Morning roundup — and Open Thread
My very strong sense is that the shutdown will reveal how much of our federal government is inessential. I’m not the only one who feels this way. And no wonder, because the shutdown reveals waste everywhere. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Monopolies are invariably poorly managed and unchecked bureaucracies invariably grow.
PowerLine takes on a disgusting piece of revisionist history. (I’d seen the underlying grotesque revisionism myself, but hadn’t had the time to challenge it.)
When it comes to Obamacare, is the government shutdown both a means and an end? Buzzfeed thinks that the shutdown on its own, without any specific defunding measures, will damage Obamacare quite badly. Considering Obamacare’s disastrous first few hours, Buzzfeed may be right.
Even in my most atheist days, I recognized that religion, whether or not there really was a God, is a moral necessity. Dennis Prager’s challenge to Richard Dawkins hones in on that fact.
Britain’s NHS continues to show us just how coercive government-run healthcare is. I’m no fan of smoking, but this type of bullying is sickening.
As we already saw in the Balkans, when it comes to Islam, the call to jihad always trumps all other loyalties.
Obama’s foreign policy in a nutshell — sort of. I actually think there’s a malevolent consistency running through it, which sees Obama’s hierarchy: Most favored are Muslim tyrannies; second place to Muslim nations; third place to Leftist tyrannies; fourth place to socialist nations; fifth place to free countries and traditional American allies.
Did I mention bullying somewhere above? Why, yes I did, in connection with Britain’s NHS. The fact is, though, that leftists are always bullies, as Christian troops in the American military are discovering to their cost. The First Amendment promises religious freedom. America hasn’t always been true to that, as with her attack on Mormon polygamy. (I hold no brief for polygamy, but it was a core Mormon doctrine.) There are certainly practices one can quarrel with. For example, I don’t think the First Amendment should extend to human sacrifice. To the extent, though, that heterosexual marriage is one of the core doctrinal concepts in all of the world’s religions, and that it reflects biological and reproductive reality, the bullying and coercion from the left is unconscionable.
Arthur Laffer (the repeatedly proven Laffer Curve) and Stephen Moore write Obamanomic’s epitaph. (And one should add that Obamanomics, which is simply Marxist economics has already been repeatedly proven . . . as a failure.)
This is an open thread, so please add anything you’ve found that’s interesting.
