When a person kills himself, why are so many so quick to blame everyone but the killer? Perhaps this has something to do with the emotional reluctance to assign blame to people who victimize themselves. It's as cathartic to relieve the guilty party from responsibility as it is to assign blame to people who had no direct (or perhaps even no indirect) role in the loss of life. A suicide of a beautiful teenager in Western Massachusetts has sparked mass indictments against her classmates, anti-bullying bills in the state legislature, and the type of hysteria made famous in this region 318 years ago. The facts of this case are murky, but what seems clear is that a fifteen-year-old Irish immigrant had conflicts with classmates prior to taking her own life. Not everything is a legal matter, even when somebody very likable dies. This is good politics for the district attorney to go after students (but not teachers or administrators). But, like the legal lynching of Tookie Amirault in Massachusetts in the '80s, this is an abuse of law. The written legal code, not public outrage, should govern prosecutorial conduct. When we think with our hearts we disgrace our heads.

Happy Holy Week! The neverending priest-pedophile scandal is distasteful enough without all the political baggage attached to it. The compulsion to inject extraneous issues into the discussion just adds to the grossness factor. The scandal has been exploited by critics of the church to get their jabs in about gay marriage and abortion. Buried within a local columnist's attention-grabbing call for Pope Benedict to resign was this: "The hierarchy's loss of moral authority has been wonderfully liberating for some Catholics now free to ignore, with good conscience, bishops' various directives on gays, birth control, divorce and remarriage, etc." In other words, lemonade has been made from lemons. Warning: what looks like lemonade doesn't always taste like it. The abuse of authority by certain priests to sexually abuse children serves as a proxy for those who attack the church on a whole number of questions. That said, reflexive defenders of the church are often too quick to step into these battles as "defenders of the faith" only to appear to others as defenders of the filth. Pick your battles. Even though there are hateful people that will exploit every church scandal to discredit the teachings of the church, that doesn't invalidate the main point: the church, along with law enforcement, acted in a horrific manner.

Democrats have been touting a narrative of victimization in the wake of their unpopular vote to extend health-care-as-welfare benefits to 32 million Americans. You've heard of blaming the victim? This is praising the perp. Democrats who ignored their constituents are now playing victim. Many of the claims, such as the plausible but unproven allegations of epithets hurled at congressmen walking to vote, have been crassly employed within Democrat fundraising appeals. Pat Buchanan, in a must-read column on the subject, notes: "Majority Whip James Clyburn accuses Republicans of 'aiding and abetting...terrorism.' New York Times columnist Frank Rich compared the tea-party treatment of Democrats to Nazi treatment of the Jews during Kristallnacht." Nobody killed, nobody hurt (unless feelings count)--that's neither terrorism nor pogram. As Buchanan points out, nobody was even arrested at the Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill. Now comes news of the arrest of a Philadelphia man for threatening Congressman Eric Cantor. "Remember Eric at our judgment time, the final Yom Kippur has been given," the disturbed man said. "You're an abomination, you receive my bullets in your office, remember they will be placed in your heads. You and your children are Lucifer's abomination." Cantor is a Republican. This doesn't fit the narrative. Don't count on MSNBC giving it saturation play. Some threats are more equal than others.

Do you think President Obama's trip to Afghanistan has anything to do with changing the subject from health care? The seven months between now and the November elections will be all about obscuring the fact that the Democrats codified the most extensive welfare entitlement since the Great Society. They will talk about busted militia groups in hopes of replaying the 1990s, threats (real and imagined) against congressmen to engender sympathy (deserved and undeserved), and a million other topics extraneous to health care. When you are proud of your victory, you take a victory lap. When you aren't you rush into the locker room before the referees have second thoughts.

The Rolling Stones re-released Exile on Main Street earlier this month with bonus tracks. I won't be buying. I already own a reissue, and, it was just like the original. The Stones are notorious for re-mastering their albums without adding in freebies for fans. Give me an excuse to buy an album I already own--a b-side, a few live tracks, unreleased material, even. I realize this time is different. They should consider my boycott payback for their past affronts.

Rolling Stone, after its original reviewer found himself "unsatisfied" with the album, put Exile on Main Street as the seventh best album of all time. They were too harsh then and are too fawning now. I put it about the seventh best Stones album. I guess you had to be there. I was born after its release. Like Mick Jaggar, I don't think Exile on Main Street the Stones' best album, despite what diehards say. "Well, I don't think it really is," Mick Jagger says in response to the fetishization of Exile on Main Street as the band's masterpiece. "I'm a great fan of Sticky Fingers." Me too. Can I get a witness?

Whereas Exile on Main Street is much filler, a little killer (Happy, Shine a Light), Sticky Fingers is all killer, no filler. Plus, some of it was recorded at Stargroves, where Doctor Who battled the evil Osirian, Sutekh ("I give you Sutekh's gift of death!") in Pyramid From Mars. It's the Stones sounding most like the Stones. It's one of those rare releases that can get mistaken for a greatest hits album (Who's Next, Back in Black, Appetite for Destruction being a few others). If you wanted to explain to a Martian what rock 'n' roll was, pressing play to Can't You Hear Me Knocking or Brown Sugar would probably do the trick. Is heroin a performing enhancing drug?

Since they were really the Stones' decade, I recently mixed my own CD of my favorite Stones tracks from the seventies. Along with the aforementioned tracks, I included Sway, Bitch, and Moonlight Mile from Sticky Fingers. Some highlights from other seventies albums that I included are Winter, Before They Make Me Run, Memory Motel, and Coming Down Again. After a decade like that, the Stones were justified in taking the eighties, nineties, and aughts off.

Led Zeppelin sold their souls to the devil to rule the seventies. The Rolling Stones brought in Mick Taylor and stole his songs.

Silence is sometimes more meaningful than words. This is true for a funeral. It is also true when irreparable damage has been inflicted on your country. At these moments, there really is nothing to say because saying nothing says it all. Do you understand my respite?

The day after the 2008 presidential election, I blogged that life goes on. I would keep reading, smoking cigars, listening to music, and drinking champagne. Politics doesn't define my happiness. And a presidential election doesn't foreordain the next four years. Hawk Nixon opened up China, ended conscription, and removed America from Vietnam. Liberal Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and pushed welfare reform. Peacemakers Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt waged war. Warmonger Ronald Reagan made peace. You don't always get what you expect.

For his first fourteen months in office, Barack Obama's ineptitude prevented him from inflicting serious, long term, irreversible damage to the United States. The health care-welfare bill signed into law Tuesday is different. It's the toothpaste that won't go back into the tube, no matter how many attorneys general file suit against the federal government or congressional candidates run on its repeal. We have crossed the Rubicon.

Conservatives of the 1910s, 1930s, and 1960s must have felt the same way, and perhaps crossed at a deeper and wider point, when the income tax, Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid became law. Their progeny, unfortunately, became defenders, to one degree or another, of the income tax, Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid that their forebears had stood athwart. And so it will be with this. You will understand when I become even more alienated from people who call themselves "conservative" twenty years hence. I can see it now. When some further encroachment of the state upon private transactions is proposed, they will oppose it on the grounds that it might imperil the gains made through the Great Health Care Reform of 2010. This is how it works, folks. If you don't believe me, rewind the tape and watch just about every Republican leader oppose ObamaCare on the grounds that it would weaken Medicare. I am not a conservative if it means preserving statist victories.

The justice of forcing some people to pay for other people's care, after all, was the prevailing logic behind President Bush's prescription-drug giveaway. The differences are in the degree and not the principle. Presumably, had Bush proposed what Obama just signed, some Republicans would have tripped over one another to announce their support in front of the nearest camera. This isn't just bare supposition. When Mitt Romney advanced a proto-ObamaCare in Massachusetts, not just Republicans, but conservative outfits partook in disgraceful mental gymnastics to proclaim the plan--which also fascistically compelled people to buy health insurance and subsidize coverage for people making under a certain amount of money--a free-market reform. To quote the great rhetorician John Boehner, "Hell, no!"

To the party's eternal credit, every Republican opposed this assault on the land of the free and promotion of the land of the freeloader. The Republican Party batted 1.000. Ted Williams only batted .406. You don't get better than perfect. That said, their below-the-Mendoza-line batting average during the Bush years--on Iraq, the prescription drug giveaway, the bailouts--led us to this point. No George W. Bush, no Barack Obama; no Barack Obama, no government takeover of health care.

Sorry if my pessimist's outlook does not offer hope for erasing the events of the last few days. Pessimism does provide the wisdom that however bad things seem now, they can always get worse. Believe liberals when they say this is only step one in reforming American health care. Today, forced health insurance and 32 million dependent on government for what they should be responsible for; tomorrow, the public option and single payer.

Like your typical college date rapist, liberals don't get "no." Whether the politician seeking to screw the American people was named Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, or Bill Clinton, he didn't take "no" for an answer on health-care-as-welfare. They will persist. And just like your typical college date rapist, they deem "no" the obscenity rather than they act they seek to force upon the unwilling party. People who can't say "no" are gluttonous, compulsive, out-of-control, other-directed. "No" is not a four-letter word. People who use it control themselves rather than get controlled by others.

With that in mind, it's time for previously uninvolved Americans to get involved. Not for catharsis, but become active to elect office seekers who respect limited, constitutional government. Volunteer for a campaign. Contribute money to a candidate. Join a tea-party group and make trouble for any congressman who voted to make your life more troublesome. Do this not under the illusion that Republicans will reverse this mess. Do this because liberals mean it when they say that this reform is means and not end. Most conservatives, understandably, prefer living their lives to political involvement--let alone running other people's lives. But with fanatics not allowing you to live your life, but forcing you to live and work for another's health care, mortgage payment, student loan, grocery bill, rent, etc., it's difficult not to hear the call. Do something, or somebody will do something to you.

By a vote of 219 to 212, House Democrats passed the bill passed by the Senate in December. President Obama will probably have signed his cornerstone piece of legislation into law by the time that you read this. The America of March 22, 2010 is a different place than the America of March, 21, 2010. You live in a different country and you didn't even have to immigrate.

Stopping President Obama's health care-welfare bill was contingent upon Democrats doing the right thing. If viewed through that lens, it was hard to envision the bill stopped. Republicans, a mere 178 of them in the House of Representatives, were powerless to prevent passage. They needed 38 Democrats--about 15 percent of the Democratic caucus--to rebuff their president and their party. This is why, once Democrats had decided upon the ends-justifies-the-means course of "reconciliation," the bill could only be slew by Democrats. Only wishful thinking could produce confidence in the notion that a sizable chunk of House Democrats would stand for the people against their president and party.

Elections have consequences. The consequence of electing Barack Obama and Democrat majorities in Congress is that America is now less free. But governance has consequences too. Bad governance, which includes the introduction of a means-tested welfare entitlement of health care on the taxpayers' dime for 32 million freeloaders, will lead to historic defeats for Democrats this November. Democrats lost Congress to save the president.

The post-partisan president quickly became the most partisan president. Whereas Social Security and Medicare gained the support of about half of Republicans in Congress, ObamaCare convinced not a single Republican to crossover. Such in-your-face governance can't be good for the polity. Those Republicans not invited to the table by the president represent millions of Americans. Those millions of Americans now strongly disapprove of their country's president. Governance by poll is cowardly; governance in defiance of the governed is hubristic. Somewhere between lies a happy medium unknown to Barack Obama, the post-post-partisan president.

Thirty-two million people now, through force of legislation, become dependent upon the government for what they should be responsible for. For the first time in history, Americans will be compelled by law to purchase a particular product, health insurance, or face a heavy fine. This is fascistic. This is also counterproductive to the stated aims of the legislation to reduce health-care costs. Manufacturing increased demand for a product is a sure-fire way to increase the price of that product. Republicans won't repeal this bill. Democrats can't repeal the laws of supply and demand.

The bill removes about $500 billion from the private economy through taxation at a time of terrible hardship. As the deficit exceeds $1.5 trillion, and the national debt approaches the gross domestic product, the bill, dubious CBO guesstimates aside, is certain to further burden future generations with much red ink. Democrats will pay a price. Americans will pay a higher price.

The onerous taxes unleashed upon health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers will make health care more expensive, not more affordable. That's probably by design. The worse the private industry performs, the louder the calls for greater state intrusion becomes. Thought ObamaCare Mach One bad? Wait until its inflation of medical prices rationalizes calls for a public option, and later, for single payer, which is a pleasant sounding euphemism for state monopoly. Strangely, the primary consequence of the failure of more socialism in medicine will be more socialism in medicine.

This is a sad day for America because it is really the death of one America and the birth of another. The same observation could have been made upon the numerous usurpations of individual responsibilities by the state in the past. In the era of American ascendency, Europe played follow-the-leader. In the era of American decline, America imitates Europe. America, the land of the free, has become America, the land of the free loader.

"Children by the millions/sing for Alex Chilton." It escaped my notice that Alex Chilton passed away on St. Patrick's Day. I confess that Alex Chilton escaped my notice during his entire sixty year existence. "Alex Chilton," on the other hand, commanded my attention from the first time I heard it. I speak, of course, of The Replacements song in tribute to Alex Chilton. It's their best, and, perhaps, top ten, of late '80s-early '90s American alternative. To inspire a song that good, Alex Chilton must have been pretty good himself. Rest in peace. "I'm in love. What's that song?"

ObamaCare hasn't even been passed, and Idaho has already enacted law that compels the state's attorney general to sue the federal government to block enactment of the health care-welfare bill's provision that forces individuals to purchase health insurance. The AP story snarkily notes, "Constitutional law experts say the movement is mostly symbolic because federal laws supersede those of the states." But the article quotes neither a "constitutional law expert" nor the Constitution. I will bypass quoting a constitutional law expert, too, but because I reject the notion that the Constitution is so mystical that it requires an expert to explain it. It's pretty straightforward, especially so on the relationship between the states and the federal government they created. Here's the 10th amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In other words, if the Constitution does not explicitly grant certain powers to the federal government, the federal government doesn't have those powers. Now, can somebody tell me where does the Constitution delegate to the federal government the power to force me to buy health care from some company or government entity?

Remember all the talk of Iraq the Model during the Bush Administration? Given the civil war, terrorism, and basketcase central government of Iraq, the rest of the Middle East understandably decided to take a pass on copying the model. On the domestic front, America should be wary of embracing Massachusetts as a model on health care.

Mitt Romney made many of the same promises about his bill in 2006 that Obama makes regarding his bill today. "Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced," Romney boasted in the Wall Street Journal four years ago. It didn't quite work out that way. Massachusetts has the most expensive health care in the world, and the costs are rising, not falling. We've seen this movie before, folks. It doesn't have a happy ending.

Massachusetts has served as the model for ObamaCare. Democrats are loathe to admit it because it would credit Mitt Romney as the idea man for their party. Republicans, many of whom hypocritically praised RomneyCare then (as they bash ObamaCare now) are loathe to admit it because it would place the leading candidate for their party's presidential nomination alongside the Democrats' leading candidate for their party's presidential nomination in supporting a government takeover of health care.

Jim Antle's Masscare Massacre American Spectator article is a must read. Massachusetts's 2006 landmark health care reform has busted state budgets, resulted in higher premiums, and sparked talk of rationing. Massachusetts is the mess that America will become.

"Medicaid costs have continued to explode, rising from $7.5 billion to an estimated $9.2 billion since the Massachusetts health care law has taken effect," Antle writes. "More people now have coverage, but of the 407,000 newly insured only 32 percent paid for their insurance entirely on their own. The remaining 68 percent were either partially or wholly subsidized by the taxpayers. Only 5 percent of newly insured Massachusetts residents who are not receiving any taxpayer benefits obtained their coverage through the state's 'Connector' health care exchange." Why is this salient? ObamaCare is in large part a replication of RomneyCare. Like RomneyCare, ObamaCare mandates health insurance. Like RomneyCare, ObamaCare subsidizes the health insurance of middle- and lower-income people. Get the picture?

A canary in the coal mine--Massachusetts--is sending the rest of us a message. "The insurance companies were at the table, the hospitals were at the table, the large providers were at the table," explains Democrat-turned-independent state treasurer Tim Cahill, who recalls the similarities between RomneyCare and ObamaCare. "The taxpayers and small businesses weren't at the table. It appears to be repeating itself at the national level."

Those people in white lab jackets behind the president aside, most doctors in the United States, like most doctors in the United States Congress, oppose ObamaCare. More revealing than the New England Journal of Medicine's findings that two-thirds of American doctors oppose the health care-welfare bill is the startling statistic that 45 percent of American doctors "would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" should ObamaCare pass. Add doctor shortages to the long list of reasons to oppose the Democrats' plan to reform American health care.

The closed-door meetings, the obfuscation of the text of the bills until the eleventh hour, the byzantine length and verbiage of the bills, the exclusion of the minority party from the crafting of legislation, the severe limitation of the amendment process, and the Saturday evening votes when nobody was paying attention all showed that Democrats were prepared to violate rule and custom to get President Obama's health care-welfare bill passed. Waiving the Senate rules to allow for a simple majority, as if the Senate (which tellingly represents the states and not the people) were merely another House of Representatives, to pass the bill demonstrated this rule or ruin mentality had been taken to a whole new level. More farcical still for our republican form of government is the plan to pass the Senate bill without taking an actual recorded vote in the House of Representatives on the Senate bill. The so-called "deem and pass" would be another extraordinary breakage with precedent. Do you recall Social Security, Medicare, or the Reagan tax cuts passing in such an obscene manner? What's amazing is that there are, presumably, House Democrats who actually believe that "deem and pass," and the symbolic amending of the Senate bill, would free them from owning the unpopular aspects of the Senate bill. A vote for "deem and pass" is a vote for the Senate bill. This reeks of the I-voted-for-the-bill-before-I voted-against-it verbal legerdemain that makes decent people find politicians indecent. Any campaign season weasel language by "yea" voting Democrats in competitive districts will merely show their imprudence to be matched by their dishonesty. Own it.

Back in the mid-1990s, I attended LAV school at Camp Pendleton. The rules prohibited Marines with less than two years service from going to Mexico. Barely, my term of service had exceeded two years. My fellow Marines, a few of whom had broken the rules by spending weekends in Tijuana, considered me lucky for getting the priviege to travel to Mexico. But not only did I forgo weekends in supposedly sleazy Oceanside, I didn't travel to Mexico once. Instead, I stayed in sleepy San Clemente, whose beaches, bars, and juke boxes represented my idea of heaven. Even the on-base NCO club was a preferable haunt to Tijuana. My reluctance to go south puzzled many of my fellow Marines. For the privates and PFCs, the fact that I could go dictated that I should go. No thanks.

That a fellow Marine had eaten a hepatitis burger in Mexico merely confirmed my decision. My aversion to travelling south of the border then is why so many Americans are averse to travelling south of the border now. Any place where the rule of law is lacking scares me. I can deal with criminals. But when the cops are criminals that is quite frightening. Some people fear clowns. I rogue authority is my phobia. Rather than your own behavior determining your freedom, the whim of an on-the-make cop does. These days bribes are the least of the worries of travelers to Mexico.

Many Mexican cities are lawless. The three U.S. consulate workers murdered by Mexican drug gangs in Ciudad Juarez highlights this danger for Americans. But Mexicans need no reminder. In the first two months of 2010, 410 people were murdered in Ciudad Juarez. By way of comparison, Washington, DC, about half the size of Ciudad Juarez and long considered the "murder capital," reported 140 murders in all of last year.

Even Acapulco, long a mecca for American tourists, experienced 17 murders over the weekend, which included several cops. Numerous people were beheaded. Is that your idea of a dream vacation destination? I'd rather vacation at Revere Beach in March.

The United States is almost alone among G8 countries in that a Third World nation sits on its border. Americans can control whether they go to Mexico. It's harder to control whether Mexico comes here. Considering what happens in places like Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, and points beyond, can you blame Mexicans for wanting to leave that? Considering what happens in places like Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, and points beyond, can you blame Americans for not wanting that to come here?

One of the dangers of illegal immigration is that the pathologies of Mexico get exported into America. The kidnapping wave in Phoenix was (is?) an example of this. One of the dangers of merely visiting Mexico is that the benefits of life in America, such as the rule of law, get left in America.

The Democratic vote counter in the House of Representatives says there aren't enough votes to pass ObamaCare. He also says that he's confident that the Democrats will get enough votes to pass it. I think he's right on both counts. If they had the votes by now, the vote would have been held by now. But should it be that difficult for House Democrats to muster 216 votes? The Democrats, after all, control the House by more than seventy votes. They have lost a dozen or so "yea" votes through resignations, deaths, and abandoning the Stupak language prohibiting abortion funds. But if they can't make up those votes with this large of a majority then they can't hope to do anything this ambitious for at least a generation.

One the toothpaste is out of the tube on ObamaCare, there will be no putting it back. Conservatives opposed Medicare and Medicaid, for instance--in 1965. But in 2010, they defend them to the extent that Medicare cuts are cited as a reason to oppose ObamaCare. Unfortunately, conservative means conserving the gains of liberalism. Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and so many other bad programs opposed on principle by conservatives become sacrosanct once made law. If you hop in a time machine and head fifteen years into the future, you'll see some of ObamaCare's detractors defending it. The party of no, unfortunately, isn't the party of repeal.

Corey Haim, excellent in the movie Lucas but best known for being one half of the brief pop-culture phenomenon "The Coreys," died late last night. Drugs are suspected if not by his agent then by everybody else. Haim joins a long list of people--River Pheonix, Dana Plato, Michael Jackson, etc.--who reached the heights of stardom early only to tragically hit rock bottom before late normally arrives.

It makes one wonder why so many parents push their children into the spotlight. The spotlight blinds too many to reality. It distorts developing egos into monstrous proportions. When the spotlight is gone, the grown-up children are left to wonder: where did the spotlight go? Corey Haim, who was only 38-years-old at his death, had been asking himself this question for the better part of his life. He had a great 1980s (The Lost Boys, Dream a Little Dream, License to Drive, Lucas). The 1990s (Fast Getaway II, Snowboard Academy) and 2000s (rehab) were not so kind.

Child stardom perverts the parent-child relationship. Parents curry for favor. They compete with agents and other show business types for the child's allegience. Apart from placing children into environments not ideal for children, like Hollywood parties and movie sets, it gives the youngster power over, and distrust of, his elders as the family's moneymaker. Child stardom seems the ideal formula for creating a tyrannical personality who wants to exert control over others as he can't control himself. After having so many people kneel at your feet as a kid, normal treatment might strike the former child star as rude. Do you know who I am? Or at least who I was? Living in the past is enough to make some cease living.

I once knew a gregarious fellow who had attained a degree of stardom as a child. He put himself at the center of every conversation. Enjoyable initially, ultimately annoying, he didn't surprise me when he broke the news that he was an actor as a child. He was a functioning alcoholic, drinking in the mornings, on weekdays, and at other inappropriate times. Alcohol clearly filled a void. People lavished too much attention upon him at an early age, and he spent the rest of his days craving the attention he had in his younger days. It was hard for me to separate the person from the persona because it was harder for him to separate the person from the persona.

You can count the number of well-adjusted child celebrities on a four-beaded abacus. Shirley Temple, perhaps the biggest of the child stars, became an ambassador and seems to have lived a good life. Emmanuel Lewis seems pretty normal. I have never read a report of a nude and bloodied Christopher Makepeace arrested for a PCP-fueled rampage in the mall. But beyond that, I'm drawing a blank.

Why would a parent want their child to live the life of Britney Spears? Dustin Diamond? Lindsey Lohan? Leif Garrett? The great high is followed by a lingering hangover. Aside from this, Hollywood seems a cesspool of sex, drugs, and narcissism. Would any parent choose to send their kid to a school mired in a major drug problem? Undoubtedly, parents delude themselves into believing their child will be different, won't succumb to the lures of money, ego, and drugs. But clearly, as Corey Haim's life and death demonstrates, that's easier said than done.

"Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it," actor Sean Penn remarked the other day on Bill Maher's HBO program. "And this is mainstream media, who should -- truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies." Doesn't Penn know that dictators can win elections, too? Hugo Chavez warned that foreigners who come to Venezuela and criticize him will be expelled. He has expropriated private property. His government has killed its protestors. He has shut down opposition television channels and radio stations. One could say Chavez's views on free speech are consistent with Sean Penn's.

"Despite the often expressed dichotomy between chaos and planning, what is called 'planning' is the forcible suppression of millions of people's plans by a government-imposed plan. What is considered to be chaos are systemic interactions whose nature, logic and consequences are seldom examined by those who simply assume that 'planning' by surrogate decision-makers must be better."
--Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 2009

Barack Obama's most amazing feat as president has been to induce a nostalgia for the George W. Bush years. Bush's post-presidency popularity is only partly due to his all-promise/no-delivery successor. George W. Bush has been a model former president, abiding by Rule #1 of the How To Be a Great Ex-President Guidebook: Ex-Presidents Shouldn't Be Seen or Heard. If only Jimmy Carter had abided by this rule people might be pining for the days of 14 percent inflation, Russians on the march in Afghanistan, and idling automobiles waiting hours for gas. Then again, maybe not.

Like tigers, Democrats eat their young. That's the message one gleans from Congressman Eric Massa's tale of the White House pressuring him to resign. Is the White House capable of this? Sure. If they can trade a federal judgeship for a "yea" vote then certainly they're capable of another sort of bribery with Eric Massa, who now claims his "no" vote, rather than any questionable private conduct, is behind the controversy in which he finds himself embroiled. Did the White House manufacture this scandal? That's another question. Certainly Mr. Massa's version of events transforms him from pervvy perpetrator to victim. It's convenient for him. But, then again, his resignation is convenient for the White House. This is hardball politics, and if Obama wins the health care vote certainly his goon squad will celebrate that the ends justified the means. But if they lose it their scorched earth policy will have made many enemies, particularly within the Democratic Party.

Milton Friedman was fond of explaining how public higher education was welfare for rich kids--people from Watts paying for the education of kids from Beverly Hills was how he colorfully put it. So it is with a sense of humor that I observe campus brat-fits from Amherst to Berkeley.

Whatever the intention of public higher education, the result isn't subsidized college for the poor. There is no financial barrier preventing rich kids from attending, say, Penn State or the University of Virginia. Many do. In fact, about four out of five college students attend state institutions. Obviously, four out of five college students are not poor. The fact that many well-off teenagers enjoy college educations subsidized by taxpayers is a perverse outcome of public higher education. Poor kids, who have a tough time making it through high school, generally don't make it to college. Another perverse outcome is that many low- and middle-class students who do make it to college can't afford the skyrocketing costs of a public education.

There is a crisis in the areas of American life most consumed by socialism. Largely as a result of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the federal government plays an enourmous role in higher education and medicine. The Higher Education Act of 1965 and Medicare and Medicaid, all created within four months in 1965, promised to bring down the costs of education and medicine, respectively. They didn't. They inflated the costs. That's the unintended consequence of mandating third parties (taxpayers) to subsidize interested parties (students and schools).

There are other issues at play with regard to passing the buck on paying for college. An explosion of unnecessary administrators, a conspicuous consumption desire for "Club Med" style recreation facilities, the inclusion of students who use college to extend adolescence rather than study, etc. But these are largely symptoms of Free Ride Syndrome.

The painful irony is that the more horribly these programs perform in bringing down price, the louder the demands from their advocates to strengthen the programs. To the partisan of big government, that's the beauty of it: failure is an argument for more big government. The skyrocketing of health-care costs since the intrusion by the federal government isn't coincidental. Should ObamaCare pass, its failure will rationalize future increases in the government's role in health care. Likewise, the failure of enormous subsidies by state and local governments to reign in tuition and other college costs is, from the mouths of the traffic-stopping protestors, an argument to expand such subsidies. Do they teach logic in college any longer?

As Americans are finding out with regard to health insurance, when we pass the buck to somebody else--financial aid, the health insurance company, medicaid--the commodity in question inflates in price. A solution to the related problems of out-of-control health-care costs and out-of-control college costs is to remove third-party payers from the equation as much as possible and allow the consumer to pay (or not). The result of not doing so is plain to see on every doctor and tuition bill.

Barack Obama flanked himself with white-coated doctors in 11th-hour push for his welfare/healthcare bill. The spectacle was just the latest insult to intelligent Americans. Presumably, the message we in the hinterlands are supposed to glean is that all doctors support the president. The message intelligent people received is that any doctors who show up to a press event wearing their workplace attire are willing tools of propaganda. There are actually sixteen doctors with an intimate knowledge of the various health-care plans. They are members of Congress. None of the sixteen wears a white coat to his job in the Capitol. Almost all of them are voting against the president's welfare/healthcare bill.

So committed to abortion-uber-alles are the Democrats that they have left abortion coverage in the health bill up for a "nuclear option" vote. Forty House Democrats who voted for the health care bill last time around did so after first voting for the Stupak amendment forbidding such abortion funding. A handful of those "Stupak" Democrats is the margin between victory and defeat, and Rep. Bart Stupak believes a dozen or so who supported his amendment won't vote for health-care reform without his language forbidding abortion funding. Leaving those Stupak Democrats aside, three Democratic "yes" votes have resigned or died, and the lone Republican to vote for passage has since come out against it because of the lack of a prohibition on abortion funding. Nancy Pelosi, then, has to switch fifteen or so "nays" to "yea." That's a tall order, particularly when considering the dramatic change in political climate since the Democrats passed their version of health-care reform four months ago. There are 39 Democrats who voted "no" last time around. Just eight of those 39 claim they are even open to switching their vote. Even if Pelosi were to convince all eight to switch their votes, she would still be short. The Senate Democrats' hypocrisy in invoking reconciliation after damning President Bush for threatening to do so on judges is indeed, as the Wall Street Journal puts it today, an abuse of power. The abuse of power in the Senate, thankfully, may be matched by a lack of power in the House.

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) seeks to replace Ulysses Grant with Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill. Grant wrote a better autobiography, but Reagan was a better president. "Our currency ought to be something that unites us," complains Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), who notes that Reagan is "controversial." Somebody tell Congressman Sherman that the man on the $20 killed a man in a duel. Isn't that "controversial"? What Rep. Sherman means to say is that Reagan is conservative. Franklin Roosevelt is controversial too me. But I doubt Sherman cares that Roosevelt's inclusion on the dime is a point of division. Reagan certainly deserves a place on money more than most whose faces adorn coins and currency. But aren't there enough presidents on money? We fetishize presidents more than the Brits fetishize kings and queens. It's as though there were only one branch of government. Worse still, politicians like Rep. McHenry predictably seek to honor--who else?--other politicians. Aren't there inventors, explorers, industrialists, artists, authors, and soldiers more deserving of placement on a coin than, say, Millard Filmore?

Chile's earthquake was 500 times more powerful than Haiti's. Yet, 323 times more people died in Haiti than died in Chile. Why? Bret Stephens suggests that Milton Friedman, maligned for meeting with Augusto Pinochet for 45 minutes in 1975, "was surely hovering protectively over Chile in the early morning hours of Saturday." Ideas have consequences.

Jim Bunning is in my Hall of Fame for putting principle before politics in standing alone against the extension of unfunded federal unemployment benefits. The move left the Washington Post's Dana Milbank to ponder Bunning's sanity and ABC News' Jonathan Karl to stalk the elderly Kentuckian. Where are the reporters to question the sanity of running up the largest deficit as a percentage of the total economy since World War II? The feigned outrage on this issue is a bit much, particularly when considering that the senator from Kentucky voiced objection to unanimous consent, something that's easily overcome by the majority. Forty-one senators can bring the august body to a standstill. But one? Get a grip. It's not as though he's pondering aloud heretical questions like "Where in the Constitution does it authorize such an expenditure?" The former major league pitcher merely asks that his colleagues--Republican and Democrat--pay for the program. As Bunning quite sanely points out, "If we can't find $10 billion to pay for it, we're not going to pay for anything. We will not pay for anything fully on the floor of the U.S. Senate."

Life imitates art. Eve Plumb, like the character she played, has issues with her older Brady Bunch sister, Maureen McCormick. The rift stems from a playful insinuation McCormick made in an autobiography that she and Plumb had engaged in some sexual experimentation together during the Brady Bunch years. Now I could see why Marcia might be mad if Jan had made such a claim. But Jan? C'mon. You were reduced to inventing imaginary boyfriend George Glass and had to rely on props such as wigs to get attention from the opposite sex. Can't you see that Marcia is doing your career a favor? The contempt Jan has for Marcia is so great that a Brady Bunch reunion had to be nixed because Plumb refused to be in the same room as McCormick. No word yet on if Marcia still holds a grudge against Doug Simpson or if Peter and Buddy Hinton have patched things up.

I waited until the final day of 21st Winter Olympics to tune in. Better late than never. The USA-Canada hockey game was a classic. Coming back from a 2-0 deficit, the overmatched U.S. team dramatically tied the game with less than 30 seconds left. I mentioned my affinity for the Pick-6 after the Super Bowl; the score off the pulled goalie ranks alongside it in sports excitement. But a storybook game required a storybook ending. Skating on their home ice in Vancouver, the Canadians (I felt ripped off that none of their skaters looked like they had played in the Iron League) won the gold medal in overtime. Sidney Crosby is the new Wayne Gretzky. Like the Raiders-Patriots snow bowl and Castillo-Corrales, I felt that I had witnessed something special by tuning in. If you missed this game, you missed one for the ages. If you missed Shaun White, Apollo Ono, and the rest of the Olympics, you're a lot like me.