To be clear: I have serious doubts about the efficacy of tort reform in driving down medical costs, and anyone who has examined Tom Baker's seminal research on medical malpractice will probably share them as well. That said, it is politics and not policy that drives what goes into the health insurance reform bill, as Shirley quotes Howard Dean as admitting: "The reason why tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everybody else they were taking on, and that is the plain and simple truth. Now, that’s the truth.” Actually, that's not the truth. It's not like the people drafting the bill wanted to take on tort reform but were somehow afraid of a confrontation with trial lawyers. Not hardly. Here's what progressive strategist George Lakoff has always maintained about tort reform and trial lawyers : Another multifaceted conservative strategic initiative is "tort reform," w...

... despite the fact that everyone knows it would dramatically reduce medical costs. Let's see if you can connect the dots. Dot A: progressive/liberal-philosopher guru (and occasionaly Obama campaign consultant) George Lakoff : Another multifaceted conservative strategic initiative is "tort reform," which has been made to sound like it is just about capping large damage awards and lawyers' fees. It is really a destruction of the civil justice system's capacity to deter corporations from acts that harm the public, since it is the lawyers' fees that permit the system to function. Moreover, if successful, it will also dry up one of the major sources of campaign finance for progressive candidates, which comes from trial lawyers. Dot B: presidential campaign contributions 2008 from Lawyers and Lobbyists : Lawyers & Lobbyists Obama, Barack $43,440,058 Clinton, Hillary $16,941,277 McCain, John $11,290,948 Dot C: President Obama does not want tort reform as par...

Europe, as Progressives never tire of explaining to us when speaking of health care, or education, or snails for dinner, is the gold standard of civilization. If it works in Europe, and we're not doing it, it's another reason that all values but Progressive values (governmental force in the service of an ideology) are bankrupt. So, in the interest of furthering America's understanding of the European Statist Utopia, here's a post from Nanny Knows Best about the latest British good government idea : taking fat kids away from their parents: David Rogers, the LGA [Local Government Association] spokesman on public health, said: "Councils are increasingly having to consider taking action where parents are putting children's health in real danger. Councils would step in to deal with an undernourished or neglected child, so should a case with a morbidly obese child be different? If parents place children at risk through bad diet and lack of exercise is it right for ...

You'll recall that back during primary season, Senator Barack Obama got a nasty surprise when audio from a closed fund-raiser surfaced, with his voice explaining the attitudes of small town Ameircans in these words: They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. As the UK's Guardian noted, Obama initially reacted to the resultant media firestorm over the weekend by trying to stand by his comments. But he later apologised, saying: "If I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that." Now, in a stunning piece of investigative journalism and editorial analysis, Jason Scott of Delawareliberal explains that Senator Obama meant exactly what he said , and that it is the opinion of many liberal Democrat columnists and bloggers that many (if not most) non-liberal middle-class American citizens are feared to be ho...

Sometimes when I read Nanny Knows Best , I can't decide whether I'm reading the sequel to George Orwell's 1984 or visiting the future of America if our Progressive Brethren and Cistern take power. For example: now it is being seriously bruited about that the British Government should fine restaurants for serving out-of-season (read, "imported") produce. The source of this ingenious idea (and the individual who is lobbying Prime Minister Harold Brown for its adoption) is none other than Chef Gordon Ramsay of Hell's Kitchen . The Orwellian logic behind this idea is that it would cause restaurants to rely on local produce, which would have a smaller carbon footprint because it would not have to be transported as far as, say, bananas from Guatemala. Unfortunately, this idea is already percolating just beneath the surface right here in the USA, where--for example--Progressive guru George Lakoff intends his healthy foods "strategic initiative" to emplo...

I'm not an Ayn Rand Libertarian Objectivist or anything, but I do think she was onto something about the virtues of selfishness--although not in quite the way she would have meant it. This comes to me after several weeks in the Delaware blogosphere in which (a) people who don't want opt-out or mandatory organ donation have been castigated as selfish for not wanting to share their organs after death, even if they have profound religious or philosophical doubts about the process.... (b) people who oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds have been accused of not giving a rat's ass essentially about living, breathing children.... (c) people who object to the tax increases (and potential loss of choices for them) involved in various schemes for universal health care have been portrayed as unfeeling toward the millions of uninsured.... Orwellian Progressive guru George Lakoff repeatedly makes the case for progressive taxation in terms of the idea that wealthier America...

About two weeks ago I got into it with Jason on Delawareliberal over (of all things) opera . What's interesting is the comment Jason made in critiquing one of my argument: The logical fallacy that Libertarians like most, above all logical fallacies is that slippery slope argument. I pointed out in rebuttal: Not all slippery slope arguments are invalid–you guys use them all the time about Republicans when it suits your purposes, so get real. And Dana Garrett agreed with me: “Not all slippery slope arguments are invalid” Now there is a truth few know. Any chance you could teach it to Al Mascitti? If you tell him the predictable consequence of some action (that he likes, of course), his knee twitches and out comes the “You are committing the slippery slope fallacy.” Here’s the scoop on it folks: “If A happens, then by a gradual series of small steps through B, C,…, X, Y, eventually Z will happen, too. Z should not happen. Therefore, A should not happen, either.” The whole bit disappea...

Sometimes people say the damnedest things. Here's an admission I never expected to read from "Progressive" guru George Lakoff in his Thinking Points, A Progressive's Handbook [for] Communicating Our American Values and Vision (pp. 102-103): Another multifaceted conservative strategic initiative is "tort reform," which has been made to sound like it is just about capping large damage awards and lawyers' fees. It is really a destruction of the civil justice system's capacity to deter corporations from acts that harm the public, since it is the lawyers' fees that permit the system to function. Moreover, if successful, it will also dry up one of the major sources of campaign finance for progressive candidates, which comes from trial lawyers. You can handle the implications for yourself.

One of the problems with Libertarians is that, frankly, the theoretical and strategic writing of self-styled Progressives is so difficult to read that we don't do much of it. This is something we have to get over, especially as the Progressives seemed to be in full swing of pulling off the same trick that Ronald Reagan did for conservatives in the 1980s: reframing the public political discourse in their favor. Reagan, followed by talk radio, actually managed to make the term "liberal" one that even politicians who were avowedly liberal needed to avoid if they wanted to get elected or re-elected. Liberal as a "brand" still has not been successfully rehabilitated. On the other hand, Dubya--with a lot of help from his neo-con friends and his opponents--has managed to self-destruct the brand value of "Conservatism" that Reagan created, so much so that today Rush Limbaugh announced , "I can see possibly not supporting the Republican nominee this elec...