Mark Steyn's Blog, page 11

Embolden This

Andy, re that referendum "emboldening" the opposition, maybe Reuters should check with these ladies:

Women Without Hijabs Were Prevented From Voting In Egypt

Didn't President Obama have something to say on the subject last time he was in Cairo?

The United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it.

Gee, thanks for the courageous stand, Mr President!

The country's least worst constitution was the Kingdom of Egypt's 1923 constitution. Back then, the idea of a Western leader coming to Cairo and talking up the hijab would have been regarded as deeply weird and profoundly insulting.

Go North, Young Man!

A thought for the day from John Hinderaker:

For the first time in history, the average Canadian is wealthier than the average American.

More Tea, Vicar?

Abu Qatada has been called "the spiritual leader" of al-Qaeda in Europe and been tied to terrorists across the map from Spain to Chechnya. Her Majesty's Government in London has spent a decade trying to deport him to no avail. In the course of his legal battles, British taxpayers have given him half-a-million pounds in various forms of welfare. Currently out on bail, he's now been moved into a three-quarter-million dollar home at public expense.

All that's par for the course in the suicide phase of advanced western society, but I did enjoy this comment from one of the firebreathing imam's new neighbors:

However, the vicar at the church said: 'Absolutely anyone is welcome to our church and I would encourage Mr Qatada and his family to join in our Christmas celebrations and reach out to the local community.'

Mr Qatada was a "spiritual advisor" to the so-called 20th hijacker Zac Moussaoui and the shoebomber Richard Reid, so when he "reaches out to the local community" you might want to stand well back.

On the other hand, like Jesus, he was born in Bethlehem, so there's that.

The Doctor Won’t See You Now

A few years ago, my small local hospital asked a Senate staffer if she could assist them in obtaining federal money for a new building. So she did, expediting the process by which that particular corner of northern New Hampshire was deemed to be “under-served” and thus eligible for the fed gravy. At the ribbon-cutting, she was an honored guest, and they were abundant in their praise. Alas, in the fullness of time, the political pendulum swung, her senator departed the scene, and she was obliged to take a job out of state.

Last summer, she returned to the old neighborhood and thought she’d look for a doctor. The sweet old guy with the tweed jacket in the neatly painted cape on Main Street had taken down his shingle and retired. Most towns in the North Country now have fewer doctors than they did in the 19th century, and the smaller towns have none. The Yellow Pages lists more health insurers than physicians, which would not seem to be an obvious business model. So she wound up going to the health center she’d endowed so lavishly with your tax dollars just a few years earlier.#ad#

They gave her the usual form to fill in, full of perceptive inquiries on her medical condition: Do you wear a seat belt? Do you own a gun? How many bisexual men are you now having sex with? These would be interesting questions if one were signing up for eHarmony.com and looking to date gun-owning bisexuals who don’t wear seat belts, but they were not immediately relevant to her medical needs. Nevertheless, she complied with the diktats of the Bureau of Compliance, and had her medical records transferred, and waited#...#and waited. That was August. She has now been informed that she has an appointment with a nurse-practitioner at the end of January. My friend pays $15,000 a year for health insurance. In northern New Hampshire, that and meeting the minimum-entry requirement of bisexual sex partners will get you an appointment with a nurse-practitioner in six months’ time.

Why is it taking so long? Well, because everything in America now takes long, and longer still. But beyond that malign trend are more specific innovations, such as the “Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology,” which slipped through all but unnoticed in Subtitle A Part One Section 3001 of the 2009 Obama stimulus bill. Under the Supreme National Coordinator, the United States government is setting up a national database for everybody’s medical records, so that if a Texan hiker falls off Mount Katahdin after walking the Appalachian Trail, Maine’s first responders will be able to know exactly how many bisexual gun-owners she’s slept with, and afford her the necessary care.

This great medical advance is supposed to be fully implemented by 2014, so the federal government is providing incentives for doctors to comply. Under the EHR Incentive Program, if a physician makes “meaningful use” of electronic health records, he’s eligible for “bonuses” from the feds -- a mere $44,000 from Medicare, for example, but up to $63,750 from Medicaid. If you have a practice at 27 Elm Street and you’re treating the elderly widow from 22 Elm Street, she’s unlikely to meet the federally mandated bi-guy requirement, but you can still qualify for bonuses by filing her smoking status with Washington. For medical facilities in upscale suburbs, EHR is costly and time-consuming, and, along with a multitude of other Obamacare regulatory burdens, helping drive doctors to opt out entirely: My comrade Michelle Malkin noted the other day that her own general practitioner has now switched over to “concierge care,” under which all third parties (whether private insurers or government) are dumped and a patient contracts with his doctor solely through his checkbook. Some concierge docs will even make house calls: Everything old is new again! (For as long as the new federal commissars permit it.)

But in the broken-down rural hinterlands, EHR and other novelties make it more lucrative for surviving medical centers to prioritize federal paperwork over patient care. For example, there’s a lot of prescription-drug abuse in this country, and so the feds award “meaningful use” bonuses for providing records that will assist them in determining whether a guy with a prescription for painkillers in New Hampshire also has a prescription for painkillers with another doctor over the Connecticut River in Vermont. So in practice every new patient in this part of the world now undergoes a background check before getting anywhere near a doctor. It doesn’t do much for your health, but it does wonders for an ever more sclerotic bureaucracy.

Hence the decay of so many “medical” appointments into robot-voiced box-checking. At the doctor’s a couple of months back, the nurse was out to lunch, and so the receptionist-practitioner rattled through the form. In the waiting room. “Are you sexually active?” she asked. “You first,” I replied. I hope I didn’t cost her the federal bonus.

But don’t worry, it’s totally secure. Carl Smith Jr. was the first physician in Harlan County, Kentucky to introduce EHR. “Because of this technology,” Dr. Smith says, “we can send the patient’s prescription electronically by secure e-mail to pharmacies.” Wow! “Secure e-mail”: What a concept! It’s a good thing the e-mail is secure at American pharmacies because nothing else is. Last Christmas, while guest-hosting at Fox News in New York, I had a spot of ill health and went to pick up a prescription at Duane Reade on Sixth Avenue. The woman ahead of me was having some difficulties. She was a stylish lady d’un certain age, and she caught my wandering eye. After prolonged consultation with the computer, the “pharmacist” informed her (and the rest of us within earshot) that her insurer had approved her Ortho but denied her Valtrex. I was thinking of asking her for cocktails at the Plaza, when I noticed the other women in line tittering. It seems that Ortho is a birth-control pill, and Valtrex is a herpes medication.

So good luck retaining any meaningful doctor-patient confidentiality in a system in which more people -- insurers, employers, government commissars, TSA Obergropinführers, federal incentive-program auditors -- will be able to access your medical records than in any other nation on earth.

No foreigner can even understand the American “health care” debate, which seems to any tourist casually surfing the news channels to involve everything but health care. Since the Second World War, government medical systems have taken hold in almost every developed nation, but only in America does the introduction of governmentalized health care impact small-business hiring practices and religious liberty, and require 16,500 new IRS agents and federal bonuses for contributing to a national database of seat-belt wearers. Thus, Big Government American-style: Byzantine, legalistic, whimsical, coercive, heavy on the paperwork, and lacking the one consolation of statism -- the great clarifying simplicity of universal mediocrity.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago, Obamacare governmentalizes one-sixth of the U.S. economy -- or the equivalent of the entire French economy. No one has ever attempted that before, not even the French. In parts of rural America it will quickly achieve a Platonic perfection: There will be untold legions of regulators, administrators, and IRS collection agents, but not a doctor or nurse in sight.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

War-making for Losers

The new U.S. Army manual for troops heading east apparently blames the tendency of Afghanistan's U.S.-trained soldiers and policemen to shoot their Western "allies" on "American cultural ignorance." Fortunately, the manual offers a solution:

The draft leaked to the newspaper offers a list of “taboo conversation topics” that soldiers should avoid, including “making derogatory comments about the Taliban”...

I mean, it's not like they're the enemy or anything.

. . . “advocating women’s rights,” “any criticism of pedophilia,” “directing any criticism towards Afghans,” “mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct” or “anything related to Islam.”

Stick to safe topics like the weather, the impressive increase in opium production, and how hot the local warlord's child bride looks now she's back in the burka. Then, after handing your trainee his weapon, try to back out of the room slowly without catching his eye.

As Scaramouche says, don't let's be beastly to the Taliban.

Nobel Laureate Steyn Takes On National Review

Jack Fowler writes today about fantasy Nobel laureate Michael Mann's suit against me and National Review. Unlike Dr. Mann, we don't have boxes of Nobel Prize certificates from Kinko's to auction on eBay, so we've launched a legal appeal. Personally, I'd like to raise enough to buy our lawyer a barrister's wig and court coat, perhaps with lace jabots. Anyway, if you can chip in a few groats, we'll do our best to stick Dr. Mann's hockey stick where the global warming don't shine.

Our friends at The Blaze ran a story on the suit, and the first few commenters are already taking sides:

I stand with Mark Stein. Sorry National Review. I hope you lose.

Er, last I knew, I was on the same side as National Review. Unless you've heard something.

The next commenter says:

If they would get rid of Kristol and guys like him I might be willing to help.

Er, Kristol is the guy at The Weekly Standard -- the other mag. If it would help, for a donation of $250, we'd be willing to hire Bill Kristol just so we can fire him on your say-so.

So pick your sides for the trial of the century: Mark Stein vs. Bill Kristol's National Review.

On the other hand, these fellows are way ahead of MSNBC, which is still proclaiming Michael Mann as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Evidently, the slackers at MSNBC didn't get the memo -- from the Nobel committee, and from the actual winner.

UPDATE: I promise to come to court wearing my official EU "I won the Nobel Peace Prize" button.

The Royal Presidency

From the New York Daily News:

“Snooki Gives Kate Middleton Advice on Being a New Parent.”

Great! Maybe Kate could return the favor and give Snooki and her fellow Americans some advice. About fiscal prudence, for example. Say what you like about a high-living, big-spending, bloated, decadent, parasitical, wastrel monarchy, but, compared to the citizen-executive of a republic of limited government, it’s a bargain. So, while the lovely Duchess of Cambridge nurses her baby bump, the equally radiant president of the United States nurses his ever more swollen debt belly. He and his family are about to jet off on their Christmas vacation to watch America slide off the fiscal cliff from the luxury beach resort of Kailua. The cost to taxpayers of flying one man, his wife, two daughters, and a dog to Hawaii is estimated at $3,639,622. For purposes of comparison, the total bill for flying the entire royal family (Queen, princes, dukes, the works) around the world for a year is £4.7 million -- or about enough for two Obama vacations. 

According to the USAF, in 2010 Air Force One cost American taxpayers $181,757 per flight hour. According to the Royal Canadian Air Force, in 2011 the CC-150 Polaris military transport that flew William and Kate from Vancouver to Los Angeles cost Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects $15,505 per hour -- or about 8/100ths of the cost.

#ad#Unlike a republic, monarchy in a democratic age means you can’t go around queening it. That RCAF boneshaker has a shower the size of a phone booth, yet the Duchess of Cambridge looked almost as glamorous as Snooki when she emerged onto the steps at LAX. That’s probably because Canada’s 437 Squadron decided to splash out on new bedding for the royal tour. Amanda Heron was dispatched to the local mall in Trenton, Ontario, and returned with a pale blue and white comforter and matching pillows. Is there no end to the grotesque indulgence of these over-pampered royal deadbeats? “I found a beautiful set,” said Master-Corporal Heron. “It was such a great price I bought one for myself.”

Nevertheless, Canadian journalists and politicians bitched and whined about the cost of this disgusting jet-set lifestyle nonstop throughout the tour. At the conclusion of their official visit to California, Their Royal Highnesses flew on to Heathrow with their vast entourage of, er, seven people -- and the ingrate whining Canadians passed the baton to their fellow ingrate whiners across the Atlantic. As the Daily Mail in London reported, “High Fliers: Prince William and his wife Kate spend an incredible £52,000 on the one-way flight from LA to London for themselves and their seven-strong entourage.” Incredible! For £52,000, you couldn’t take the president from Washington to a state visit to an ice-cream parlor in a Maryland suburb. Obama flew Air Force One from Washington to Williamsburg, Va., requiring a wide-bodied transatlantic jet that holds 500 people to ferry him a distance of a little over 100 miles. And, unlike their British and Canadian counterparts, the American media are entirely at ease with it.

Just for the record, William and Kate actually spent an “incredible” £51,410 -- or about $80,000 -- for nine business-class tickets on British Airways to Heathrow. At the check-in desk at Los Angeles, BA graciously offered the Duke and Duchess an upgrade to first class. By now you’re probably revolted by this glimpse of disgusting monarchical excess, so, if it’s any consolation, halfway through the flight the cabin’s entertainment consoles failed and, along with other first-class passengers, Their Highnesses were offered a £200 voucher toward the cost of their next flight, which they declined.

By contrast, in a republic governed by “we, the people,” when the president of the United States wishes to watch a film, there are two full-time movie projectionists who live at the White House and are on call round the clock, in case he’s overcome by a sudden urge to watch Esther Williams in Dangerous When Wet (1953) at two in the morning. Does one of them accompany the first family on Air Force One? If the movie fails halfway across the Pacific, will the president and first lady each be offered a $2 million voucher in compensation?

In his recent book Presidential Perks Gone Royal, Robert Keith Gray, a former Eisenhower staffer, revealed that last year the U.S. presidency cost American taxpayers $1.4 billion. Over the same period, the entire royal family cost British taxpayers about $57 million. There’s nothing “royal” about the current level of “presidential perks”: The Obama family costs taxpayers more than every European royal house put together.

In the American republic, even the dogs cost more. The Queen is a famous corgi lover and has been breeding them since she was a young girl. Now in her late 80s she’s slowing down and only keeps four. The president has one pooch, a photo-op accessory called Bo, who unlike the corgis requires a full-time handler. In contrast to the stingy remuneration offered by the royal household, the presidential dog-walker is one of 226 White House staff earning over $100,000 a year. For many centuries, the King had a courtier whose somewhat intimate duties were reflected in his title: the Groom of the Stool, a position abolished in 1559. Now, after two and a third centuries, the American presidency has evolved to the point that it has a full-time six-figure Groom of the Canine Stool. Will he be accompanying the president on Air Force One to liaise with the Keeper of the Privy Flatscreen over screenings of Lassie?

In 2003, the advance team for President Bush informed Buckingham Palace that he would only be able to stay there if they took out all the windows and replaced them with blast-proof glass. The Queen, keeping a straight face, politely refused, and the president was forced to spend three nights in an insecure palace. Happily, in Hawaii, the flood-the-zone “security” can proceed unimpeded by cheeseparing monarchs who feel the job of head of state entails assuming a modest amount of risk or at least a passing acquaintance with reality. So local residents who will never catch a glimpse of their hermetically sealed-off sultan are expected to put up with walled-off neighborhoods, closed beaches, and residential streets clogged by 40-car motorcades. The Secret Service is installed in luxury hotels, no doubt with their Colombian hookers, and their hookers’ Colombian glaziers, fresh from installing bombproof windows on Bo’s kennel.

The fish rots from the head down, and so do republics. A $1.4-billion president has a defense secretary with a private plane to fly him home every weekend, and a chair of the “White House Council on Women and Girls” with her own Secret Service detail, and all of them ever more detached from the rhythms of American life. In the wake of the Cartagena hooker scandal, the Secret Service with predictable obtuseness imposed a new rule prohibiting agents from having “foreign nationals” in their rooms. The salient fact surely wasn’t that they were “foreign” but that they were hookers. Yet now, at the luxury Moana Surfrider resort, Obama staffers passing through the lobby and bumping into minor princesses and arch-duchesses staying in the cheap rooms on the lower floors won’t even be able to ask them up to their federally mandated ocean-view suites for tips on deficit reduction. In the Brokest Nation in History, it would be unreasonable to expect the president to pretend to have a regular all-American family Christmas for less than five million bucks.

As Ben Franklin famously said: “A republic, if you can keep it in the style to which it’s become accustomed.”

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

Dracula Stirs...

When President Obama, in his dronefest at the UN the other week, said that the future, on the one hand, will belong to those who empower women, but, on the other, must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam, he failed to foresee any potential contradictions between these goals. We Canadians are naturally miles ahead of you guys in this respect, so, in a current if near parodic Ontario "Human Rights" Commission case, a lesbian is suing a Muslim barber for refusing her custom.

A year or two back, I was proud to play a small role in clobbering Canada's "human rights" racket, giving them the worst press in their history, and eventually getting a disgusting law repealed. But, as the great George Jonas writes in an excellent column, the bloodsucking vampires are once again stirring in their coffins. The current rationale is that, in a multicultural society, you need an all-powerful state to mediate the interests of competing identity groups. Get lost, creeps. There's a word for that kind of state, and it's nothing to do with human rights.

Meaty, Beaty, Big, and Bullying

I'm not as big a fan of "Won't Get Fooled Again" as John J. Miller, but I'll always treasure Pete Townshend (who, oddly enough, was acquisitions editor at Faber & Faber when I did Broadway Babies Say Goodnight for them) for telling Michael Moore to stuff it:

Rock guitarist Pete Townshend has labelled Michael Moore a "bully" in a public spat over the use of the classic Who song Won't get Fooled Again in Fahrenheit 9/11.The Who guitarist refused Moore permission to use the song on the end credits of the film. Afterwards, Moore claimed that Townshend did so because he was in favour of the war in Iraq.

On his website, Townshend protests that this is not the case. Instead, he says he refused permission because he was suspicious of Moore's credentials. "When first approached I knew nothing about the content of his film Fahrenheit 9/11. I had not really been convinced by Bowling for Columbine [Moore's previous film] and had been worried about its accuracy. Once I had an idea what the film was about, I was 90% certain my song was not right for them."

On a more general point, Jay writes today about oboe players who whisper to him that they're closet conservatives. I can understand the nervousness of orchestra members and session players, but it is remarkable to me the number of big-time rockers (or at least British ones of a certain vintage) who feel obliged to be far more circumspect in public than they are in private. 

Arab Spring Goes Full Twinkie

Egypt's High Constitutional Court has gone on strike:

The HCC's decision comes after it was pushed to postpone its decisions on the constitutionality of Egypt's Shura Council (upper house of parliament) and the Constituent Assembly after supporters of the president surrounded the court.

Hundreds of pro-Morsi demonstrators gathered at the HCC late Saturday as the draft constitution was officially presented to the president by the head of the constitution-drafting body, to demonstrate against the courts' expected verdict on the two bodies, which could see both dissolved.

I wonder how Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was in Cairo only a few months back airily advising Egyptians to eschew the U.S. Constitution in favor of Canada's hideous Trudeaupian "Charter of Rights and Freedoms" and the European Convention on Human Rights and no doubt the Swedish Declaration on Recycling, Bike Lanes and Transgender Bathrooms, would advise the jurists to play this one.

At any rate, Mohamed Morsi is now, as they say, shooting without a script. Which suits him just fine.