Sorting out the battlefield after the Obama healthcare melee, a big winner was the pharmaceutical industry. Despite having to pay annual fees of over 80 billion dollars over the next decade, drug manufacturers will benefit from an additional 32 million previously uninsured customers. In addition, they extracted longer patent protection for newly developed drugs and, more importantly, avoided Government price controls.

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There are pianists and then there are piano players, according to Mike Greensill, who is of the latter persuasion.

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They have been sworn enemies since Henze, in some published musings, attacked Lachenmann for writing musica negativa. The pair then had a ding-dong on Stuttgart Radio in which the less flamboyant composer felt he was given insufficient chance to counter the accusation. Since then, they have co-existed in uneasy silence, broken by the occasional barbed letter to a music magazine.

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Society is held together by communication and information” – a sentiment perfectly true in 2010, though James Boswell wrote it in a book published in 1791. I just finished reading Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, and while its 1,433 pages cannot be summarized in a newspaper column, I hope you won’t mind my trying to anyway. Every 1-0 Cubs/Phillies snooze fest gets reported; why not this?

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Over the past decade or so, there’s been a movement in our schools to make every kid a winner. In gym class, in sports events, in spelling bees, in tests of every kind, every child was often given an award or citation to cushion their fragile self-esteem. Competition was eliminated and “winning” was downgraded to a mere technicality. If you came in second, you still won! No losers here, kids. You’re all equally mediocre.

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It is one thing to do nothing to help Iranian dissidents. It is quite another to help Iran harass them in the US. Yet that is precisely what Obama has done.  Of course, he may not have done it on purpose as yet another good will gesture. At least I am willing to give him and his administration the benefit of the doubt. Obama and his bureaucratic minions merely acted according to their internationalists bent.  They gave Carte Blanche to Interpol and Iranian authorities recognize a good opening when they see one. Iran invented Chess. Remember?

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Nothing makes me happier than liberals who reveal what they truly are: close-minded bullies who believe they and they alone own the franchise on enlightened thinking. Nothing exemplifies their true nature better than their collective reaction to the new immigration law enacted by Arizona. Two stories top the list: In Los Angeles, the City Council voted to boycott Arizona businesses; in Illinois, a Highland Park H.S. girl’s basketball team, scheduled to play in Arizona after winning their first conference championship in 26 years, had their trip cancelled by school officials.

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November is coming… what are you doing to make a difference? Every day I get more and more frustrated with Team Obama and their Chicago way of politics. Whether it’s the perpetual assault they’re waging on private industry in the form of onerous regulations and job-killing tax and cap energy policies, or this nonchalant amateur-hour approach they’ve taken to the War on Terror, the social experiment of President Obama’s first term cannot continue to a second. That’s why it’s time for you to stand up and win back Washington.

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Yesterday I wrote that democratic leaders around the world need to stop taking Obama’s phone calls. He rings them up, shoots the breeze over the weather, and then instructs them to fight their debt crises by taking on more debt.

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RAY KELLY: He could be totally innocent. This was one of the first videos that we obtained. We thought it warranted an interview. This happened just around the time that the pop started to go off inside the car.

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You hear one of these stories and it reminds you why we tolerate subzero temperatures nine months out of the year. Take a look at sunny California: dominated by big-government democrats, their elected leaders have driven the state’s economy straight into the ground long before any mention of a recession. Faced with a staggering unemployment rate of 12.6%, some folks got together to propose a common sense ballot measure that would suspend tax-and-cap energy taxes until jobs picked up again. How has the left responded? In typical fashion.

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When I started writing these columns many years ago, I often identified little things I called ‘truisms’ or ‘Perry’s law’. These are just little quirks in life that we all seem to encounter from time to time. What’s amazing is how true they are and how often they do actually happen.

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Stunning news via The New York Times today (see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/business/global/11reconstruct.html) that President Obama pushed a reluctant German Chancellor Angela Merkel into going ahead with the $1 trillion bailout for the European Union. Whatever positive effect the news of the latest $1 trillion monstrosity had was gone within 24 hours. The euro, stocks, and commodities all fell today as most thinking people sobered up and realized that you cannot effectively fight debt by going into more debt.

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In the media, President Hugo Chavez seems to be portrayed more commonly these days as a threat to golf, which he considers “bourgeois” and is trying to eradicate in Venezuela, than to regional stability.

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Please, everyone: Stop interpreting each little Obama administration hiccup as a potential repeat from the Bush years.

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But some never learn that lesson, and then it’s too late.

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In 2005, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement. President Bush (with the oh-so-”helpful” suggestion from Democrat Harry Reid) then named White House Counsel Harriet Miers as his choice to replace her.

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Last December, I wrote an article outlining the reasons for New York City to not allow the proposed construction of a Muslim Mosque and Cultural Center around the corner from Ground Zero.  This project is spearheaded by two Muslim groups:  The Cordoba Initiative, led by Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf and The American Society for Muslim Advancement, led by Daisy Khan who is Mrs. Rauf.  The building to be called Cordoba House is slated to be 13 stories tall with a projected budget of 100 million dollars, obviously not coming from these two sponsoring organizations. 

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I am less than enamored with the appointment of Elena Kagan to the supreme court. Why? Because she is not only yet another Harvard law graduate on a court limited to Harvard and Yale law graduates but that she thinks that state of affairs highly desirable. When she headed Harvard Law School she told a graduate that he should direct all his charitable giving to Harvard Law because she wishes to make the school the center of governing power of the US. Such a blind elitist view is troubling at anytime. It is particularly troubling during Jacksonian or democratic periods in which we are currently living. Her appointment is sure to further increase the current mutual alienation between the elite and the citizenry.

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Since taking office 15 months ago, the Obama administration has pressed a systematic suffocation of the free market—from the government takeovers of health care, the autos, student loans, and the banks to the attempted takeover of the energy sector to the new oppressive tax and regulatory schemes. The president has often chimed in on how evil, nasty, and greedy various segments of the private sector are (bankers, insurance companies, you name it.) He’s singled them out, wagged his finger, and declared that they will pay for their vile profit-seeking ways.

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Anyone on the fence about immigration reform, and about what direction it should go, needs to see this thing and then consider what it means.

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This week, Nitin Nohria, 48, was named dean of the Harvard Business School. At a time where MBA has come to stand for “masters of the business apocalypse” this is an important show of support for an ethics-focused approach to capitalism.

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Trust the UN to place in a position of moral authority to loyal servants of the most hideous regimes. The truth is that while we were all shocked to discover the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim, the former Austrian UN secretary General, we are hardly surprised to discover that Richard Goldstone, the useful Jew the UN Human Rights Commission chose to issue a report condemning Israel for human rights violations based on Hamas evidence used to be a loyal Apartheid hanging judge.

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Greece just moved out of the frying pan and into the fire. Violence has broken out across that country, resulting in deaths and anarchy, because the parliament has voted to try to save the economy with deep, deep spending cuts. Greece has been on a spending binge for decades, The government subsidized everything—from health care to vacations—and consequently, rang up an outrageous and unsustainable debt.

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First we were told it was a lone wolf, a white man in his forties. Mayor Bloomberg even suggested that he was against Obamacare. Then we are told Faisal Shazad was motivated by the foreclosure on his house and anger over the civilian casualties caused by American drone attacks on the Taliban. Now we are told it is the expected response of a group successfully targeted by drones on behalf of Pakistan’s civilian government. If I am skeptical, it is because Jaishe-e -Mohammad seems to be involved:

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So, a local San Francisco Bay Area news broadcast Wednesday, reported that several high school kids were thrown out of class for wearing American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo.

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On a trip to the Middle East last month I discovered a clue on getting through security faster. In Frankfurt, just as I was being told to remove a loose sweater, the Muslim woman directly ahead of me was let through wearing a heavy, full length, full button front coat. Apparently her hijab signaled there was less chance she was hiding something dangerous on her person than my bare head indicated.
When I pointed out this disparity to security, they admitted it, but said there was nothing they could do. (What about frisking?)
Not to be outdone by the Germans, the French have a better system. Two months ago a friend passed through Paris on his way from the Middle East. The Arab Muslim screeners found out he was Palestinian, and while the other passengers were being heavily scrutinized, he got the “hail fellow well met” treatment. Smiles and sympathy replaced not only his walking through the metal detector, but exempted his backpack from the indignity of x-ray as well. Good thing he was not in the mood to blow up a plane that day.

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New York and Washington, May 5, 2010 — International human rights and women’s rights leaders, attorneys, scholars, columnists, Iranian human rights activists, media figures, women in the arts, and other prominent women have joined a nationwide campaign to urge Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to denounce the recent election of Iran to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

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US Taxpayers Bailing out Euro Banks AGAIN IMF is to loan money for Greece and 17.1% of it is our money, money we are borrowing from the Chinese and Japanese.

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Yesterday I appeared on Securefreedom radio, the Center for Security Policy’s radio show, discussing with host Frank Gaffney the attempted Times Square terror bombing and the Baghdad recount. Frank engaged me in some interesting back and forth about NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s off-the-cuff speculation regarding the likely identity and motivation of the would-be car bomber. To my on-air comments I would add that clearly our Mayor is a brilliant manager and businessman, but perhaps he should leave the counter-terrorism analysis to others. You can listen to the show here.

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In a tasty little piece of irony, the Associated Press recently reported that a Muslim man, who created a TV station to combat negative stereotypes about Muslims, is on trial for beheading his wife. 

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I’m surprised that no one, to my knowledge, has pointed this out:  As each week goes by, the Obama administration’s tone looks and sounds more and more like a replay of the 1960s.  We have seen a return to the constant use of “racist” to describe opponents.  We have seen a return to the “non-judgmentalism” that allowed the 60s generation to peddle the absurd concept that all cultures have their own “validity.”  We have seen a return to the notion that the United States is a dangerous nation, no better than any other, and probably worse.  We have seen selective concerns about women and minorities, concerns expressed only when they don’t interfere with the larger leftist agenda. (If they do, the female and minority victims are treated with silence.)  We have seen the growth of a new isolationism, similar to the isolationism that grew on the left in the 60s.

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