The Rant

Here is another suggestion by Diana West to just withdraw and let the Muslims continue their 1000 year old sectarian battle. _______________ Funny thing about the recent op-ed by Nawaf Obaid in The Washington Post outlining likely Saudi actions if the United States withdraws from Iraq: namely, that Saudis would both support Sunnis in Iraq (versus Shi'ites supported by Iran) and manipulate the oil market to "strangle" the Iranian economy. I think it sounds peachy, this let-them-devour-each-other strategy — which I'm guessing many Americans mutter to one another in frankness, if not also in confidence. You can read the entire thing here. --------------- I note that this sort of suggestion was not included in the Iraq Study Group. It has increasing appeal to me because I am less sanguine about the possibility of "moderate Muslims" who would appreciate our efforts to institute a western style Constitutional democracy. They say they want this, to get our mon

Hillary Clinton and some Democrats are seeking a single provider health care system. As someone who has made frequent use of our medical system of late, this catches my interest. A single provider health care system is basically a government monopoly on health care. Advocates for such a system emphasize that it is free. The problem is that you can not pay for services if you want to. All private healthcare is outlawed. Any "free" product or service will necessarily create shortages as anyone who has every studied basic economics can confirm. The market price of a product is the price that the demand equals the supply. If you raise the price above market price, you will have a surplus of goods. If you lower the price, you will have shortages. Free is always below the market price. In Canada, which makes private paying for medical services illegal, there are long waits for things we take for granted, such as an MRI or simple routine surgeries. Michelle Malkin hosts a short fil

December 12, 2006 By Bruce Bartlett For many years, those who consider themselves to be libertarians have been fairly reliable members of the Republican coalition. Although no libertarian would consider himself or herself to be entirely in agreement with either major party, they have historically sided with the GOP. But the relationship today seems more deeply strained than any time in the last 30 years, and a divorce may be forthcoming. Basically, libertarians are allied with the right on economic issues and the left on everything else. They believe in the free market and freedom of choice in areas such as drugs, and favor a noninterventionist foreign policy. Consequently, someone who is a libertarian could prefer to ally with the right or the left, depending on what set of issues is most important to him or her. I first became aware of the libertarian philosophy in 1969, when there was a big split in a college-based group called Young Americans for Freedom, which was supposed to be t

Iraq’s Biggest Failing: There Is No Iraq By ROGER COHEN Published: December 10, 2006 WAR spews words. They make up its fog. Washington was awash in them last week as the damage control exercise called the Iraq Study Group culminated with a proposal to extract all American combat brigades by early 2008, leaving a few tens of thousands of troops to train the Iraqi Army or protect the trainers. As befits a bipartisan report on what looks like a lose-lose situation, it was a fudge. But beyond the words — from President Bush’s chagrin at “the pace of success” to the report’s “grave and deteriorating” situation — lie people, the millions of Iraqis who have to get their kids up in the morning, those dimly discernible objects of the myriad political contortions. One of them, a 32-year-old Iraqi engineer encountered earlier this year in Baghdad, had this to say in a desperate e-mail message: “I am facing the most difficult times of my life here in Baghdad. Since I am a Sunni, I became a target

Ahmadinejad And Thin Ice By George F. Will Newsweek Dec. 18, 2006 issue - How gruesome was 2006? the year's most consequential person was Iran's president, who says the Holocaust did not happen and vows to complete it. Regarding his nuclear aspirations, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose manias are leavened with realism, treated the United Nations as a figment of the imagination of a fiction—the "international community." Democrats, given control of Congress because of Iraq, vowed to raise the minimum wage. Nimble and graceful Barack Obama became the Democrats' Fred Astaire, adored because of, well, perhaps the way he wears his hat, the way he sips his tea. And the way he isn't Hillary. This year's civil-rights outrage was "soaring" and "record" gasoline prices, a violation of Americans' inalienable right to pay for a gallon no more than they paid 25 years ago. By December the price of a gallon, adjusted for inflation, was 83 cents lower th