dog Democrat votes to extend the tax cuts. On the flip side, House Republican Leader John Boehner and his band of free marketeers should restrain themselves and avoid dumb rhetoric that sounds like they believe the only good marginal tax rate is zero.

Full disclosure here. Our present president lost much of the love of this libertarian Democrat (about six of us) with his Lyndon W. Obama war in Afghanistan and his consultant-driven health-care "reform." I am not here to help a politician, but to add my small voice to others who want to keep us from driving over a tax-policy cliff. Some of us who just read, write and teach for a living have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines, asking the best of our politicians. At 63, I'd just like to have enough to semi-retire, without burdening my political-journalism students and their children in my old age.

In Defense of Libertarianism
An open letter to left-liberals

Terry Michael | May 28, 2010

To my left-liberal Democrat friends:

As you engage in intellectual dishonesty using Rand Paul’s silly comments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act to misrepresent libertarianism, perhaps you might want to consider a little history of the political philosophy of the founder of our party, Thomas Jefferson, the original libertarian. Let me help you escape your ignorance about libertarianism without a capital L, a political philosophy far from conservatism.

As a child of the 1960s, I was one of you. I wore a “Madly for Adlai” button, delivered Kennedy brochures on my newspaper route, and defended Medicare in speech class. Growing up in the Bible Belt, I was the only kid in town to subscribe to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a near-communist rag according to neighbors who read the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, for which a young Pat Buchanan was writing editorials.

After three years of reporting, I became a press secretary, arriving in Washington in 1975 with Rep. Paul Simon who embodied the Progressive Era. He believed programs, regulations, and social “science” expertise could lift the poor and end corruption.

By the mid-1980s, I was press spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, when “centrist” Democrats began to repair the damage that led “Reagan Democrats” to desert the party. I joined other “New Democrats,” rejecting tax-and-spend excess and the group-outcomes mentality that advocated preferences based on race rather than focusing on individual opportunity.

Then, by the middle of the 1990s, I made the logical progression to libertarian.

My own evolution might help inform those of you who think libertarians are a bunch of self-centered, conservative, anti-poor ogres—unless, like some liberals in the cable babble and op-ed page commentariat, you wish to willfully mischaracterize the word libertarian and use the philosophy as a whipping boy. I’m talking to you, Joe Klein of Time magazine, who wrote that “Tea Party libertarians” would “expose the utopian foolishness of their ideology.” And you, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, who informed readers that “Paul lives in Libertarian La-La Land, where a purist philosophy leads people to believe in the purest nonsense.” Surely, Mr. Robinson, you know the difference between capital L Libertarian Party members, and those of us who are members of the two major parties, or of no party at all. The Tea Party is not a libertarian movement. It’s a hodgepodge of populist beliefs, like those always accompanying economic downturns.

Classical liberalism, on the other hand, has lasted centuries. It was a natural fit for an Agrarian Era, with self-sustaining farmers, frontiersmen, and shop keepers. When the Industrial Era arrived, these individualists railed against “wage labor.” They wanted no part of centralized industry and its abuses. Corporate excesses fed Progressive Era reformers, who promoted one-size-fits-all government to address the sins of the Robber Barons.

With adoption of the income tax and world wars, a depression, and a big tax-paying middle class after World War II, Big Government was in full bloom by the 1960s, complete with a tax-hungry Cold War military industrial complex, entitlement programs that devoured revenue, and government dependency by both an impoverished underclass and a corporate welfare class.

Then came the push-back that brought Ronald Reagan to power. With about twice as many Americans calling themselves conservative as liberal, Democrats abandoned liberal and used the wimpy mush-word progressive.

Concurrent with abandonment of the New Deal and Great Society by large blocks of voters, there arrived the third great economic wave, the Information Age, which intellectually empowers individuals, allowing them to enjoy more control over their own economic lives.

If you made it this far, left-liberal friends, you’ll see why many of us consider you reactionary when in comes to one-size-fits-all government. But we know you make common cause with us on cultural concerns like gay rights, and you share our non-interventionist views on foreign policy—though many of you avert your eyes as Barack Obama places young men and women in harm’s way in Afghanistan.

Of course, Rand Paul was ridiculous questioning four-decade-old settled law that recognized slavery and segregation as conditions justifying the coercive power of the state to prohibit discrimination. We libertarians could give you a long list of things, like fighting crime and enforcing contracts, we regard as appropriate for state intrusion. We just insist the use of government power be minimal, consistent with individual liberty and responsibility.

If you want a short explanation of a what a libertarian really is, here’s one from a self-described “libertarian Democrat” who used to be one of you: Get the government out of my bank account, out of my bedroom, away from my body, and out of the backyards of the rest of the world (we should lead by example, not military force.)

And now, please have enough intellectual honesty—which Rand Paul had to a fault—to call yourselves liberals, instead of hiding behind that bullshit progressive euphemism!

Terry Michael is director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, which he founded in 1988 to teach journalism students about politics. His writing is collected at “thoughts from a libertarian Democrat.”

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

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

Lies of the Ethics Industry
How the champions of "good government" suppress speech
and sow cynicism

Our 21st century politics might be regarded as an ethical golden age—at least in contrast to the corruption of the 19th century, when senators were on railroad payrolls and urban machines pilfered public treasuries. Yet according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, only 22 percent of citizens now trust government "almost always or most of the time."

Ironically, the trust deficit is partly a result of the very transparency rules adopted to encourage confidence in government. Enacted after some idiots in Richard Nixon's White House broke into the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee—apparently guided by the aphorism "nothing's too cheap to steal"—transparency laws were supposed to shine light on the influence of cash. Which they did. But they also left an even bigger impression that money is the root of all public policy evil.

Four groups now work to convince us we have the worst government money can buy: (1) an ethics industry spawned in Washington by Watergate, which features nonprofits lobbying for regulation of speech they don't like; (2) journalists who collude with ethics purveyors, writing cheap-and-easy stories fitting a corruption narrative they create; (3) politicians, especially Democratic Progressive Era throwbacks, who think evil-doing can be stopped with new and better rules and who pander to the ethics industry, the media, and (ironically) to citizens convinced that Democrats are just as sleazy as Republicans; and (4) citizens, frustrated by the budget-busting consequences of the free lunches we accept from politicians.

The usual suspects will be familiar to viewers of TV news features devoted to topics like “keeping them honest” and “it’s your money.” A self-described citizens’ lobby, Common Cause, was founded in 1970. It spawned a series of other “Goo-Goo” (good government) nonprofits, including Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen in 1971; the Center for Responsive Politics in 1982, which massages finance records from candidate and PAC reports and feeds the information to friendly journalists who repeat “follow the money” as a mantra; and the Center for Public Integrity, created in 1989 by former 60 Minutes producer Charles Lewis, who launched investigative studies that focused on money as a one-size-fits-all explanation for bad politicians and policy.

The Goo-Goos reflect the Progressive Era faith that non-partisan elites, armed with ever-expanding rules and great expertise, can serve stupid people better than greedy elected officials can. And to make matters worse, every one of their failures to legislate political morality has only encouraged ethics-mongers to propose new-and-better “reforms.” Common Cause and its sister organizations want to limit political speech that they disapprove of—i.e., speech by evil corporations. And these crusading groups all share a common cause: Goo-Goo self-perpetuation. After all, those press release writers have mouths to feed, too.

Anyone in a college journalism program during the past several decades has been advised to “follow the money” as a key to political behavior. With that limited wisdom, a young reporter quickly learns she can make the front page with a story suggesting a money-policy nexus.

Assisting journalists in these exposés of political cash are their friends in the ethics industry, ready to supply “studies” and “reports,” which often mis-aggregate donations and expenditures (figures lie just like politicians do, and liars frequently employ figures). The Goo-Goos are always prepared with sky-is-falling quotes about the dire consequences of money impinging on democracy.

What never seems to occur to journalists—especially those in the non-real world of editorial boards—is that their own publishers spend unlimited cash to speak, cash they’ve accepted from their advertisers, who usually happen to be big bad corporations.

With progressivism still their dominant theology, Democrats constantly campaign for more “reform” of money in politics, occasionally joined by “maverick” Republicans like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). But just like religious Republicans who get caught in the wrong beds or bathrooms, Democrats pay the hypocrisy price when they’re discovered with cash in their freezers or embarrassing gifts from criminals.

The Democratic-progressive dream is public financing of elections, an incumbent protection racket that would allow them to wage permanent campaigns with taxpayer-funded congressional staffs—all while appearing to equalize spending for electoral opponents, courtesy of your tax dollars.

Finally, the public’s disappointment with government can be traced to the most likely suspects of all: the public itself. Dangerously armed with a willingness to suspend belief in the law of supply and demand, the people are always eager for a free lunch of entitlement spending, while for dessert they blast politicians for running up giant deficits.

The thus-embattled citizen then turns on the TV and reacts with fury to stories by cable-babblers, pandering to their audience of political spectators with pretensions of keeping those sleazy pols honest.

Lost in this televised Kabuki theater is any serious attempt to address the really big public policy problems facing the country, including massive entitlement payouts for the elderly, the bipartisan jobs program known as national defense, and gigantic interest payments on the national debt. Who actually believes that removing money from politics will help fix any of that?

It all recalls the old cartoon strip character, Pogo, who declared: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

Down the Health Care Wormhole

How ObamaPelosiCare
will saddle future generations
with a public policy disaster

If we can put a man on the moon, we can re-write the basic laws of supply and demand and get more quality health care, dispensed by fewer providers per patient, at lower prices for all Americans. Sure we can. Just like we ended poverty with the Great Society, and like we’ll impose liberal democracy on the corrupt oligarchy ruling a collection of tribes known as Afghanistan.

Landing humans on the lunar surface looks like an easily do-able dream when set beside many of the ideologically and anecdotally driven social, economic, and foreign policy nightmares cooked up by public officials in the last half-century of big government. That truth is explored in the appropriately titled book, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon...: Getting Big Things Done in Government (though, it should be noted, the book doesn’t advocate getting big things done by big government).

Published last year, it was co-authored by former Reason Foundation privatization analysts John O’Leary and William D. Eggers. Together, the authors bring experienced insight about how good, bad, and really awful public policy ideas are generated, and then how those ideas should be tested in terms of design, adoption, implementation, achievement of intended results, and periodic review.

And after deconstructing health care "reform" via the O’Leary-Eggers model, you’d have to be moonstruck to believe that ObamaPelosiCare is headed for anything but a crash landing.

When the Supreme Court was trying to define pornography in order to judge certain anti-obscenity statutes, Justice Potter Stewart famously said, “I know it when I see it.” Therein lies the fatal flaw in trying to reform a sixth or seventh of the economy related to personal health. So-called health care reform fails at the very first stage posited by Eggers and O’Leary, ideation, because—like beauty and porn—reform is in the eyes of the beholder.

In the left-liberal imagination, health care reform means getting the greedy bad guys in private enterprise out of health care delivery and securing the “right” to health care with a “single payer” system. That euphemism, like most verbal obfuscations, is a tacit admission that there’s nothing remotely close to public consensus about changing health care delivery. In the free-market conservative imagination, reform would mean buying health care in the same way we purchase milk, whiskey, or a new Lexus, linking consideration of price to unlimited desire for stuff.

Of course, we already have both free-market and government-run health care, which is the other great obstacle to reform. We have the worst of both worlds, with government Medicare and Medicaid providing a big pile of increasingly deficit-financed dollars sitting aside another mountain of cash generated by mostly tax exempt, employer-provided insurance coverage. Both of these mounds of free moolah discourage any consideration of price while they encourage demand. Doctors, hospitals, and Big Pharma do their best to Hoover suck billions from both piles. And politicians facilitate the process by pandering to a 40-million-strong lobby of greedy geezers (“the folks who built this great nation”) and a free lunch-seeking middle class.

For the sake of argument, let us hallucinate that reform was a big idea whose time had come. Then let’s subject it to the second phase of the O’Leary-Eggers construct: design.

ObamaPelosiCare was most certainly not designed by Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi or any other leader. In fact, it wasn’t designed by anybody. It was a Rube Goldberg contraption of bells, whistles, and trap doors tossed together by K Street representatives of insurers and providers, colluding with their congressional clients. In a lobbying orgy, they mostly succeeded in getting bigger pieces of what promised to be a hugely expanding pie, bringing millions into the private (though massively subsidized by the government) insurance pool, with largely unfunded mandates against insurance exclusion for pre-existing conditions, and deficit-funded new “services” like even more free drugs for old people.

By the summer of 2009, with the president of the United States engaging in sloganeering and finger-pointing at the enemy du jour (insurers and Big Pharma, mostly), an angry citizenry emerged to flail away at the Big Idea. Yet there wasn’t even a clear definition of what reform actually meant, which left the specifics up to the imagination. This in turn produced much angry howling and congressional town hall meetings and helped stimulate the amorphous, citizen-directed tea party movement.

By year’s end, reform seemed doomed, until Commanders Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi rammed it through the wormhole of Stargate, as O'Leary and Eggers metaphorically label the adoption stage of their construct. The Stargate is the sci-fi gateway from our apparently real world to parallel universes with alternate forms of reality, popularized in the military science fiction movie and TV series of the same name. Without a trace of bipartisan consensus, and with the opposition from the center of the electorate bordering on fury, Pelosi and her allies used brute political force to hurl "reform" cosmic distances ahead into the regulation-writing hands of future bureaucrats, who will have to square liberal hallucinations with real-economy conditions sometime far, far away.

It isn’t often a landmark law makes it though the Stargate given the fortunate Madisonian obstacle course that thwarts change. But when paradigm shifting legislation has cleared those hurdles, there almost always has been significant consensus—or at least some modicum of bipartisan cooperation. Not so with ObamaPelosiCare.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see the pitfalls that will occur when bureaucrats attempt to enter the implementation stage of an undesigned, unpopular public policy creation. The results are likely to be even worse than the 1000 percent error made in projecting eventual Medicare costs when that program was adopted in the 1960s. Today, Medicare is eating tax dollars like some hungry Godzilla. In a few years, ObamaPelosiCare will make that monster look like a little lizard.

A Nanny State Assault on Internship Programs
The trouble with the Labor Department's one-size-fits-all agenda.

As if I didn’t have enough to worry about raising money for my non-profit college journalism education program in this lousy economy, the nanny state is now threatening my Politics & Journalism Semester with one-size-fits-all regulations written for the blue collar employment era.

Twenty-one years ago, I founded, and still run, a semester-in-Washington effort to teach real world politics (maybe an oxymoron) to college journalists who want to be political reporters. In spring and fall classes of 16 weeks each, I give my dozen students a twice-weekly seminar series featuring top political practitioners and political journalists. The rest of the week, they work in news bureaus as interns, usually unpaid. Few of them receive college credit, and many have already graduated. I guarantee each a $3000 living expense stipend if they aren’t paid, and don’t charge any tuition or fees. Generally, my “graduates” have nothing but praise for the experience, reflected in hundreds of them making personal donations to our 501(c)(3) non-profit, which has a budget of about $250,000 per year.

As an educational entrepreneur, what I have built is now threatened by an Obama Labor Department bureaucrat who wants to crack down on employers who don’t pay interns, using rule-making powers that date to a Supreme Court decision from the 1940s that is mostly applicable to blue collar apprenticeships, and hasn't been updated since.

As reported by The New York Times, M. Patricia Smith, now Labor’s top law enforcement official and previously New York’s labor commissioner, is using her left-liberal imagination to conjure up a 21st century version of 19th century sweat shops that exploit young slave labor.

One of my regular news bureaus pays its intern from my program several times the minimum wage. Several other participating organizations have paid the minimum wage. Most donate at least $3000 to my non-profit to fund the stipends. Some give as much as twice that amount, to help with other program costs. And a few contribute nothing at all, and I have to pick up the stipend expense from other donors. In all, about a fourth to a third of my quarter-million dollar budget comes from the news organizations that host my students and give them useful work to do.

In other words, there is no one size that fits the situation for each student. I have had to cobble together funding to allow lower and middle income students to take advantage of this opportunity, which they are not only willing, but eager, to do. If Smith gets her way, I will now have to shoehorn my program into her restrictive concept of the public good.

Ms. Smith: Why don’t you leave your hands off my program and hundreds like it, and let students decide whether or not they are being exploited? No employer or program like mine is forcing any 20-something to apply to, or accept, an internship.

How will the federal government’s apparatchik mind justify this additional assault on individual liberty and choice? Well, consider this paragraph from The Times story: “Kathyrn Edwards, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute [EPI] and co-author of a new study on internships, told of a female intern who brought a sexual harassment complaint that was dismissed because the intern was not an employee.” Yes, they’ll tout the biggest, scariest, most anti-feminist anecdotal horror story they can conjure up. EPI, by the way, is a labor union-funded think tank.

In a perfect world, it would be great if all interns were paid. But in a perfect world, M. Patricia Smith’s job wouldn’t exist. Her Wikipedia biography indicates she has spent her "entire career in public service." It comes as no surprise that she has never held a real-economy job. Please, Ms. Smith, go find something worthwhile to do with your taxpayer-paid time, and let me and my students and the benefactors who fund our program decide what is best for us.

Terry Michael is director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism. His other writing is collected at his “thoughts from a libertarian Democrat” web site, www.terrymichael.net.

Elective Wars.
Brought to you with a little help from
our friends in the MainStreamMedia.

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) let his anger get the best of him recently, when he exploded at America’s press for obsessing on a disgraced congressman while blood and treasure is spilled for a corrupt U.S. client government in Afghanistan. But Kennedy got it mostly right, despite his over-the-top angry tone.

Years ago, America’s now decimated newspapers and broadcast news divisions shut down all but a handful of foreign bureaus, leaving international coverage to flag-waving Cable TV anchors, embedding themselves with troops to market their “shows.” American journalism has scant resources--and even less will--to investigate foreign affairs.

With military boosterism substituting for intelligent foreign policy coverage, America’s mainstream media has made itself the propaganda organ for a phony bi-partisan, military and congressional industrial complex.

“I talk to myself because I like dealing with a better class of people.” Jackie Mason's Borscht Belt humor sums up the Washington echo chamber control of keys to the foreign policy temple, open to a few Democratic and Republican congressional and think tank “experts,” plus a cadre of neo-conservatives who populate cable babble punditry and op-ed pages read by official Washington and its press corpse (sic.)

It takes no imagination to see how the “liberal” Washington Post circumscribed discourse in the run-up to the Iraq War and drove a non-debate about Afghanistan. The appropriate aphorism is, “He who controls terms of a debate leverages its outcome.” Two names come to mind as controllers of the foreign policy “debate” inside the Washington establishment: the neoconservative editor of The Washington Post editorial page, Fred Hiatt, and his neo-con deputy editor, Jackson Diehl.

Conservatives used to deride the Post as "Pravda on the Potomac." Now they have two of their own driving the sheep-like herd of Beltway policy makers and pundits. Hiatt and Diehl have stacked the Post 's so-called “op-ed” page with a bevy of neo-con artists.

Chief among them, Charles Krauthammer, with neo-con bona fides reflected in his Wikipedia biography, noting his 2004 'Democratic Realism' speech, when he won the “Irving Kristol Award.” Krauthammer also writes for The Weekly Standard, edited by Bill Kristol, son of the late godfather of neoconservatism, for whom is named Krauthammer’s commendation--neo-con self congratulation.

Bill Kristol is a Republican political hack, pretending to be a public intellectual. Bounced from The New York Times op-ed page last year, Kristol received a consolation prize from Hiatt, a monthly Post column.

Also writing monthly for the Post ’s one-sided foreign policy opinion page is neo-con cheerleader Robert Kagan, of the poorly-named Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His most recent column: “On foreign policy, Obama and the GOP find room for agreement.” Yes, "bi-partisan" agreement, indeed--formulated by the militarist Republican Party’s tiny but influential neoconservative branch and the Neo-Con Lite Democratic war boosters, obfuscating relationship to the military-congressional complex by calling themselves “liberal internationalists.”

In that March 5 Post screed, Kagan wrote: “Democrats who look back fondly to the days of George H.W. Bush forget that they voted overwhelmingly against the Persian Gulf War...Today, by contrast, the administration and opposition largely agree on some of the most pressing issues. [F]oreign policy is one area where the government is working.” It has worked really well for the neo-cons, who in 2002 enlisted “liberal” prospective presidential candidates Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, who feared they wouldn’t look tough if they resisted the blank check for the elective war into which Bush-Cheney scared the country. It took "anti-war" Obama only months to be co-opted into the phony bi-partisanship of the military-congressional industry, which has insinuated itself as a jobs program into every state and district.

Briefly playing good “liberal” cop to Obama’s dithering bad cop in the kabuki theatrical Afghan policy review, Biden received a pat on the back for his good behavior from Kagan: “[W]e may be seeing reestablishment of the...alliance between liberal interventionist Democrats and hawkish internationalist Republicans that provided working majorities throughout much of the Cold War and...Clinton years. In the 1990s, Joseph Biden was a card-carrying member of this coalition...[and] Biden's willingness to take ownership of Iraq today may be a signal that the pendulum is swinging back again.”

Kagan also blessed President Woodrow Obama: “Nothing would do more to cement bipartisan support...than a return to the old American tradition of making the world safer for democracy.”

Rounding out Fred Hiatt’s stable of neo-cons is the self-promoting big government conservative and former Bush speech writer, Michael Gerson. Talk about rewarding incompetence!

Of course, Hiatt would point to his token op-ed liberals, Progressive Era throwback, E.J. Dionne, and self-described “democratic socialist” Harold Meyerson, both of whom write almost exclusively about domestic affairs.

The Post hasn’t been alone in neo-con stacking of the policy deck. David Brooks and Tom Friedman were New York Times war boosters. Friedman, darling of establishment moderate Democrats, has penned countless weasel words to square his early war-making drum beats with unfolding reality. Recently, he all but declared Iraq a success, arguing: “I only care about one thing: that the outcome in Iraq be...forward-looking enough that those who have actually paid the price--in lost loved ones or injured bodies....see Iraq evolve into something that will enable them to say that whatever the cost, it has given freedom and decent government to people who had none.”

Well, isn’t that special. Worthy of neo-con accolades.
______________________________
Director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, Terry Michael tries to teach college journalists not to mimic their baby boomer MSM bosses. His “thoughts from a libertarian Democrat” are at www.terrymichael.net.

Writer's Note to Readers: This argument in no way disparages some excellent reporting in the news pages of both the Post and the Times. But the identity of a great newspaper is, in significant measure, a function of its editorial and op-ed pages.

"We've got a government in a box, ready to roll in," Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, told The New York Times last week about the largest military offensive since an American-led coalition invaded the country in 2001. Six thousand U.S. Marines, plus British and Afghan forces, descended on a Taliban stronghold in Marja, in the southern Helmand Province, a mission described as a "test" of America’s new counter-insurgency strategy designed to win over civilians and establish order, all while chasing away or killing Taliban fighters.

Government in a box? What a foolish thing to say, what hubris. Ironically, it’s probably more truth than the general wanted to reveal about American manipulation of the Afghan "government." But what should we expect when we put a military commander—underscore the word commander—in charge of a nation-building folly. Apparently, the general thinks you can bring in a government as easily as he requisitions more meals-ready-to-eat for his troops.

Of course, we’ll get a result as tasty as those MREs. The outcome will be what any intelligent observer with a sense of history will understand--a client government in name only, in a failed non-state, rife with corruption. If that sounds familiar, you probably know what we tried unsuccessfully with an earlier American client regime, in “South” Vietnam in the early 1960s. And it’s what another general touted by the Military Industrial Complex, David Petraeus, did with his rent-a-bad-guy “counterinsurgency strategy” in Iraq, heralded by neocon loonies as the “victory” for their elective war.

The Times story that quoted McChrystal’s nonsense appeared under the headline, “Afghan Offensive Is New War Model.” “Marja is intended to serve as a prototype for a new type of military operation,” the Times correspondent wrote, “based on the counterinsurgency thinking propounded by General McChrystal in the prelude to President Obama’s decision in December to increase the number of American troops here to nearly 100,000. More than at any time since 2001, American and NATO soldiers will focus less on killing Taliban insurgents than on sparing Afghan civilians and building an Afghan state.”

Well, that’s an improvement over President Lyndon Johnson’s napalming distant villages in Vietnam in order to save them. But military nation-building is still a fool’s errand, particularly when there is no indigenous infrastructure to build a nation, let alone build a liberal democracy.

Dr. Nadir Atash, an Afghan native who has mostly lived in the United States since he came here as a student in the 1960s, recently made that point to me as we both sat in the guest waiting room of RT-TV. I was there to assess the first-year failures of President Barack Obama, and he followed me to discuss how McChrystal’s Afghan adventure was doomed to fail.

“This (the assault on Marja) is not a break through,” said Atash, who recently authored a memoir, Turbulence: The Tumultuous Journey of One Man's Quest for Change in Afghanistan. After a career in teaching and building a successful business, Atash went back to Afghanistan after the U.S. removed the Taliban from Kabul in 2001, hoping to help restore a nation assaulted by the Soviets in the 1980s and terrified by the Taliban in the 1990s.

Military efforts won’t produce anything lasting, Atash told RT TV. We first “need to focus on [instilling] rule of law, [ending] corruption and creating jobs.”

He had some real-life experience battling corruption in the Karzai government when he returned to Afghanistan in 2001. He was asked to head the state-owned airlines, but finally gave up and returned to the U.S. in 2006 after failing to make headway for years.

For those who advocate following Petraeus’ Iraq model of trying to purchase peace, Atash had this to say in his interview: “We cannot buy peace. Maybe time. But it is sure to backfire. The insurgents are fighting for ideology, not money.” The rent-a-Taliban theory, he noted, “was cooked up by the Afghan government” and its American and NATO “allies”, who, he said, “only see dollar signs.”

The Obama-McChrystal military “solution” for Afghanistan, which fell on Presidents Day weekend, should remind the historically-informed of America’s own efforts to build a nation-state in the New World. Our founders created an indigenous movement for liberal democracy. They were nobody’s clients.

If Barack Obama hopes to join George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of wise American leaders, our very brainy president needs to stop outsmarting himself. He needs to study—and understand—the lessons of our failed attempts to impose liberal democracy where no indigenous liberal or democratic movements existed. Gen. McChrystal is no Gen. Washington. And thus far, Barack Obama doesn’t resemble the founder of his political party, Thomas Jefferson.

Terry Michael is executive director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism. His "thoughts from a libertarian Democrat" are collected at his website www.terrymichael.net.

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

On first year failures
of President Barack Obama....
(from RT TV, February 12, 2010)

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

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

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

Climate and AIDS Denialists,
and Politicized Junk Science.

by Terry Michael | January 3, 2010

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

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

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.

The Case
for MichelleCare

Why Obama should let his wife
handle health care reform

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.

Swine Flu Fantasies
A testing epidemic, spread by media ignorance

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.
_____________________

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

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........

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........

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......

Don't Eat the Rich, President Obama

Terry Michael | July 31 , 2010 WASHINGTON -- Keeping the Bush tax cuts from expiring at the end of the year would be both good policy and good politics for President Barack Obama.

In Defense of Libertarianism An open letter to left-liberals

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

Lies of the Ethics Industry How the champions of "good government" suppress speech and sow cynicism

Down the Health Care Wormhole

How ObamaPelosiCare will saddle future generations with a public policy disaster

A Nanny State Assault on Internship Programs The trouble with the Labor Department's one-size-fits-all agenda.

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

The Case for MichelleCare

Why Obama should let his wife handle health care reform

Swine Flu Fantasies A testing epidemic, spread by media ignorance

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

Don't Eat the Rich,
President Obama

Terry Michael | July 31 , 2010

WASHINGTON -- Keeping the Bush tax cuts from expiring at the end of the year would be both good policy and good politics for President Barack Obama.

In Defense of Libertarianism
An open letter to left-liberals

Lies of the Ethics Industry
How the champions of "good government" suppress speech
and sow cynicism

How ObamaPelosiCare
will saddle future generations
with a public policy disaster

A Nanny State Assault on Internship Programs
The trouble with the Labor Department's one-size-fits-all agenda.

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

The Case
for MichelleCare

Why Obama should let his wife
handle health care reform

Swine Flu Fantasies
A testing epidemic, spread by media ignorance

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