I swear, I can't leave you people alone for a second. I take one little week off, then come home to discover no one has killed cap and trade or health care reform yet. In fact, the march toward statism is so far along I wonder if the whole concept of freedom is starting to sound like just a rightwing rant.
Newsweek has put Al Gore on the cover (again), this time with the heading "The Thinking Man's Thinking Man" with apparently no clue of what absurd territory they've wandered into. The article is all about how his thinking has evolved to the point where he now believes we can save the planet by allowing people to make money on green technology. The tone is one of hushed reverence the magazine usually reserves for President Obama:
Dressed in blue jeans and a button-down shirt open at the collar, Gore looks younger than his 61 years: the mountain-man beard he grew in the wake of the Florida recount debacle of 2000 is long gone, and the extra weight, which hung on several more years, is nowhere in evidence. Nor are the trappings of office, unless you count an electronic gate at the bottom of his circular driveway in the wealthy Nashville neighborhood of Belle Meade. When he travels—as he does about one quarter of the time, often to train volunteers to give the slide show that formed the core of An Inconvenient Truth—it is with no more than one aide, and he pulls his own luggage.
Geez. He pulls his own luggage! What a planet-saving titan! In the meantime, health care reform has passed the House and now will be taken up by the Senate:
The Senate bill would have major areas of overlap with the House's: Both would expand Medicaid coverage for the needy, provide private-insurance premium subsidies for people of modest means, and set rules to make it harder for insurance companies to deny coverage or charge higher rates to people based on their medical status or history.
Both bills would require everyone to have health insurance and set up an insurance exchange to offer affordable policies for small businesses and individuals not covered by their employers. Both bills would include one government-run public option among the choices. But Reid has said that his bill would allow states to opt out of offering the government plan.
We will be required to have health insurance. This isn't like making us get insurance if we do something dangerous scary like running a playground for kids or having mandatory insurance as part of an implied contract, as when driving on public roads. We would be required to have insurance simply because we are alive and on the planet. This is crossing a line between the individual's rights and the state's prerogatives that I never thought we'd even get close to in this country.
Oh, well, that's what you get when liberals and leftwing advocacy groups get near something they've been salivating over for years. Nothing like an exaggerated threat to the planet or the well-being of the people to help them get their way.
Just having a little fun there. The "salivating" is actually being done by neocons and rightwing advocacy groups, explains a helpful professor who tells us that the "threat" of an electromagnetic pulse taking out the country's electronics is being "greatly exaggerated" by all those evil hawks who just want to get back into building up our missile stock again.
One of the books I read on vacation, by the way, is "One Second After," an apocalyptic novel on the order of "On the Beach" and "Alas Babylon," but about the after-effects of an EMP attack rather than an atomic war. The author does seem to stretch a point now and then, but that's what such novels do, isn't it? And he could have used a good editor to help him deal with commas, typos and the occasional choice of the wrong word. But the novel does illustrate a potential threat much more likely to cause us harm than climate "change" and one that can be addressed without economy-crippling taxes and nation-changing rules (and without a lot of new missiles, either).
But we're only dealing with leftwing fantasies these days, apparently. The righwing ones will have to stand in line.
