Measure for Measure: Bin Laden Gets His Last 15 Minutes

The American Administration should release the Bin Laden photo(s).  Not because the photos will prove he was killed.  Photos on the internet prove nothing -- just ask Elvis.  Not because of "spiking a football."  But because those who celebrated Bin Laden's evasion of G-d's Justice and American determination should be reminded, in the thousand words that a picture provides, that there is no evading G-d's justice and that Bin Laden and his fellow shark food aspirants were writing America's epitaph way too prematurely.  Bin Laden thought America was weak, soft, lazy, and certainly never could pursue a determined manhunt for a decade.  Those who reveled with him in that belief, those who spiked their own footballs at America after every terrorist outrage, deserve to see photographic imagery revealing the stark reminder of reality:  There is no evading justice.  Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini all died young.  Justice caught up with each.

America does not relent.  Even the most incompetent and weak-kneed American Presidential Administration since that of Jimmy Carter -- and possibly the weakest and most incompetent in all American history (with apologies to Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan) -- saw this one through.  They had no choice.  The American People would not let Obama relent.  We would not let him close Gitmo.  We would not let him put terrorist leaders on civilian trial in Lower Manhattan.  We accepted enhanced interrogation and rendition, refusing to let Holder lay a hand on any of those who protected our country during the Bush-Cheney years. Much as we forced Obama finally to go down to Louisiana and to clean up the mess in the Gulf of Mexico, after the President and his inexperienced and unqualified staff  fumbled and bumbled by refusing repeated offers of boom and of assistance from oil-cleaning vessels, so we forced him to clean up after Al Qaeda -- like it or not.

As the final judgment took place, G-d saw Osama finished exactly as he merited, measure for measure.  He had murdered 3,000 Americans who perfunctorily had left for work on the morning of 9-11 as they respectively had done every other morning -- a quick cup of coffee, a brief glimpse of a newspaper, perhaps forgetting to say "good-bye" or to hug or kiss a loved one on the hurried way out the door.  None saw what lay in store that day, and thousands who survived them live a decade later with the pain that they never said "good-bye."  Garth Brooks captured that feeling -- the feeling of never having said "good-bye" to a loved one before he died -- years before 9-11 in his incredible song "If Tomorrow Never Comes."  I personally have lived 44 years with that pain, having been too young and immature to exchange "good-byes" with my Father as he lay in a hospital bed dying of leukemia.  That pain has wracked me nearly half a century, and it never will end -- never having gotten to say "good-bye."  But at least I have been able to visit my father's burial site, and I have said "good-bye" there.

For the families who lost 3,000 souls on 9-11 at Osama's inducement, there were few chances to say"good-bye."  The survivors forever will live with that amplified pain, even as the victims never saw it coming.  And, for so many of those victims, their final remains never were found by the subsequent crews.  Many who died at the Twin Towers never will be found.  They are part and parcel of Ground Zero.  Their survivors cannot go to their gravesites.  There is no coming to terms or ultimate closure.

And so it was fitting, in the ultimate measure for measure, that Bin Laden died a decade later in a sudden hail of frenzy, never having seen it coming.  It was a day that had begun like all others with the three wives and the 23 kids.  And then, from nowhere, with no advance warning, it all came to thud of a halt.  A hail of fire, a blown-off piece of skull, and tomorrow never came.  Only A flash of fire and a last image: that of Uncle Sam's SEALs discharging their weapons at his head.  And, even as those who survived him never got to say "good-bye," they and their fellow mourners have nowhere to go to pay their respects.  His body is gone, remains disappeared.  There is no gravesite, no marker.  As Moses the Zionist cheerfully sang in Exodus 15:3-5,10:   "G-d is a master of war. . . .  Pharaoh's chariots and warriors He threw in the sea, and the most select of his officers sank in the sea.  Deep waters covered them; they descended in the depths like stone.  . .  [T]he sea enshrouded them; they sank like lead in water."

And so Osama, too, promptly sank in the ocean like lead, subsumed by the mighty waters and the deepest of depths.  There is nowhere to go to say "good-bye, Bin Laden."  By now, part of him still may lie on the ocean floor, part in some whale, part in some shark.  Perhaps, by now, a bit even in some local aquarium's population.

Gone at once.  Never saw it coming.  Nowhere to be found.  Measure for measure.

That, too, is G-d's justice, as realized by the armed forces of a nation determined not to relent, not to let its weak and inadequate national leadership back off.  And that is the testimonial power of that photo -- for every terrorist and terrorist-wanna-be who ever spiked a football towards America.  There is no evading justice, and this United States of America will not relent.

Always the Jews -- Not: There Is No Specifically Jewish Angle to the Giffords Shooting

I respectfully recoil from asserting a Jewish angle in every story (although JTA effectively finds it). Although everything in HKBH”s world may unfold with a purpose to help the Jewish People to perfect our souls, not everything arises from someone thinking about “The Jews.” Edward VIII did not abdicate the throne after ten months because he was infatuated with the chance to marry a woman who had divorced a Jew. (Wallace Simpson had divorced Ernest Aldrich Simpson. His father, Ernest Louis Simpson, had changed his surname from Solomon. Always the Jews.)

This guy was a nut. He merits the privilege, by dint of his own hard efforts, of being deemed by all of us a 100% nut. He may have had an interface with an extremist hate group because they hate Latinos or African Americans or even people from the planet where Loughner perhaps thinks he comes from.

It does not help us or abet the truth to find a Jewish angle in this if there honestly is none. Giffords is a Jew because a Reform rabbi married her to an astronaut named Kelly?

This maniac, Loughner, loved Mein Kampf? Well, he also loved Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan. http://www.businessinsider.com/jared-lee-loughner-2011-1 My mind can be changed, but I am not persuaded that this is about Jews. Nor is it about American politics. It is about a nut.

It is not about the Tea Party any more than John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan because of Democrat rhetoric that demonized Reagan in the day. Hinckley wanted to impress a fictional character protrayed by Jodi Foster in the movie “Taxi Driver.” Our present maniac, Loughner, wanted to change the currency or English grammar. Really. It is like the guy who killed Allard K. Lowenstein – he had been very close to Lowenstein but became a paranoid-schizophrenic. Much as some people needed to find a Jewish angle, or blame the Republicans for prosecuting the Vietnam War in the face of Lowenstein’s principled objections, the bottom line behind Lowenstein's murder was that that his assassin was a nut. Charles Manson’s extended family did not slaughter Sharon Tate because she was married to a Jewish filmmaker.

Representative Giffords’s mother, Gloria Fraser, was a Christian Scientist. In 2001, at age 31, Giffords began identifying with the paternal side of her ethnicity. The interesting thing, though, is that her Jewish paternal-line grandfather, Akiba Hornstein, had changed the family surname to “Giffords” in order to hide their Jewish identity. Now, with Hornstein’s presumably non-Jewish granddaughter tragically shot by a nut, some in the American Jewish media race to turn her tragedy into an act of anti-Semitism. The Hornsteins can run, it seems, but they can’t hide.

Although Loughner may indeed have been motivated by anti-Jewish animus, I am skeptical. Give the crazy man his due – he is just plain insane.

Seattle Takes Down Those Despicable Anti-Israel Bus Ads: In Fairness, Credit Goes to Pamela Geller and David Horowitz

For the record, it should be noted that Seattle made the bus-ads decision today only after Pamela Geller’s “American Freedom Defense Initiative” bought 25 bus ads (twice as many as the anti-Israel ones) with an equally confrontational message showing bloody victims from Hamas terror bus-bombings with the header: “Hamas Terror: Your Tax Dollars at Work,” and then David Horowitz entered to buy yet another several-thousand-dollars-worth of confrontational bus ads titled: “Palestinian War Crimes: Your Tax Dollars at Work.”

Today, Pam Geller’s advertising representative first got a phone call that the Kings Metro system had decided to refuse her ads, then received a letter from Sharon Shinbo, in Seattle Metro’s Sales and Customer Services department, advising her that the Geller ads were being denied under rules pertaining to running ads that are “so objectionable under contemporary community standards as to be reasonably foreseeable that it will result in harm to, disruption of, or interference with the transportation system” and that are “so insulting, degrading or offensive as to be reasonably foreseeable that it will incite or produce imminent lawless action in the form of retaliation, vandalism or other breach of public safety, peace and order.” Therefore: “The content of the advertisements and the unprecedented response that the County has received to another recently proposed ad of a similar nature show that the American Freedom Defense Initiative ads do not meet the standards set forth in these sections, including among other things, that they pose an unacceptable risk of harm, disruption and interference with the transportation system and other breaches of the public safety, peace and order.”

It is my humble opinion that the efforts of the Jewish community of Seattle were virtually nugatory in obtaining the satisfactory result that all the ads are being rejected. Nonetheless, Seattle residents may anticipate that the community leaders will race to the mails to rustle up a last surge of tax-deductible donations from the locals before the tax-year ends next week.

Truth is an important weapon. It is important for us to know and to acknowledge that the real turning point came when Geller and Horowitz each used their respective organizations to buy a large number of equally confrontational ads. Those ad-buys guaranteed that the real goal would be obtained: not that Geller’s and Horowitz’s ads would run, but instead that no ads on the subject would run.

Geller and Horowitz deserve the thanks that few will give them, while the local Jewish groups will take the credit next week.

That’s how these liberals work. Free Speech for everyone. Free Speech for everyone. Bash Israel on the city buses. We can’t stop the ads even if we disapprove of the views because we protect all people’s right to speech.

Until the target is not Israel or Dead White Protestant Males. Then they suddenly find the Supreme Court language from Chaplinsky (1942) and Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). They know that Jews will not vandalize the twelve buses with anti-Israel ads. And they know what they are going to face if there are 30 buses with anti-Palestinian ads depicting . . . blown-up buses.

Reagan and Obama: A Great President, An Empty Suit

I was searching something pertaining to Menachem Begin -- his wonderful first-ever TV interview (in Hebrew) after being elected Israeli Prime Minister – and I also came across these pearls, four or five jokes that Ronald Reagan told about the Soviet Union and Communism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN3z3eSVG7A&NR=1

They say on CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, and MSNBC that Obama is brilliant, the greatest speaker and communicator in the White House in our lifetimes. Just four or five minutes listening to Reagan tell these jokes is all it takes to remember back and realize what an empty suit we now have sitting in the chair that once was filled by a truly great leader.

Also, despite his greatness, Reagan also had a humility. You hear it in his voice, and you see it in his bearing. How different from the empty suit that arrogantly now walks down stairways refusing to hold the bannister or even to have his hand seen near the bannister, to signal to all the media that “Hey, I do not slip. I do not use bannisters. Bannisters are for wimps. Bannisters get in my way.”

As painful as it is to live in the Age of Obama, it is even more painful after hearing a few minutes of Reagan.

Universal Health Care Issues -- and a Congress in Default

Some basic health care principles:

1. If there is a public government health-care option, assuring universal coverage, it will be cheaper than private insurance. Private companies exist to make profits so the owners can pay their food bills and rent. A government agency can exist on a permanent-losing-money basis because, no matter how much money the agency loses, the Government always picks up the tab either by taxing more or printing more money. Compare the Post Office and Fed Ex.

2. Because the Government plan will be cheaper than the private plans, private plans will be driven out of business. Private citizens will opt for the cheaper plan. Companies, knowing that a cheap public plan is available, will stop insuring their employees.

3. In short order, private insurers will be driven out of business. At that point, with a monopoly, Government insurance will become the health equivalent of the Post Office. Lines will get increasingly longer. Service will get increasingly shoddy. The best doctors will try avoiding patients on Government coverage, offering services on private bases.

4. As the demands for health care increase, resources will be strained, and the Government will need to cut back. Sit in a Post Office with six teller windows, and note that four are closed. Think back to the 4-cent stamp and contemplate the 44-cent stamp, even as the Post Office continues to lose a fortune. The reason that Britain and Canada have long lines and long delays in treatment is that the Governments lose control of costs and soon respond by cutting back in ways that make sense only to bureaucrats in Washington.

5. Now when you need an immunization, you go for immunization. Once the Government assumes full control of American health care, Government guidelines inevitably will be drawn to prioritize whether you may get an immunization before someone else. Expect guidelines that define "epidemic" to limit access to certain immunizations until a certain epidemiological number is reached. Thus, in the case of a Hepatitis A outbreak, gamma globulin immunization may be expected to be restricted until a minimum number of residents in a community have been stricken.

6. Universal care will take away from doctors an aspect of the motive to provide excellence. Private doctors vie for paying patients with reasonable health plans. By contrast, many gatekeepers on several of the HMOs take what they can get, compromise on fine points of quality care, live off capitation fees that pay them based on the number of heads they treat each day, and consequently drop all pretenses of bedside manner.

7. Under Government care, it will become profoundly difficult to see specialists, as money will be conserved by forcing patients initially to see lesser specialized "Gatekeepers" who will lose money by referring out, so will insist on personally treating symptoms that best would be treated by specialists. Instead of one visit to a dermatologist for a proper acne treatment regimen, then, a patient will need to first go through the time waste, inefficiency, and delay of being treated by a general Gatekeeper less experienced with specialized treatment.

8. Of the 47 million uninsured Americans, only 5 million actually need a fix in the current system. More than 10 million others are illegal aliens. Others can afford health care but opt, for their own reasons, to spend the insurance premiums instead on other items like cars, vacations, clothes, etc. For them it is a matter of choice, not desperation.

9. Any effort aimed at truly cutting health care costs would include, among its range of proposals, a proposal to reform Medical Malpractice Tort Litigation. Such litigation is often important, aimed at catching up with doctors who have malpracticed. However, such cases are few and far between. The vast majority are crap-shoot cases, in which an attorney takes case on contingency -- meaning that the client has nothing to lose in attorneys' fees -- and sometimes wins and sometimes loses. Often, malpractice insurers force weak cases to settle, even as their medical-doctor clients beg for a full defense at trial. These cases cost a fortune in litigation costs, even when plaintiffs lose, and doctors who are sued get penalized with huge increases in their malpractice premiums. Therefore, to avoid litigation at all costs -- literally, at all costs -- doctors tie up their patients and increase health costs exponentially by ordering ranges of unnecessary lab tests. The lab tests are costly, but they help the doctor establish for the disappointed patient that he was thorough. Moreover, costs are compounded by the tens of millions that doctors need to spend each year on malpractice premiums, costs that they shift to the consumer. There must be tort reform, and the failure to seek tort reform in the midst of a 1,017-page bill demonstrates that the Government is not seeking to save money.

10. It is a fallacy that increased funding for "prevention" will save money. Prevention is important, and it is necessary medicine. Doctors do it and should do it, but the reality to face is that prevention costs more money than it saves. Although prevention saves a rare patient from a costly illness and treatment regimen - a wonderful result that justifies prevention medicine -- the reality is that the cost entailed in applying the same prevention efforts for the many hundreds others who never would have contracted that disease anyway more-than-offsets savings. Yes, prevention still is important. It is costly but a worthwhile societal cost. However, no one should claim falsely that prevention saves money.

11. It is a falsehood that a doctor would rather evade prevention -- a low-income process for the doctor -- so that he ultimately can have the opportunity to make big money by amputating a diabetic's foot or removing a child's tonsils. We have doctors, and we know that such allegations simply are demagoguery. A doctor does not receive $30,000 for amputating a foot, but less than $750. Nor do doctors, sworn to uphold the values of Hippocrates, practice such vicious medicine.

12. There are two bona fide problems with the current health-care system. First, portability: a person who leaves a job loses his coverage. This quirky phenomenon forces people to work at jobs they hate because they risk losing their health coverage. Moreover, those who do lose their jobs, as has been so prevalent during this downturn, lose their coverage. If, G-d forbid, they contract a disease during the interregnum of non-coverage, then they cannot later get insurance privately as individuals because they are barred for "pre-existing conditions." Congress needs to resolve the portability and "pre-existing conditions" issues. On the one hand, insurers would be hurt financially by being forced to insure people with "pre-existing conditions." On the other hand, large corporations with many dozens of workers, typically provide health coverage for all employees without regard to pre-existing conditions. That is because their employee health pool is sufficiently large to offset anomalies. Congress should be able to craft a system or fix that pools enough private individuals in a way that somehow addresses these two issues.

13. At least two states have attempted Obama-style universal health care: Tennessee and Massachusetts. Both programs began with great promise -- they would provide universal care, keep costs down, and prove societal boons. Instead, both have emerged as unmitigated disasters, with costs skyrocketing and the states forced into heavier debt as a result. In both states, as the programs have fizzled, predictions of cost savings have fizzled, and care has been rationed.

14. Obama may not intentionally be planning to pull the plug on Granny, but his plan ultimately will do just that. As funds disappear, public health care skyrockets in cost, resources become more scarce, demand builds, there will be efforts to find cost savings. People needing surgeries that are adjudged non-essential -- say, a person with a painful knee who wishes a meniscus operation -- will be compelled to wait longer than conceivable, offered pain killers during the extended interregnum. And octogenarians needing hip replacements will be evaluated not as people but as expenses: "Is it a worthwhile expense to replace the hip of someone with a life expectancy of X years?" That is British and Canadian, but that is not the way that America values its citizens.

15. The most disheartening aspect of the public debate on universal health care is the revelation, most artfully stated by Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, that he parcels out to others the responsibility to read the legislation on which he will vote. It is disheartening that legislators would vote on a 1,017-page bill without reading the bill and understanding every provision. They did this with a stimulus bill that they passed on a short fuse, told falsely that they needed to pass it immediately because shovel-ready projects were awaiting cash infusions to begin. So they voted to spend $780 billion -- and only ten percent of the funds have been spent, lo these six months later. Similarly, the Democrats in Congress rushed through a terribly complex and ill-advised "Cap and Trade" bill that really is a "Home Heating Tax Raise for the Middle Class." State utility companies will be compelled to reduce emissions at such staggering rates that they necessarily will need to spend fortunes on infrastructure modifications -- all of which will be passed along to the end consumers. This project, an insane initiative at a time when the country cannot afford the luxury of turning the economy upside-down on a theory of Global Warming, will force enormous increases in our electric and gas bills . . . and in bills for all other commodities that use electric or gas: food, clothes, everything. It emerges as remarkable that the Democrats of the House voted for such a massive bill, so massive an infrastructure overhaul, without reading its provisions either. They were elected to do a job, and they have proceeded with malfeasance and recklessness, voting to approve the most extraordinary expansions of the American debt burden in our history -- without even reading the bills they approve.

The Judicial Panel That Ordered 40,000 California Prisoners Released Was Lop-sided and Will Be Overruled

A federal judicial panel recently ordered California to release some 40,000 prisoners over the next two years, if prison medical conditions do not improve markedly. In all the reportage on the remarkable ruling, the media missed one telling point:

All three jurists on that particular panel regularly judge from the more extreme side of the liberal bench. Two of them, District Judges Lawrence Karlton and Thelton Henderson, are Jimmy Carter appointees with long and distinguished extreme liberal records on the bench. The third, federal appellate judge Stepehen Reinhardt, is among the most extreme liberal judges on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Thus, news was made when, by the luck of the draw, a judicial panel was composed of three judges way-out-left.

No media attention was paid to the probability that such an extremely one-sided panel would be declared "tilt" on appeal.

The odds are overwhelming that a more balanced federal appellate panel will overturn the extreme ruling which, if impelemented, would convert California life overnight into scenes from a horror movie. If not overruled en banc, one would expect that the panel would be overruled by an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, unless the Supreme Court denies certiorari. But this one seems too important to be left unaddressed on appeal.