Sunday Scan

Jihad week is coming to the University of California Irvine, according to Red County:

In what will be a counter to the non-existent Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, The Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine will be rolling out a series of racist and anti-American speakers next week. Featuring British-born journalist Yvonne Ridley, the infamous Amir Abdel Malik-Ali, and Shaykh Khalid Yasin, this school year's inaugural hate week won't disappoint the aspiring jihadist.

Here's the event program. If you want a hint of the jihadist jist of the theme, look no further than the blurb for Shaykh Khalid Yasin's little talk:

He was considered one of the most influential men to walk the Earth. Today, over a billion people adhere to what he preached. 1400 hundred years later, his message and story are still the center of an intense controversy - as evidenced by the Danish cartoons.

The Danish cartoons?! If we want to look at what's controversial about Moe-hammed's message, let's take a gander at 9/11, the infitada, Ahmadinejad's calls for the extermination of Israel and the oppression of a third of the world's women.

Oh. Scratch that last one. Feature speaker and Stockholm Syndrom poster girl Ridley is going to talk about how the Koran is "a Magna Carta for women." Uh huh. She's also called Israel a "vile little state" and praised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Chechyen martyr mass-murderer Abdallah Shamil Abu Irdis.

If you're still looking for proof that the Muslim student associations in America are firmly in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi Wahhabists, look no further than UCI this week.

Nothing Funny in Denmark

In the home of those notorious Mohammed cartoons, all eyes not on the big storms that are whipsawing coastal Europe are on November 17 and the upcoming election:

Since 2001, Denmark has been governed by a center-right Liberal/Conservative coalition under Prime Minister Rasmussen. This coalition has been supported in parliament by the right-wing populist Danish People's Party in exchange for implementing key demands, such as strict policies on immigration. In the most recent opinion polls, Denmark's two main parties -- the opposition Social Democrats and Rasmussen's center-right Liberals -- are running neck and neck, each with roughly 25 percent of the vote. (Spiegel)

Particularly interesting is who Spiegel is calling the "king-maker" of this election: Naser Khader, Denmark's first Muslim, first immigrant MP. Spiegel quotes polls that show Khader's party will get about six percent of the vote -- enough to play some serious politics if the Social Democrats and Liberals split the vote, as anticipated.

Insurance for Illegals

You know the GOP electeds are in real danger of losing the base when James Carville understands the immigration issue better than George Bush:

“Just as many workers with moderate incomes, uncertain employment and health insurance could not understand why they were being taxed to subsidize the long-term idleness of those on welfare,” Carville and [Stanley] Greenberg write, “many Americans are just as perplexed that this country has lost control of the borders and winks at illegal employment, taxing the resources of local schools and hospitals.” The frustration extends to health care. One voter lamented: “We can’t afford to do anything because we’re paying for health insurance,” yet illegal immigrants “just go in and get it free.”

The quote is from a Town Hall article on SCHIP by Michael Frank. The only thing that may save the GOP on immigration is that the Dems are lost even deeper in the forest of denial:

When rumors circulated that House leaders were contemplating language to require tough proof-of-citizenship requirements for SCHIP enrollees, representatives of the several race-based congressional caucuses as well as other “progressive” members jumped into action. They sent Speaker Nancy Pelosi a strongly-worded letter warning against further concessions, especially, CQ reported, “on immigration issues.”

“We are deeply concerned,” they wrote, “by the continued compromises we may be asked to make on behalf of our communities.” “Such compromises,” they warned, “cause us to question our support for the overall package.”

These members like the vetoed SCHIP bill because it would weaken the citizenship and identity verification requirements in current law to prevent illegal immigrants from enrolling in SCHIP.

It bears repeating: SCHIP is Hillarycare; Hillarycare is SCHIP.

Connectivity Drives Code

That's the mantra of Thomas P.M. Barnett of The Pentagon's New Map fame. It basically means if you want to participate and prosper in the global marketplace, there are rules to follow. If you want to live Kaczynski-like in a cabin in the woods, you can free yourself of a lot of the code, but at the cost of removing yourself from the material, intellectual and physical benefits of connectedness.

In his weekly column, Barnett tells us of the increasing difficulty with the Kaczynski lifestyle, which is also the bin Laden lifestyle: We are getting better and better at forcing people into the grid. His subject is fascinating: Nanotechnology and better fingerprinting. It's typical Barnett; taking a seemingly narrow and arcane subject and globalizing it:

In this increasingly connected world, it's our inability to finger bad actors that - in the end - allows them to create the most terror. Make better fairy dust, crack tougher codes, connect more dots, create more transparency, and you've got fewer bad actors.

Nano-fairy dust is interesting stuff; trust me.

Human Obliteration Watch

You may not need to put a fresh coat of paint on your "The End Is Near" sign, but here's a bad news from Wyoming (which, it seems, usually falls far short of its bad news quota):

The Yellowstone "supervolcano" rose at a record rate since mid-2004, likely because a Los Angeles-sized, pancake-shaped blob of molten rock was injected 6 miles beneath the slumbering giant, University of Utah scientists report in the journal Science. ...

The upward movement of the Yellowstone caldera floor -- almost 3 inches (7 centimeters) per year for the past three years -- is more than three times greater than ever observed since such measurements began in 1923, says the study in the Nov. 9 issue of Science by Smith, geophysics postdoctoral associate Wu-Lung Chang and colleagues.

The Science Daily article assures us there's no reason to worry; caldera go up and down all the time without massive explosions, horrific extinction, an ash-packed atmosphere with nuclear winter-like effects, and longer waits at Starbucks.

Hillary Waffles; Obama Taxes

Barack Obama has been politely pounding Hillary for not giving straightforward answers, but when he comes up with an answer, it leaves you wanting some waffling:

Democrat Barack Obama said Sunday he will push for higher Social Security taxes if elected, viewing it as the best option for improving the retirement program's finances. ...

[D]uring an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," Obama said taxing more of a person's income was the option he would push for if elected president. He objected to benefit cuts or a higher retirement age.

"I think the best way to approach this is to adjust the cap on the payroll tax so that people like myself are paying a little bit more and people who are in need are protected," the Illinois senator said. ...

Currently, only [only?!] the first $97,500 of a person's annual income is taxed. That cap is scheduled to rise to $102,000 next year.

Obama's proposal could include a gap or "doughnut hole" to shield middle-income earners from higher payroll taxes, he said.

Doughnut holes ... waffles -- I wish the Dem prez candidates would go on a low-carb diet.

Image: Cox & Forkum

Hillarycare's SCHIP Sinks In Oregon

SCHIP went to the voters this week and sank like a highly taxed rock.

It happened in Oregon, where a universal health care for kids proposition that mimicked the DC Dem position on SCHIP, with an identical 300% increase in program reach funded by an identical jacking of tobacco taxes, was on the ballot.

It was there because the Dems had failed to pass the measure through the statehouse, so shoot, they thought, the people want this stuff, so we'll just circumvent those Neanderthal Republicans and put it on the ballot.

Bad idea, the Dems realized, as they watched their dreams flame out by a 60/40 margin. Here's a good recap from today's WSJ:

Measure 50's defeat is being blamed on $12 million in advertising by Big Tobacco. "What happened was, the tobacco industry bought the election," Governor Kulongoski declared yesterday.

We're surprised the Governor thinks voters in his left-leaning state are so easily gulled -- especially in a contest between "healthy kids" and cigarettes. More persuasive is the notion that voters didn't want to pass a state tax increase to finance a health-care expansion that Congress might soon pass, along with buckets of federal dollars. But most likely, voters understood that a tax increase on cigarettes is still a tax increase, and a highly regressive one at that. Only about 20% of Oregonians smoke, and most of those are lower income.

They may also have figured that to the extent tobacco taxes reduce smoking, they will soon not yield enough revenue to pay for ever-growing health costs. An analysis by William Conerly, a member of Governor Kulongoski's own Council of Economic Advisors, found that a straight Schip expansion funded by a tobacco tax was unsustainable, with costs exceeding revenues by $115 million by 2017.

Counting "crowd out" -- the migration to public from private insurance -- Mr. Conerly predicted a $638 million deficit within the decade.

The idea that Oregonians defeated the measure because they'd rather wait for a federally funded program is ludicrous; taxes are taxes, whether they're state or federal, they still rip money out of our wallet.

The more likely explanation is that Americans may be unhappy with our health care system, but we want an American solution to the problem, not a European one.

Sunday Scan

The OCRegister editorial page leads off today's scan with its editorial giving a cool reception to Al Gore's ignoble Nobel:

"Nearly every significant statement that Vice President Gore makes regarding climate science and climate policy is either one-sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative or wrong," says CEI environmental policy expert Marlo Lewis. Otherwise, nice job Mr. Gore.

Global warming alarmism serves those opposing free-market economics and its fossil-fuel reliance and those seeking power and profit by gaming the system once they force rule changes. Neither motive is in most peoples' interests. The Kyoto Protocol, which would force nations to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, if enforced would reduce projected temperatures about one degree over 100 years while – and this is not exaggeration – dampening and devastating economies worldwide.

Gore got a much warmer reception in Palo Alto, where young and old alike believe his hype, says an also hyped up Merc News:

Mackenzie Pope, 12, ... was one of several kids who had the day off from school [what?!] and showed up with signs saying [to Gore] "Welcome to Palo Alto."

"I was walking my dog when I saw all the people here and so I went home to get them," she said, motioning to her mom, little sisters Bailey and Rylie, and a couple of friends. [Mackenzie, Bailey and Rylie -- how cloyingly No. Cal.]

The girls, like typical Palo Alto kids, were well-versed on the climate-change issue.

"They say in 20 years New York City is going to be half gone," said Mackenzie's friend, Charlotte Barry.

The alliance is a small organization Gore founded last year as a fundraising arm for his media campaign. Its office, at Hawthorne Avenue and High Street, once housed the Foundation for a Global Community, a descendant of Beyond War. And it's next door to POST, the Peninsula Open Space Trust.

"This spot has good karma," said POST Executive Director Audrey Rust. "We're sort of at ground zero, right here on High Street."

The Merc News, which is after all a news paper, somehow didn't feel compelled to correct little Charlotte's gorism.

Babs At The Money Trough

Wrapping up news from the Golden State, the LATimes reports that Bay Area Greenie Babs Boxer is swimming in dough from the very hooligans against The Sacred Earth Mother she has worked so hard to harm:

For years Barbara Boxer has campaigned, first for Congress, then for the U.S. Senate, as a progressive Democrat strong on ... the environment. ...

But now that she's chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, she's finding some new people who want to be her friend. And not in the MySpace kind of way.

Roll Call reports (sorry, it's a subscriber-access page) that Boxer, who assumed the committee chair with the 2006 Democratic takeover of the Senate, received through Aug. 30 about $41,000 from political action committees representing "energy, natural resources, construction and transportation industries."

But in the 2004 cycle, when she was last up for re-election, Boxer "reported $18,500 in total receipts from the energy and natural resources sector in all of 2003 and 2004, according to CQ MoneyLine ....

Politicians. Love 'em or hate 'em, you gotta pay 'em off.

Don't Worry About Islam

There's a complicated piece by Simon Jenkins in the Times of London spurred by the 29-page letter to the Pope from 138 imams and other Muslim high and mighty. Jenkins doesn't see Islam as the biggest threat to the West, rather:

The chief threat to world security at present lies in the capacity of tiny groups of political Islamists to goad the West into a rolling military retaliation. Extremists on each side feed off the others’ frenzied scenarios so as to garner money and political support for their respective armies of the night. Each sees the other as a cosmic menace and abandons communal tolerance and peaceful diplomacy to counter it.

It's easy to discount this out of hand because Jenkins slices too thin. Our fear isn't of the tiny groups of jihadists ... it's the consequences of even five or ten percent of Islam picking up the jihadist terror tool kit. Still, the piece isn't just liberal pap and multi-culti over-optimism. There's a lot of food for thought there, like:

It is ironic that defeat in the cold war should have led Russia to the exuberant self-confidence of Vladimir Putin’s Moscow, while victory has plunged the West into a loss of nerve. In both Washington and London are leaders who have so little confidence in democracy as to regard it as vulnerable to a few madmen, and who have so little respect for democracy’s freedoms as to suspend them at the bang of a bomb.

I believe the liberties that have been suspended have been carefully defined and limited so as to protect Americans and subject suspicious foreigners and battlefield enemies to the treatment that is needed and deserved. But how about this for a Sunday pondering: What if we fought the war on terror the way the Libs would have us fight it? Would we not still win?

Of course, to answer that, you also have to answer this: Would the extra American dead that might result from the Lib approach be worth the rigorous, hard-line protection of each letter of the Constitution, as applied by Lib judges?

Watch It, Canadians!

Canadian readers, watch out! Science Daily tells us that according to the journal Environmental Research, you might be one of the 25,000 Canadians pollution will kill this year! I love these studies that pore over medical records and death certificates and attempt to lay the blame at pollution, or global warming, or fast food, or whatever else the Lib media have their eyepieces focused on.

Here's the picture that accompanies the story. I kid you not. Look at that awful, life-nipping gunk! The caption reads:

Photo taken near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Industry in the foreground, pristine mountains in the background -- Canada is not immune to environmental problems. (Credit: Michele Hogan)

Help me find the industries in the photo that are cavalierly ignoring Canada's environmental laws and spewing toxins into drinking water and mother's milk. More easily, help me find manipulated statistics that look at cancer deaths and low birth-weight babies (as this one did) and attribute them to pollution instead of, oh, the luck of the draw or genetics or moms who smoke and booze.

Corn Fission?

Earlier in the week, Syrian flacks toured media hacks around an ag field and ag lab that they say were targeted by Israeli fighters ... why the Zionists would do that, who knows? After reporting the tour with almost a completely straight face, today the NYT joins those who understand what really was going on there:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 — Israel's air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports.

The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state.

Central mystery? Not to everyone.

Who Defines 'Dying Well?'

Charlotte Allen, faced with minor breast cancer surgery -- seemingly an oxymoron, but not really -- was asked on three separate occasions whether she had a living will. A complicated form was stuffed into her mitt, asking her to ponder "a range of conditions under which I might like to have a Do Not Resuscitate order hung over my hospital bed, whether I would want to be denied "artificial" food and water under some circumstances, what I thought about being taken off a ventilator, and so forth."

Her conclusion, as very well relayed in her WaPo piece today:

In fact, when I contemplate the concept of "dying well," I can't avoid the uneasy feeling that it actually means "dying when we, the intellectual elite, think it is appropriate for you to die." Consider what's happened in recent years: The classic Hippocratic Oath and its prohibition against physicians giving people a "deadly drug" has collapsed with the growing acceptance of such notions as physician-assisted suicide, the "right to die," and even giving some very sick, disabled or demented people a little push over the edge, as seems to be the case in the Netherlands. People facing end-of-life decisions may well feel subtle pressure from the medical and bioethical establishments to make the choice that will save the most money, as well as spare their relatives and society at large the burden of their continued existence.

As the SCHIP plan catches the news and the Dems vow to override a prez veto, do you recall ever seeing someone raise the question of whether parents would be pressured to quickly dispatch sick babies once the feds start paying for their costly health care? Neither did I.

Start thinking about it.

Road to Rangoon

No, it's not a long-lost Bob Hope/Bing Crosby movie; it's the UN's continuing dismal performance in its attempts to stop the Burmese junta from killing off every monk and protester in that poor country.

In this case, the road will lead UN chief Burma dude Ibrahim Gambari to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, China and Japan, before "hoping" to return to Burma. Condi's response? Knock it off! Get back to Burma pronto and do something.

Good advice.

Hillary Care: It's What She Does, Not What She Says

What a great deal! A brand new national health care program that reduces costs and doesn't create a whole new big ugly bureaucracy! Or even a trim little pretty one!

You have to hand it to Hillary; her health care proposal is a hum-dinger, and WaPo is ready to tell us all about it:

In a speech in Des Moines, the Democratic front-runner said she would expand insurance to the 47 million people who do not already have coverage and would attempt to reduce costs for others without spawning a massive new bureaucracy. In a far different political environment than the one that turned her efforts to establish universal health care into a fiasco in her husband's first term, Clinton offered a more modest approach than she took as first lady and head of a White House task force in 1993.

"Today's plan is simple yet doable," Clinton said. ". . . This is not government-run. There will be no new bureaucracy." ...

She added that "there is a much broader consensus on the need for reform now," as health-care costs have outstripped inflation and the growth of income in the past 15 years. "You see businesses and labor together on this, Republican and Democratic governors, and the fact that we are in a global market, where our health-care costs are a competitive disadvantage -- all of that is different."

So this should be a piece of cake, not a repeat of the Death Walk Down Pennsylvania Ave. Hil endured the last time she gave national health care a big hug. And since she's the candidate to beat, we should all be happy.

But wait a minute. Stuck a few pages back from the big page 1 splash on Hillarycare II: Not A Disaster we find another story about a health care program near and dear to Hil's heart:

Key lawmakers in the House and Senate negotiated into the night yesterday on a deal that would expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program by $35 billion over the next five years.

That would set up a clash with President Bush, who has promised to veto such a plan.

The emerging compromise would bring total enrollment to 10 million children. Congressional aides said it would be funded by an increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes, which is now at 39 cents a pack. [And, by the way, repeal of Bush's tax cuts for people earning over $250K a year.] It would also attempt to blunt rules the Bush administration imposed last month that restrict the eligibility of middle-income children.

The SCHIP program, as I've written about previously, started innocuously enough as a modest program to provide funding for health care for children in poverty. Cunningly created with incentives for state's to grow the program, it has expanded like an ebola outbreak, as states both pushed the age of recipients and the household income allowed so it no longer was a program for poor children.

Now, Congress is pushing to expand it even more, so middle class families can opt out of privately run health care program and go for taxpayer-subsidized public sector programs. Could anything be more Big-D Democratic?

SCHIP is more than just Hillary's approach, it's Hillary's plan, as her Web site makes clear:

Nobody has worked harder or longer to improve health care than Hillary Clinton. From her time in Arkansas when she improved rural health care to her successful effort to create the SCHIP Children's Health Insurance program which now covers six million children, Hillary has the strength and experience to ensure that every man, woman and child in America has quality, affordable health care.

SCHIP started at $25 billion; now the Dems -- led by Hillary who is, you know, the health care socialized medicine point person on the Hill -- want to push it up to either $60 or $75 billion, depending on whether you prefer the House or Senate version.

Hillary's smaller, smarter national health care program would start not at $25 billion like SCHIP, but at $110 billion. A year. But not for many years. Expect the Dems to "schip" it up right away, to $150 billion, $200 billion, up and up until it's finally big enough for Hil to call her own.