Some things just make you shake your head in disgust, wondering how so many people could possibly be so stupid.  Rasmussen reports, “60% of Voters Say Supreme Court should Base Rulings on Constitution.”

During his acceptance speech last night at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota, John McCain told the audience, “We believe in a strong defense, work, faith, service, a culture of life, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and judges who dispense justice impartially and don’t legislate from the bench.” Most American voters (60%) agrees and says the Supreme Court should make decisions based on what is written in the constitution, while 30% say rulings should be guided on the judge’s sense of fairness and justice. The number who agree with McCain is up from 55% in August.

What the other 10% think should be used is a mystery - ouija boards maybe.  Don’t laugh, they couldn’t be worse than something as frightening as the “sense of fairness and justice” of a small group of judges.  If that’s how our law is to be decided, why even bother with a democracy?

The New York Times has a problem with McCain’s chosen tactic of running against the establishment.

“Party in Power, Running as if It Weren’t”

The nominee’s friend described him as a “restless reformer who will clean up Washington.” His defeated rival described him going to the capital to “drain that swamp.” His running mate described their mission as “change, the goal we share.” And that was at the incumbent party’s convention.

After watching two political conclaves the last two weeks, it would be easy to be confused about which was really the gathering of the opposition. As Senator John McCain accepted the Republican nomination for president, he and his supporters sounded the call of insurgents seeking to topple the establishment, even though their party heads the establishment.

…But as a matter of history, it is easier to run as the opposition party if you actually are the opposition party.

“When the president of the United States is from your own party, to present yourself as a change agent is not the easiest thing to pull off,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist. Referring to Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, Mr. Trippi added, “All Obama has to do is say, ‘Bush-McCain, Bush-McCain.’ ”

How does something so moronic get printed in the New York Times? You would think, after however many years of peddling such blatantly biased reporting, they would have at least managed to comprehend that there is more than one branch of government. A Republican most certainly can run against the establishment, since that establishment includes a Democrat controlled House and Senate (which also just so happens to be more unpopular than the Republican controlled branch of government).

Here’s a little quiz for the New York Times. Which of the two Presidential candidates holds committee chairs as a member of the majority party? Here’s a hint: it’s not the republican.

From Britain, but the same basic story could just as well be told from America:

The head of the NHS rationing watchdog has said he is ‘genuinely sorry’ for a delay in approving a new treatment for blindness.

But campaigners said Andrew Dillon’s comments would be of little consolation to the thousands of Britons who have lost their sight in the two years it took NICE to make its final decision.

The watchdog has now approved Lucentis, which is used to treat wet age-related macular degeneration, a condition which affects 26,000 new sufferers every year.

NICE’s original recommendation was that patients had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they would be given treatment to save the sight in the other.

The proposal caused a huge public outcry from doctors and campaigners, prompting a U-turn in December last year before further consultation resulted in the final decision today.

NHS thought it was their responsibility to decide what level of risk warranted use of this drug. The public vehemently disagreed with the determination that the drug was only worth taking after eye-sight was lost in one eye.

Why is the individual’s own judgment not sufficient? Let people decide when they want to take a drug, and risk the side-effects, not government. If they want to wait until they are blind in one eye, then they can.  But no one knows better than the individual how to properly way the consequences of their choices.

Proponents of government interventionism always promote these watchdog groups as protecting consumers, but what they really do is needlessly delay the operation of the market.  The real beneficiaries are the drug manufacturers, whose already approved products need not face the level of competition they otherwise would without government meddling.

Freedom is a wonderful thing.  Let it happen.

Hat tip: OpenMarket.org

I apologize for the lack of posting lately.  I’m getting settled into new living arrangements.  I should be back to more regular updates within a few days.

Gallup covers the Biden Bounce:

An analysis of historical election poll trends by Gallup Poll Managing Editor Jeff Jones shows that recent presidential campaigns have enjoyed a small (though short-lived) bounce from the running mate announcement. This includes a four percentage point bounce for John Kerry in 2004 after selecting John Edwards, a 5-point bounce for Al Gore in 2000 with his announcement of Joe Lieberman, and a 3-point bounce for George W. Bush in 2000 upon choosing Dick Cheney. Bob Dole received an extraordinary 9-point bounce in 1996 after bringing Jack Kemp onto his ticket.

All of these bounces occurred before the respective party’s convention began, and in most cases the candidates received an additional boost in the polls upon completion of the convention. Thus, any increase in Obama’s support in the coming days would seem to be more the result of the star-studded and well publicized Democratic national convention than the apparently lackluster Biden selection.

Surprisingly, the public just isn’t all that enamored with the liberal dream team.

Regular readers will know I have many issues with Ron Paul. From his quirky and misguided obsession with the gold standard to his head-in-the-sand isolationism (and his tendency toward kook conspiracies), he often rubs me the wrong way.  But on many other issues he is one of only a few voices representing federalism and limited government.  In that vein, this op-ed by Dr. Paul is worth reading, especially considering the type of big-government rhetoric that is about to bombard us from Denver.

It’s a vicious cycle, I tell you.

Climate change could release unexpectedly huge stores of carbon dioxide from Arctic soils, which would in turn fuel a vicious circle of global warming, a new study warned Sunday.

And according to one commentary on the research, current models of climate change have not taken this extra source of greenhouse gas into account.

…

Commenting on the research, Christian Beer of the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, pointed out that the climate change models upon which future projections are based, do not include the potential impact of the gases trapped frozen Arctic soils.

“Releasing even a portion of this carbon into the atmosphere, in the form of methane or carbon dioxide, would have an significant impact on Earth’s climate,” he noted in his commentary, also published in Nature Geoscience.

Methane, another greenhouse gas, is less abundant than carbon dioxide but several times more potent as a driver of global warming.

Our hysteria has not yet been properly calibrated to take into account this new source of doom! And to think just how much more wrong our predictions could be if we did take this new finding into account.

On a related note, I couldn’t help but scoff at reporting this pathetic:

The Nobel Prize-winning UN panel of climate change scientists project temperature increases by century’s end of up to six degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Arctic region, which is more sensitive to global warming than any other part of the planet.

“The Nobel Prize-winning UN panel of climate change scientists.”  The purpose of that love-fest description is to get you to bow to the dictates of the IPCC without asking questions.  The problem is that the description is entirely misleading.  First of all, the IPCC is not a scientific panel; it’s an intergovernmental panel (hence the I in IPCC).  It’s made up of government officials, environmentalist activists and yes, some scientists.  Furthermore, it does not follow the scientific process of peer review, and many scientists involved in the reports were never given a say in the final product, but had their names attached (often over their objections) anyway.

“But it received a Nobel Prize,” the faithful will assert.  Yes, the Nobel Peace Prize, which is not awarded for scientific accomplishment, but, history suggests, for successful implementation of left-wing ideology.

AFP sells the IPCC as an award winning scientific authority, but it is nothing of the kind.  Don’t let their falsehoods intimidate you.

For those who understands how government works, stories like this are no big surprise:

Erroneous and fraudulent Medicare payments for medical equipment could make up almost a third of the number of disbursements by the program, according to a draft report from the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general.

…According to an executive summary of the draft report obtained by Congressional Quarterly, Medicare officials massively underestimated the payment error rate in the durable medical equipment program, or DME, which reimburses Medicare beneficiaries for items like wheelchairs and oxygen tanks.

The draft report summary says that in 2006, 31.5 percent of the payments made under the program were in error. That is much higher than the 7.5 percent error rate that the CMS had originally reported through its own fraud-finding Comprehensive Error Rate Testing program (CERT).

This kind of failure would be completely unacceptable in a free market. Government is a different story. Most likely this will be swept under the rug. If some pretense of corrective action is attempted, it will likely result in an even bigger and more incompetent government program.

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure…A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

- Isabel Paterson

On a similar matter to the video I posted yesterday, it seems Britain is seriously considering taking a hint from the Swedish and might actually allow their citizens a bit of educational freedom.

This summer, at least 25,000 children will drop out of English schools without a single qualification to show for their years of compulsory education. Some 240,000 will graduate from primary school unable to read or write properly. By autumn, some 250 schools judged to be failing will welcome an intake of new pupils. Youth unemployment will probably hit an 11-year high. It will, tragically, be just another year in one of the world’s highest-funded education systems.

Two strategies are available to David Cameron in addressing this scandal, should he get to No. 10. He could perform his own surgery on the comprehensive system pretending, as all prime ministers pretend, that he can actually control it. The Local Education Authorities, with whom the power rests, would almost certainly ignore him, as they did Tony Blair. But the second policy would be a new one. He would invite anyone to set up a new state school, run it independently of government, and receive a sum likely to be more than £6,000 a pupil.

He would, in short, seek to bring the Swedish education revolution to Britain. When Mr Cameron first promised to do this at the Tory conference in Blackpool (along with Wisconsin-style welfare reform), it sounded a rather abstract idea, the stuff of think-tank seminars rather than everyday life. Yet in the last five months Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, has been carefully designing a blueprint which would enable the establishment of a new breed of local independent schools, funded by the state but not run by it. It is potentially a plan of huge significance.

…

Freedom works.  Maybe one day the unions and other entrenched interests can be defeated here in that State’s and we can have some.