Articles by Glen Tschirgi

(H/T Drudge Report)

This post will require a bit of set up, so a little patience, please.

Historically, political polling originated as a means for the public to gauge which candidate was winning at various stages of a political race.   These early polls were crude efforts at asking gathered crowds which candidate they preferred with predictably poor results.   The consensus seems to be that modern polling started with George Gallup in 1935 as an effort to apply a more scientific approach with random sampling involving personal interviews with voters in 300 cities.   Because of the cost involved, newspapers and politicians did not conduct their own polls but relied upon the polling companies to inform them of public opinion.  In other words, the purpose of the polls, according to Gallup himself, was to help politicians figure out what the public wanted in order to be more responsive representatives.

This approach continued until a major shift to the use of telephone polling in the 1950’s.    The drastically reduced cost of telephone polling (which has its own inherent bias problems) enabled newspapers and politicians to conduct their own polls.   It did not take long until the purpose of polling in the hands of the media and politicians evolved into an attempt to influence the attitudes and opinions of the public.

With this background in mind, consider the explosion of political opinion polls.   The list of polling organizations– private, public and partisan– is long indeed.  With this plethora of polling groups there is a similar variety of methods used to garner opinion:  general adult population, registered voters, likely voters, sampling by partisan affiliation, automated polling, land-line polling, cell phone polling, internet polling, personal survey, and so on.   The decision by the pollster on which methods to employ, the framing of the questions, the order of the questions, the choices in the demographics and sampling size… all of these and more factors can greatly affect the results of any given poll.

So last week we had a poll released by NBC/Wall Street Journal that purported to show President Obama with a six percentage point lead over Romney in the general election.   Shortly after the poll was released, several bloggers did the necessary work to examine the choices that the pollsters made and how that affected the results.    Here is just one of those take-downs from Hot Air:

The 2008 national exit poll sample, taken when Hopenchange fever was at its zenith, was 39D/32R/29I, or D+7. This one, after three years of Obamanomics dreck, is somehow D+11 if you include leaners and D+12(!) if you don’t. Anyone feel like taking these results seriously?

In other words, the pollsters decided to radically over-sample Democrats in their poll for no, apparent good reason.   By comparison, the national party registration for Democrats and Republicans is now about even or slightly favoring Republicans.   Add to that the recent Gallup poll that found a huge lead for Republicans in voter enthusiasm which would drive proportionately more Republicans to the polls and you can only conclude that this is a poll designed to influence public opinion rather than report it.

And this is not the only, such skewed poll.   If you look at most of the polling being featured at Real Clear Politics (a purportedly neutral website for conservative and liberal news/opinion), most of the polls feature a similar, biased party sample, or sample only the general population or registered voters rather than likely voters.   All of these polls show Obama and Romney either at a dead heat or Obama with a small lead.

Add to this a report in The Weekly Standard from last week that the Obama Campaign spent over $2.6 million on polling just in the month of June (compared with just $460,000 in April) and a pattern seems to be emerging:  Obama is losing the voters and losing them badly.   Unless he takes some dramatic action or events intercede to change public opinion, he is headed toward a sizable, electoral collapse.

Despite everything that most pundits– conservative and liberal— are telling you, I believe that Obama is headed for a resounding defeat.   The spending by Obama’s campaign on polling is the result of panic.   They cannot believe the numbers they are getting and they are polling and re-polling for any and every conceivable angle that would turn opinion in favor of El Presidente.   Nothing is working, so far.

The hyper-skewed polling by NBC/WSJ is also telling.   Clearly this poll was designed to push public opinion in the direction of Obama by giving the impression that he is pulling away from Romney in voter preference.  This is not surprising in itself.  What is shocking is that NBC/WSJ had to resort to a sampling that favors Democrats by 12 points over Republicans in order to get the numbers that they wanted.

Contrast this with the daily tracking polls of likely voters from Rasmussen Reports that had Romney ahead of Obama by 5% last week.   For an incumbent like Obama to be trailing the challenger at this point in the election– before the public has focused on the race and before the convention and debates– is an indication that Obama is getting all the support he is going to get.   He is already maxed out and there is nowhere to go but down.

Obama’s only hope right now is to conceal his tenuous position from the public in order to avoid the “Bandwagon Effect.”     This is a well-known phenomenon in polling in which voters who have not yet decided or are not strongly committed to either candidate are strongly influenced by polling which indicates that one of the candidates is pulling far ahead in the race.   These voters want to be part of the winning team, so to speak, and throw their vote in with the majority.   So long as Obama and his allies in the Statist Media can manipulate the polling to maintain the appearance of viability, they can hope for a Romney implosion or some, other intervening event to save the election.

Along, then, comes an article in The Hill that attempts to do this very thing.   Using the ridiculously skewed demographics, the article makes use of the NBC/WSJ poll as follows:

Despite voters’ worries about the economy, they continue to give Obama the edge on personal popularity. In a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, Obama led Romney by 20 points on the question of whether voters liked each of them on an individual level. Two thirds said they liked Obama, whether or not they disagreed with his policies, while just 47 percent said the same about Romney.

Just 35 percent of voters held a positive opinion of Romney overall, with 40 percent negative, while 49 percent had positive opinions of Obama and 43 percent felt negatively about him. Both candidates saw slight upticks in their negative numbers since the ad onslaught began.

The article also mentions the Real Clear Politics average of polls for the idea that the candidates are locked in a statistical tie, a tie that is only made possible by the inclusion of polls that use unreliable or skewed data to give Obama a lead.

But even these partisan polls can only mask the reality for a limited amount of time.    If Obama’s numbers continue to slide and it becomes too obvious to skew the numbers in order to make the race look competitive, expect to see even Leftist polling groups grudgingly showing a Romney lead.   My personal prediction is that by September, absent an unlikely implosion by Romney, we will start to see a snow-balling of public opinion where the public has finally tuned in to the race and begins breaking for Romney.   Once that starts to happen the Bandwagon Effect will take hold and the bottom for Obama will fall out with only the hard-core, 35% of Democrats voting for him.  At that point we could be looking at a rout similar to the 2010 Elections, thus ending our national experiment in Mass Insanity.

(H/T Instapundit)

From time to time, The Captain’s Journal has posted items dealing with the shocking vulnerability of U.S. infrastructure to attack by hostile forces, as for example here.

And normally the hypothetical involves sleeper cells from Hezbollah or Iran or perhaps other hostile groups or nations.

These scenarios are scary enough on their own but it is human nature to discount the likelihood of such attacks occurring in order to avoid facing the grim possibilities.

Then we have something like this happen:

Three peace activists — including an 82-year-old nun — infiltrated the highest-security area of the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in a predawn protest Saturday, reportedly evading guards and cutting through three or four fences in order to spray-paint messages, hang banners and pour human blood at the site where warhead parts are manufactured and the nation’s stockpile of bomb-grade uranium is stored.

It was an unprecedented security breach at the Oak Ridge plant, which enriched the uranium for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II and continues to be a mainstay of the U.S. nuclear defense program.

The protesters, who called themselves, “Transform Now Plowshares,” were identified as Michael R. Walli, 63, Washington, D.C.; Sister Megan Rice, 82, of Nevada; and Greg Boertje-Obed, 57, of Duluth, Minn. They were apprehended inside the plant around 4:30 a.m. Saturday, interviewed later by members of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General, and then transported to the Blount County Correction Center, where they reportedly face conditional federal charges of vandalism and trespassing.

Supporters of the activist group said an arraignment is set for Monday.

Steven Wyatt, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration at Y-12, declined to discuss details of the early-morning events at the Oak Ridge, but he acknowledged that the unapproved entry into the plant’s inner sanctum — a high-security zone known simply as the Protected Area — was unprecedented.
(emphasis added)

And it gets better.   The break in occurred just shortly after the nuclear facility announced plans to cut back on the number of security personnel guarding this critical facility.

Stock up folks, it’s going to be a long, nuclear winter.

(H/T Instapundit)

Nothing original to add here, but this posting I picked up from Instapundit is well worth passing along, particularly in light of the typical, knee-jerk, Statist reactions to the horrific Aurora CO shootings:

Actually, if the Australian Bureau of Criminology can be believed, Americans would be insane to concern themselves with what non-Americans think about American gun rights.

In 2002 — five years after enacting its gun ban — the Australian Bureau of Criminology acknowledged there is no correlation between gun control and the use of firearms in violent crime. In fact, the percent of murders committed with a firearm was the highest it had ever been in 2006 (16.3 percent), says the D.C. Examiner.

Even Australia’s Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research acknowledges that the gun ban had no significant impact on the amount of gun-involved crime:

In 2006, assault rose 49.2 percent and robbery 6.2 percent.
Sexual assault — Australia’s equivalent term for rape — increased 29.9 percent.
Overall, Australia’s violent crime rate rose 42.2 percent.

Moreover, Australia and the United States — where no gun-ban exists — both experienced similar decreases in murder rates:

Between 1995 and 2007, Australia saw a 31.9 percent decrease; without a gun ban, America’s rate dropped 31.7 percent.
During the same time period, all other violent crime indices increased in Australia: assault rose 49.2 percent and robbery 6.2 percent.
Sexual assault — Australia’s equivalent term for rape — increased 29.9 percent.
Overall, Australia’s violent crime rate rose 42.2 percent.
At the same time, U.S. violent crime decreased 31.8 percent: rape dropped 19.2 percent; robbery decreased 33.2 percent; aggravated assault dropped 32.2 percent.
Australian women are now raped over three times as often as American women.

So, if the USA follows Australia’s lead in banning guns, it should expect a 42 percent increase in violent crime, a higher percentage of murders committed with a gun, and three times more rape. One wonders if Freddy even bothered to look up the relative crime statistics.

The International Crime Victims Survey, conducted by Leiden University in Holland, found that England and Wales ranked second overall in violent crime among industrialized nations. Twenty-six percent of English citizens — roughly one-quarter of the population — have been victimized by violent crime. Australia led the list with more than 30 percent of its population victimized. The United States didn’t even make the “top 10” list of industrialized nations whose citizens were victimized by crime.

Now all this statistical and factual information isn’t going to mean anything to Lefty’s and Statists, but it is always good to know that reality backs up the conservative position on gun rights and the 2nd Amendment. 

My apologies to all those Republican stalwarts out there, but I stopped identifying with the G.O.P. some time ago and now count myself primarily as a Conservative.

And when I see posts like this on Hot Air, I feel amply justified.

A couple key bits:

The congressional Super Committee is long gone, but the consequences of its failure will be felt by millions of Americans unless Congress addresses mandatory cuts that take effect Jan. 2, 2013.

A new study released today by economist Stephen S. Fuller of George Mason University and the Aerospace Industries Association estimates that 2.14 million U.S. jobs will disappear as a result of the Budget Control Act’s sequestration mandate. That would push the nation’s unemployment rate above 9 percent.

Automatic cuts totaling $1.2 trillion will hit the defense industry particularly hard. Defense-related jobs makes up about half of the lost jobs, according to the study. The report estimates losses for other sectors of the economy as well: 48,059 jobs in healthcare, 98,953 in construction, 473,250 in manufacturing. California, Virginia and Texas will fare worst.

And just who was it that agreed to the genius idea of a “Super Committee” and the “draconian” sequestration in the (all too predictable) event that the Super Committee failed to reach agreement?  Yep, those guys in leadership like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.  Someone please remind me just why it was so clever of Boehner and McConnell to agree to this deal with the Democrats?  A deal that these very same people are now scrambling to escape and avoid like kids caught stealing from a candy store.   “Yeah, we did it, but we didn’t think we’d actually get punished for it or anything!”

And if the whole sequestration idea wasn’t bad enough, the particulars of the deal are just, downright horrible:

Cuts to America’s military are particularly alarming. The across-the-board cut of more than $500 billion over the next decade comes in addition to the $487 billion in cuts already proposed by President Obama for the Department of Defense. The Budget Control Act hits the military hardest.

Chart produced by The Heritage Foundation based upon figures from the Congressional Budget Office.

These nitwit Republicans agreed to drastic spending cuts that barely touch the Entitlement Monster that is breaking the U.S. Treasury.

And why did the G.O.P. leadership do this?  Because they were afraid of forcing real and immediate spending cuts in 2011 as part of the debt ceiling “crisis.”

Anyone for a Conservative Party?   I don’t think America can afford the Stupid Party much longer.

This lengthy and well-written piece by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker is must reading.

Filkins attempts to give an overall assessment of Afghanistan’s future as American forces shrink and the country must increasingly rely upon the Afghan National Army for its security.   By all means, read the entire article, but the gist of Filkins’ assessment can be succinctly summarized as, “bleak.”

Filkins explores the question of whether Afghanistan is destined to return to a state of civil war as American combat troops leave.   While he makes no firm conclusions, the answer is an inescapable “yes.”   While American policymakers and military leaders boldly talk up the prospects for turning over security responsibilities to the ANA while hoping to garner a power-sharing deal with the Taliban, it is clear from the article that a debacle of enormous proportions is looming in 2014 (if not before) when American force levels are expected to drop to just fifteen thousand from an expected sixty-eight thousand after the September 2012 draw-down.

Some Western and Afghan experts say that fifteen thousand American troops would not be enough to secure Afghanistan, particularly when it comes to the use of airpower. The Afghan Air Force is far less advanced than the Soviet-trained force was at a similar moment. American officers told me that air strikes—bombs and rockets—are usually restricted to units in which Americans direct the fire. A force of fifteen thousand Americans would probably not be large enough to spread trainers and air controllers throughout the Afghan Army (and not throughout the police, who are at tiny checkpoints scattered around the country). “If they go below thirty thousand, it will be difficult for them to do any serious mentoring, and without the mentors they won’t call in airpower,” Giustozzi, the Italian researcher, said.

American officers have another concern. Currently, Afghan units are stationed where the Americans are, in hundreds of small bases, mostly in populated areas. Some American officers say that the Afghans will find it difficult to disperse themselves as fully, because of problems with supplies and communications. Once the coalition forces leave, those officers say, the Afghans are likely to consolidate their units on bigger and fewer bases. If that happens, the Afghans could end up ceding large tracts of territory to the Taliban—much as the Afghan Army did after 1989.

Filkins interviews several Afghans in and outside of the Afghan government who all candidly admit that each of the rival factions that fought each other prior to the 2001 American invasion are actively preparing for the resumption of civil war when U.S. forces leave.

Afghan and American officials believe that some precipitating event could prompt the country’s ethnic minorities to fall back into their enclaves in northern Afghanistan, taking large chunks of the Army and police forces with them. Another concern is that Jamiat officers within the Afghan Army could indeed try to mount a coup against Karzai or a successor. The most likely trigger for a coup, these officials say, would be a peace deal with the Taliban that would bring them into the government or even into the Army itself. Tajiks and other ethnic minorities would find this intolerable. Another scenario would most likely unfold after 2014: a series of dramatic military advances by the Taliban after the American pullout.

“A coup is one of the big possibilities—a coup or civil war,” a former American official who was based in Kabul and has since left the country told me. “It’s clear that the main factions assume that civil war is a possibility and they are hedging their bets. And, of course, once people assume that civil war is going to happen then that can sometimes be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

One Afghan, Abdul Nasir, made this point quite clear:

These days, Nasir said, the nineties are very much on his mind. The announced departure of American and NATO combat troops has convinced him and his friends that the civil war, suspended but never settled, is on the verge of resuming. “Everyone is preparing,” he said. “It will be bloodier and longer than before, street to street. This time, everyone has more guns, more to lose. It will be the same groups, the same commanders.” Hezb-e-Wahdat and Jamiat-e-Islami and Hezb-e-Islami and Junbish—all now political parties—are rearming. The Afghan Army is unlikely to be able to restore order as it did in the time of Najibullah. “It’s a joke,” Nasir said. “I’ve worked with the Afghan Army. They get tired making TV commercials!”

A few weeks ago, Nasir returned to Deh Afghanan. The Taliban were back, practically ignored by U.S. forces in the area. “The Americans have a big base there, and they never go out,” he said. “And, only four kilometres from the front gate, the Taliban control everything. You can see them carrying their weapons.” On a drive to Jalrez, a town a little farther west, Nasir was stopped at ten Taliban checkpoints. “How can you expect me to be optimistic?” he said. “Everyone is getting ready for 2014.”

In the process of his interviews, however, Filkins did discover one, unsettling truth:  the most effective force against the Taliban so far have been local militias.

The most effective weapon against the Taliban were people like Mohammad Omar, the commander of a local militia. In late 2008, Omar was asked by agents with the National Directorate of Security (N.D.S.)—the Afghan intelligence agency––if he could raise a militia. It wasn’t hard to do. Omar’s brother Habibullah had been a lieutenant for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, one of the leading commanders in the war against the Soviets, and a warlord who helped destroy Kabul during the civil war. The Taliban had killed Habibullah in 1999, and Omar jumped at the opportunity to take revenge. Using his brother’s old contacts, he raised an army of volunteers from around Khanabad and began attacking the Taliban. He set up forces in a string of villages on the southern bank of the Khanabad River. “We pushed all the Taliban out,” he told me.

The Taliban are gone from Khanabad now, but Omar and his fighters are not. Indeed, Omar’s militia appears to be the only effective government on the south side of the Khanabad River. “Without Omar, we could never defeat the Taliban,” a local police chief, Mohammad Sharif, said. “I’ve got two hundred men. Omar has four thousand.”

The N.D.S. and American Special Forces have set up armed neighborhood groups like Omar’s across Afghanistan. Some groups, like the Afghanistan Local Police, have official supervision, but others, like Omar’s, are on their own. Omar insists that he and his men are not being paid by either the Americans or the Afghan government, but he appears to enjoy the support of both. His stack of business cards includes that of Brigadier General Edward Reeder, an American in charge of Special Forces in Afghanistan in 2009, when the Americans began counterattacking in Kunduz.

This is a strange twist in U.S. strategy.  While the State Department, the White House and U.S. commanders in Afghanistan all blather about the progress of the ANA and the expected success of the transition to Afghan security forces, the American Special Forces seem to be busy setting up militias all over Afghanistan, perhaps in the grim realization that these militias are the only native force capable of actually eradicating the Taliban.

This would be welcome news indeed, if it is true, because it finally faces the truth that Afghanistan today simply cannot function as a modern, centrally governed nation state.   This is not to say that it never has in the past (clearly it has) nor that it will never function as one in the future, but only that the combination of religious fanaticism, the interference of Pakistan (and Iran to some extent), the ethnic divisions and the drug trade militate in favor of local control.    And this seems to be the main trade-off where militias effectively keep out the Taliban but bring their own set of problems:

Kunduz Province is divided into fiefdoms, each controlled by one of the new militias. In Khanabad district alone, I counted nine armed groups. Omar’s is among the biggest; another is led by a rival, on the northern bank of the Khanabad River, named Mir Alam. Like Omar, Alam was a commander during the civil war. He was a member of Jamiat-e-Islami. Alam and his men, who declined to speak to me, are said to be paid by the Afghan government.

As in the nineties, the militias around Kunduz have begun fighting each other for territory. They also steal, tax, and rape. “I have to give ten per cent of my crops to Mir Alam’s men,” a villager named Mohammad Omar said. (He is unrelated to the militia commander.) “That is the only tax I pay. The government is not strong enough to collect taxes.” When I accompanied the warlord Omar to Jannat Bagh, one of the villages under his control, his fighters told me that Mir Alam’s men were just a few hundred yards away. “We fight them whenever they try to move into our village,” one of Omar’s men said.

U.S. policy in Afghanistan, then, must take a hard look  at our national interests.   The primary, national interest for the United States in Afghanistan is to ensure that international terrorists do not find safe havens from which to plot and launch attacks against U.S. interests.   If militias will ensure that their territory will not be used for Islamist terror activities, that is enough.   We may be able to exercise some leverage over warlords and militias by doling out more arms and money to those who refrain from humanitarian abuses, but it is not in our national interest to force-feed an entire nation on Western morality and values as we have done for the last 11 years.

In fact, some Afghans appear to be leaning in the direction of a decentralized approach:

One political change that might prevent civil war, some opposition leaders say, would be the imposition of a federal system in which power would devolve to the provinces. Such a move could essentially cede dominion to the Taliban in the south and the east but protect the rest of the country. In 2004, when the new Afghan constitution was ratified, under American supervision, the central government, in Kabul, was given extraordinary powers, including the right to appoint local officials. The hope then was that a strong central government would unite the country.

If a federal system were to be adopted, some Afghan leaders say, it might matter less to the Tajiks and other minorities if the Taliban were allowed to govern Pashtun provinces in the south and the east. (How it would matter to the Pashtuns, and particularly to Pashtun women, isn’t much discussed.) As it is, many of the most prominent leaders of Afghanistan’s minority groups appear to be preparing for civil war.

While I disagree that the U.S. needs to “cede dominion to the Taliban in the south and the east” (there is no reason to think that Pashtun militias could not be set up in these regions as in other areas), the fact remains that Afghanistan is headed for division one way or another.  Current U.S. policy is wishful thinking and a criminal waste of American lives and treasure.

As a parting thought, it is even possible that by empowering local militias and tribes in this fashion, the U.S. may be able to deal a severe if not fatal blow to the Islamists across the border in Pakistan.  It is axiomatic that insurgencies work in both directions.   If Pakistan can support, for example, the Haqqanis in infiltrating into Afghanistan, so, too, can the U.S. support Pashtun militias on the Afghan side of the border to infiltrate and take away territory from Islamists in the FATA.   This provides U.S. policymakers with a unique lever in the tense relations with Pakistan.   This approach also allows a dramatically smaller footprint for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, enough one would expect, to deprive Pakistan of its logistical choke-hold.

If there is a new Administration in 2013, a new approach in Afghanistan is at least possible.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Isn’t this just swell?  According to this article in Technology Review, there are two, new approaches being tested for making coal-burning power plants cleaner and more efficient:

A pair of new technologies could reduce the cost of capturing carbon dioxide from coal plants and help utilities comply with existing and proposed environmental regulations, including requirements to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Both involve burning coal in the presence of pure oxygen rather than air, which is mostly nitrogen. Major companies including Toshiba, Shaw, and Itea have announced plans to build demonstration plants for the technologies in coming months.

The basic idea of burning fossil fuels in pure oxygen isn’t new. The drawback is that it’s more expensive than conventional coal plant technology, because it requires additional equipment to separate oxygen and nitrogen. The new technologies attempt to offset at least some of this cost by improving efficiency and reducing capital costs in other areas of a coal plant. Among other things, they simplify the after-treatment required to meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

The article doesn’t state how much money is being sent down the rat hole to develop these new technologies, but, regardless of the amount involved, this is such a colossal waste that I don’t know whether to laugh or punch the fake rhino head on the wall.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is still on a holy crusade against “global warming” by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, despite the fact that the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory has been repeatedly exposed as a sham.   As a result, precious time, money, talent and resources are being directed towards solving a “problem” that doesn’t exist.

The Left wants to talk about stimulating the economy, but what about the stimulative effect of lowering the cost of electricity to businesses and consumers?  Imagine the effect of simply eliminating the EPA’s carbon dioxide emission standards on the generation of electricity?  This is the sort of thing that should be high on Romney’s to-do list in January 2013.

Hat Tip Instapundit

This opinion piece by Keith Hennessey in The Wall Street Journal is full of good sense and seemingly sound strategy:

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled ObamaCare’s individual mandate constitutional, the direction of American health policy is in the hands of voters. So how do we get from here to “repeal and replace”?

Step one is electing Mitt Romney as president, along with Republican House and Senate majorities. Without a Republican sweep, the law will remain in place.

But a President Romney does not need 60 Republican senators to repeal core elements of ObamaCare. Democrats lost their 60th senate vote in early 2010 after Scott Brown took Edward Kennedy’s seat. To bypass a Senate GOP filibuster and enact portions of ObamaCare, they used a special legislative procedure called reconciliation.

Hennessey goes on to outline how reconciliation can be used in the Senate to avoid the filibuster.   More importantly, he goes on to advocate for implementing changes to the way in which Americans purchase health care, moving from an employer-sponsored plan to a marketplace where consumers purchase and own their own policies like car insurance.

Reform should start by replacing the tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance with a flat tax deduction or credit. This should be combined with insurance reforms that allow consumers to buy portable health insurance sold anywhere in the nation, through their employer or on their own. That means you’ll be able to take your health insurance with you from one job to the next. Tax policy will no longer push Americans toward lower wages in favor of more expensive health insurance.

Top it all off with expanded contribution limits for health savings accounts, aggressive national medical liability reform, and structural Medicare and Medicaid reforms that dramatically slow the growth of government and deficits.

In 2009 and 2010 the nation took huge steps down a path toward more government control of health care. A shift to the consumer-based reform path is still available—if voters want it.

The difficulty with this free market approach is that… well, the market must actually be “free.”   Hennessey’s piece leaves out at least two, crucial elements for a free market in health care to function properly:  readily flexible supply and freedom for innovation.

Health care costs will never decline, no matter how many tax deductions and national health care plans are implemented, so long as the supply of doctors and nurses is kept artificially low.   In the current system, there are a relatively small number of spots available for those wishing to enter the medical profession.   Becoming a doctor is more like joining a medieval guild than any, other occupation (with the exception, perhaps, of the Delaware bar).   With all guilds, there is an inherent financial interest in preventing too many people from entering the field.   The guild decides how many new members it wants, irrespective of the actual, public need.  A key part of any health reform, then, must be a reform to the various controls that the Medical Guild has imposed to keep out new doctors.   This would include, by the way, the active recruitment of the world’s most talented doctors by liberally handing out work visas.

Increasing the supply of doctors, however, will not work without reforms which allow for drastic innovations in the supply of medical services.   Laws need to be loosened which would encourage doctors and nurses to form profitable practices that provide quality care at affordable prices.   The provision of medical services has changed very little over the last 70 years due in large part to restrictive laws that impede competition among doctors.   Similar reforms need to be implemented in the fields of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

As just one example, the Federal Drug Administration should be transformed from a licensing agency with police powers to an advisory role.   Rather than prohibiting new drugs, procedures and devices from reaching the market until the F.D.A. has given its final approval, these products and procedures should be allowed quick entry with appropriate F.D.A. evaluations.   So, in the case of a new treatment for diabetes, the F.D.A. provides merely an evaluative opinion on its safety and efficacy.   It is left to doctors and, more importantly, to patients to decide whether they want to risk a new treatment that has, for example, a “red flag” of sorts from the F.D.A.    As time goes by, the F.D.A. may change the flag to yellow or even green.

Public perceptions play into the debate as well.  For better or worse, public attitudes about health care have shifted dramatically over the last 70 years.   Prior to World War II, the average person viewed doctors as specialists who were consulted only when a medical issue was too severe for the family to care for itself.   Doctor visits were far less frequent than they are today and no one much thought of having access to the most sophisticated and cutting-edge technologies to extend life.  Professional medical care today is seen as a right and access to expensive, marginal treatments, even for cosmetic or non-life-threatening conditions (sex change operations?  Really?) is considered essential.

In short, the problem with health care in the U.S. is not one that the Federal government needs to solve.   It is a problem largely created by the Federal government as a result of incessant meddling, regulation, taxation, over-hyping expectations of care, and anti-competitive policies.   The single, best thing that can be done to improve the health of our nation is to make the provision of health care more like the provision of automotive care— giving consumers a wealth of choices.

Sure, it’s only one state and it was a small, 200-person sample.

At least that’s what the Obama Campaign must be telling themselves at this point.

According to this article in Business Insider on June 12, 2012, support for Obama’s reelection among black voters in North Carolina is at an unprecedented low of 77% while support for Mitt Romney has climbed to 20%.   In a state that Obama won against John McCain in 2008 by only 12,000 votes these numbers are not a warning light, they are a death knell.

President Barack Obama is rapidly losing support among African-American voters in North Carolina, a new poll out today from the Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling shows.

The poll finds that Mitt Romney would get 20 percent of the African-American vote if the election were held today, compared with 76 percent for Obama. Overall, Romney has a 48 percent to 46 percent lead on Obama in the crucial swing state.

Obama received 95 percent of the support from African-Americans in North Carolina in the 2008 election, compared with just 5 percent for Republican nominee John McCain.

Besides the obvious headlines here, it is worth noting a couple things.

First, plunging support for Obama among the black community is extremely encouraging in terms of race relations for this country because it reflects the reality of Obama’s job performance. I do not care who the person occupying the White House may be– George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Ronald Reagan– no one should be getting an unwavering 95% block of support from any racial group in this country.

In other words, if race is not a primary factor, it is difficult to fathom how black voters can monolithically line up to support President Obama in the face of the highest black unemployment ever; the defiant opposition of Obama to school choice for low income black families; support for gay marriage, and; policies that have driven up the price of every staple that disproportionately affects black families.   Maybe this is controversial.  I hope not.   Barack Obama has been a disaster for the black community and party identification alone simply cannot explain support in the 95% range.   So these numbers from North Carolina may indicate that black voters may be starting to dispense with racial identity politics and look at Obama’s policies.

Imagine the real, racial healing that could occur if candidates could finally be evaluated without regard to their skin color and solely according to their policies and principles?  If the Democrats were forced to actually compete for the votes of blacks rather than simply own them outright, there would be a major shift to the right in Democrat candidates and, thus, far more consensus politically.   Even more tantalizing is the prospect that the Race Hustling Industry (run by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) would no longer find an audience for their hate mongering.

The second major point I take away from this article is the possible consequences of even 20% of the black community voting for even a quasi-conservative Republican like Romney.

The Democrat Party knows that they have no shot at retaining or regaining power without the monolithic support of the black community.   If even 25-30% of the black vote goes to Republicans it is over for any Democrat candidate.  As a result, Democrats pull out all the stops when it comes to keeping the black voter in line.   That includes hurling racial epithets at any black, Republican candidate that dares run for office, shaming any person of color who votes Republican as an “Uncle Tom,” and continually fomenting racial hatred and fears as we have seen so clearly with the Trayvon Martin case in Florida.

If, however, even 20% of black voters pull the lever for Romney, the spell may be broken.   Twenty percent is alot of voters.  Far too many for the Democrats to stigmatize as “traitors” or Uncle Toms as a whole.  Suddenly, the cultural norm of automatically voting Democrat is fatally weakened.  Once the stigma of voting Republican is tempered, it is game over.

One of the best kept secrets, repeatedly suppressed by Democrats, is that the black vote typically went to the Republican Party– the party of Lincoln, afterall– until the 1960’s.    How many people know, for example, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a registered Republican?   How many black voters know that it was the Republicans in Congress that broke the Democrat opposition to the first Civil Rights Act?

It may be the greatest irony of the 21st Century that the first, black President may be the one who loses the black vote forever.

Right now, the U.S. is saddled with more hydrocarbon riches than we know what to do with.  Well, that’s not quite accurate.  Many of us know exactly what to do with them: produce mind-boggling wealth and energy independence and national security for the rest of the 21st Century at least.

But since the mid-1970’s or so, the Environmental Extremists, or “Greenies” among us, have been thwarting every effort by normal Americans to develop and use our abundant, natural resources.   They long for a pure and Green planet that will turn away from nasty, dirty, global-warming-causing hydrocarbon fuels.

What do we do with these mindless utopians and their lackeys in Congress and the White House?

The answer is at hand in this article in Bloomberg Businessweek:

Talk about North Korea usually centers around how the regime starves its people, whether it has the bomb, and if Kim Jong Un is really in charge. The UN’s Kyoto Protocol doesn’t make the list.

Yet under the terms of the protocol, North Korea, as a developing country and a member of the United Nations, has the right to build clean energy projects that may apply for Certified Emission Reductions, or CERs, popularly known as carbon credits. The North Koreans can then sell them to a rich country or company that needs the credits to offset its own greenhouse gases. Dig into data from the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, and you will find seven North Korean projects registered for carbon trading.

***

North Korea is now building seven hydroelecrtric plants, which provide some of the cleanest energy going. Most can earn tradable carbon credits. [Miroslav Blazek, who runs a company that facilitates such carbon trading] says the North Koreans “jumped” at the opportunity to get into carbon trading: “They immediately grasped that this is a way to make money.” Korea’s seven dams may generate as many as 241,000 CERs a year, worth almost €1 million ($1.3 million). “The projects are already in a relatively advanced phase,” says Ondrej Bores, director of carbon advisory services at Virtuse Energy in Prague, who’s worked with Blazek on other deals.

***

When he visited some of the hydro dam sites, Blazek saw workers digging with their bare hands. “Human labor has practically no price there,” he says. Maybe peaceful trade in carbon credits will make the regime a little less monstrous.

The bottom line: Although its initial foray into carbon trading may fetch only €1 million, North Korea has ambitions to be a player in the market.

[Emphasis added]

Yes!  Greenies no longer need to live bitter, frustrated lives here in Gaia-exploiting, meat-eating, pollution-ridden America.   North Korea is living the Greenie dream of eco-friendly hydroelectric dams everywhere, providing cheap, plentiful electricity to the mud and straw huts of its starving peasants!  Greenies can move there now and live their fantasy of a 18th Century society that is literally digging with their bare hands rather than use evil, polluting diesel excavation machines.   Imagine the teeny, tiny carbon footprint of North Korea:  virtually no automobiles to foul the air, the vast majority of the people living simple lives, close to the earth, eating whatever they can find (literally).   A model to the world of “sustainable living” in harmony with nature.   Sure, life is nasty, brutish and short, but, in the minds of Greenies, humans are afterall a kind of virus afflicting Mother Earth.  A short existence is a plus.

So do a small favor for any Environmentalist zealot you know and pass along the brochure for North Korea.  It sounds exactly like the kind of lifestyle that they want.

Hat tip to Drudge Report.

God bless the good people of North Dakota.  Apparently at least 30,000 of them decided that they were tired of living at the mercy of local tax authorities and decided to do something about it.

The New York Times gives a brief summary of a proposal to repeal all property tax assessments in the State of North Dakota:

BISMARCK, N.D. — Since Californians shrank their property taxes more than three decades ago by passing Proposition 13, people around the nation have echoed their dismay over such levies, putting forth plans to even them, simplify them, cap them, slash them. In an election here on Tuesday, residents of North Dakota will consider a measure that reaches far beyond any of that — one that abolishes the property tax entirely.

“I would like to be able to know that my home, no matter what happens to my income or my life, is not going to be taken away from me because I can’t pay a tax,” said Susan Beehler, one in a group of North Dakotans who have pressed for an amendment to the state’s Constitution to end the property tax. They argue that the tax is unpredictable, inconsistent, counter to the concept of property ownership and needless in a state that, thanks in part to wildly successful oil drilling, finds itself in the rare circumstance of carrying budget reserves.

“When,” Ms. Beehler asked, “did we come to believe that government should get rich and we should get poor?”

An unusual coalition of forces, including the North Dakota Chamber of Commerce and the state’s largest public employees’ unions, vehemently oppose the idea, arguing that such a ban would upend this quiet capital. Some big unanswered questions, the opponents say, include precisely how lawmakers would make up some $812 million in annual property tax revenue; what effect the change would have on hundreds of other state laws and regulations that allude to the more than century-old property tax; and what decisions would be left for North Dakota’s cities, counties and other governing boards if, say, they wanted to build a new school, hire more police, open a new park.

“This is a plan without a plan,” said Andy Peterson, president and chairman of the North Dakota Chamber of Commerce, who acknowledged that property taxes have climbed in some parts of the state and that North Dakota’s political leaders need to tackle the issue. “But this solution is a little like giving a barber a razor-sharp butcher knife — and by the way, this barber is blind — and asking him or her to give you a haircut. You’ll get the job done, but you might be missing an ear or an eye.”

What I love most about this ballot measure is the way it brings into question every assumption of local governance for the last 100 years. You can almost hear the local politicians sputtering and choking as they consider the changes that would be needed if they suddenly did not have this $800 million to keep themselves employed.   Public employee unions, too, obviously see that the elimination of the property tax means an empty trough.   Although total elimination of the property tax may not be the exact solution, it forces everyone in North Dakota at least to re-think basic assumptions about public services and reconsider whether there might be alternatives.   This is the kind of thinking that America desperately needs today, and not just in North Dakota.

For example, one of the main arguments that supporters of the tax put forward is that police, schools, local government and fire and rescue will no longer exist without this tax money.   But that is simply not true and amounts to a scare tactic, a sure sign of a weak argument.  Elimination of property taxes simply means that government must find an alternative source of funding or that the provision of these traditional, taxpayer-funded services will have to change.   Might there be other ways of providing an education?  Public schools, afterall, are a 20th century creation.   Who is to say that there may not be a better way to educate children without the public school harness?   The same could be said for police, fire fighting and other local government services.   The failure here is one of imagination.   The supporters of the property tax simply cannot imagine a different way of doing things (and have no incentive to do so).

The fight over local property taxes also reveals in a stark way the limits of our actual freedoms.   Anyone who owns real property prefers not to think about the fact that we will never, truly own anything.   Even if we should manage to pay off the mortgage covering the purchase price of our home, the county government will always be there, year after year, demanding ever greater sums for the “privilege” of living on their land.

The usual, counter-argument here is that property owners benefit from all of the services provided to them by the county (fire, police, ambulance, schools, etc…), so it is only right to demand a contribution to the costs.    Setting aside the question of whether a tax assessment on the value of my property is even a rational or fair way to determine my “contribution,” however, there are fundamental problems with this kind of thinking.   What about those who make little or no use of county services?   They have no children in school, they provide for their own protection under their Second Amendment rights and they are more than willing to re-build with neighbors’ assistance in the event of a fire.   Anyone with any actual experience with local government officials knows that they do not improve the quality of our lives.  Just the opposite.   Furthermore, the coerced taxation of property owners entrenches an entire system of “public employees” who have absolutely no interest in any changes that would save taxpayers money, improve quality or find alternative means to provide services.   Simply compare the mindset of a business that must constantly respond to customers’ needs and compete with others to retain business or fail entirely with that of government.

Every indicator around us points to the fact that we cannot continue to follow the same, outdated model of taxation and governance.  Whether the North Dakota ballot initiative is the answer or merely the first, halting step, we had best be about re-inventing the American way of life.