From Real Clear Politics:
Castro's One 'Hell' of an Achievement
By Carlos Eire

Fifty years ago Fidel and Raul Castro hijacked an entire island, and ever since that New Year’s day, they have never relaxed their grip on it. What can one say about such an anniversary, if one is Cuban? This fateful date hovers over all of us like a mushroom cloud, smothering our past, present, and future.

Fidel Castro always boasted that he and his so-called Revolution were loved by “the Cuban people,” and many have believed him. Don’t let that fool you. “The Cuban people” he spoke about were a grotesque abstraction, a figment of his imagination that he successfully projected onto the world stage. He loved to speak for all Cubans, and to think of himself as our embodiment. Yet he betrayed each and every Cuban, simply because he demonized all of us who disagreed with him, and enslaved a whole nation in the name of eternal class warfare, creating new elites who dedicated themselves to suppressing their neighbor’s rights. If you objected to his self-anointing as Maximum Leader or questioned his quixotic schemes, two painful choices were open to you. Just two. And nothing has changed under Raul.

One option was to oppose the so-called Revolution. But if you dared, even by murmuring in the dark, you faced certain imprisonment, torture, or death at the hands of the new elites. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans were brave enough to choose that path, but the world at large never paid much attention to them, or simply denied their existence. The other option was to beg for perpetual banishment. Nearly two million Cubans chose that route, but millions more never got the chance. No one knows for sure how many thousands have drowned at sea while trying to escape.

Exile is never easy, but it is even harder when you are turned into a villain. Fidel loved to portray all of us exiles as arrogant troglodytes who refused to share in the dreams of “the Cuban people” as he imagined them. We were vilified, stripped of our land, our families, and all our belongings, down to wedding rings and family photos. We were picked clean, and the new elites got to keep everything. And many around the world still think of us as selfish louts.

Those who remained behind lost a lot too, besides their basic human rights. As they waved their Cuban flags at mandatory rallies and waited in line with their ration books for scraps, and as they listened to countless promises about a very distant glorious future, they saw other Cubans oozing out of the island in a steady stream, like blood from a gaping wound. And they also had to watch everything crumble around them, helplessly, while new hotels sprang up and hordes of privileged tourists from the capitalist world flowed in like toxic sludge, to exploit them, the ragged noble savages, and to gawk at their ruins and reclaim Cuba as their tawdry playground.

We exiles are always asked: aren’t the free medical care and education provided by the Revolution a great achievement? “No,” we say, speaking from first-hand experience, as the only people on earth fully qualified to comment on this subject. Those programs are a sham, and their cost insufferably high. Fidel and Raul have always claimed that “the Cuban people” were incapable of achieving social justice by any means other than those dictated by them. Their legacy, like that of all despots, rests on violence: repression is the heart and soul of their Orwellian notion of social justice, which demands that free expression be stifled at every turn, and that everyone live in abject poverty, save the elites.

In the long run, it matters little that all sorts of false claims are made for Cuba’s woefully inadequate health care and education programs. Within the island itself, the state constantly reminds Cubans that they owe everything to “the Revolution” and must therefore obey it unconditionally, like slaves on a plantation. In sum, the Revolution owns you, body and soul: no subservience, no benefits.

The ultimate legacy of the Revolution may very well be its utter contempt for Cubans. For half a century now, Cuba’s leaders have strangled all political discourse, poisoning whatever common future all of us Cubans could have hoped for. The Castro regime has not only expelled twenty percent of the population and ripped apart millions of families, but also fanned hatred and intolerance. In the process, the Revolution turned us all into beggars of one sort or another, either in our own homeland or in exile, and bequeathed to us a destitute island prison, part brothel, part work camp, part freak show, where the only way to escape despair --short of suicide-- is to flee, or to become an agent of repression.

That is one hell of an achievement. Hell itself, one might say.

Carlos Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University and author of "Waiting for Snow in Havana," winner of 2003 National Book Award, nonfiction.

From baltimoresun.com:
Ex-Colts connecting again
An old photo helps reunite two
Baltimore teammates and friends 53 years later

By Mike Klingaman

October 8, 2008

Look at the picture, taken in a dime-store photo booth in 1955. What do you see? A black-and-white snapshot of black and white buddies hanging out - in black-and-white, segregated times. They seem an odd pair. One wears a wide smile, a starched shirt and a bow tie. He glows with the naivete of Barney Fife. His friend, dressed casually, is smiling, too. But his is a weathered, worldly smile, a look born, perhaps, of the day. Both men, then Baltimore Colts rookies, would leave their mark on pro sports.

Bow Tie, aka Raymond Berry, helped lead the Colts to two world championships during a stellar career as a Hall of Fame receiver.

Teammate Leroy Vaughn left football after one season. His son, Maurice "Mo" Vaughn, became a bigleague slugger and the American League's Most Valuable Player in 1995.

And the photo? It lay tucked away in Berry's belongings, forgotten for more than a half-century before he discovered it last year.

Finding the picture led Berry to search for Vaughn, whom he hadn't seen in 50 years.

Back then, racism was still rampant in America. Had the picture been taken in the deep South - had a white man and a black man entered a coin-operated photo booth, shared the single stool and closed the curtain - there would have been hell to pay.

But it was during a road trip to Chicago or New York that two first-year players stepped into a Woolworth's, spent a quarter and forged their friendship on a wallet-sized keepsake.

Last year, when they reconnected, they spoke by phone, shared memories and vowed to reunite this summer. Soon after that conversation, a letter arrived at Vaughn's home in Midlothian, Va.

Inside was a copy of the vintage photo. Vaughn placed it on the coffee table in his living room. Berry's picture sits on the desk of his office in his house in Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Vaughn is now a retired high school principal; Berry is the spokesman for a national insurance company. Both are 75.

But in 1955, they were a couple of low-grade, 22-year-old rookies determined to stick with the Colts.

Each arrived in camp unnoticed. Berry, myopic and slow afoot, was a 20th-round draft pick out of Southern Methodist University. Vaughn, a native Baltimorean, was a free agent from Virginia Union, where he had starred at quarterback - a door then closed to almost all black players in the pros.

They met during training camp at Western Maryland (now McDaniel) College in Westminster: a country boy from north Texas and a steelworker's son from a working-class neighborhood in South Baltimore. Both single, Berry and Vaughn played catch, met for chow, shot some pool, shared some laughs.

"It was as if we'd been drawn together by a magnet," Vaughn said.

Occasionally, in their free time, the two would drive to Baltimore in Berry's black 1950 Chevy to see the sights or maybe catch a show. Vaughn took Berry with him on a visit to his alma mater, Carver Tech, an all-black trade school on the city's west side. Once, Berry and several other Colts invited Vaughn to a movie at the Hippodrome Theater. Turned away because of Vaughn's presence, the players went instead to the Regent Theater in a black neighborhood on Pennsylvania Avenue.

"We hit it off real good," Berry said of their relationship. "Who would have thought, back then, that the best friend of a guy from Texas would be a black quarterback?"

Vaughn remembered Berry for his character and drive. Bigotry, he said, was absent.

"I'd been around long enough to smell it," Vaughn said, "but I didn't smell it at all. Raymond and I really became friends."

Times were changing in Baltimore. In 1954, the city had been among the first to desegregate its public schools. A year later, had they wanted, Berry and Vaughn could have sat together for the first time at the lunch counter at a Read's drug store. Or played tennis on the same court at Druid Hill Park without risk of arrest.

But integration came in fits and starts. In 1955, if a black woman tried on a hat in a Baltimore department store, she was expected to buy it. Overt racism died grudgingly. Not until 1963 would Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Woodlawn or the Northwood Theatre (near then- Morgan State College) admit black patrons.

Pro football was changing, too. By 1955, black players had gained a toehold in the NFL. Three blacks made the Colts' roster that season, and though Vaughn wasn't one, he did make the team's taxi (practice) squad.

Berry? He caught 13 passes that season, a measly sum on a 5-6-1 club that finished 10th in passing yardage among 12 teams.

But Berry was developing a quirky work ethic that would soon become legend. Resolute and obsessive, he sought perfection. And the strong-armed Vaughn helped him in that pursuit.

"Raymond and I worked out every chance we got," Vaughn said. "On Mondays [the players' day off], he'd pick me up in that beat-up old car at my parents' place on Franklin Street, and we'd go to Druid Hill or Clifton Park to practice his pass patterns.

"When we got there, he would park, then open the hood and tape his key to the carburetor, so no one would steal the car. Then we'd go to work.

"He had me throw balls high and low, at his feet, to make him dive left and right. If he had dropped a pass on Sunday, we ran that play again and again until he figured out why. He left nothing to bear."

Each workout seemed to last forever - Vaughn and Berry playing catch in a public park at a time when such scenes might have raised a few eyebrows.

"That [setting] would have been extremely unusual in Baltimore in the mid-'50s," said C. Fraser Smith, author of Here Lies Jim Crow: Civil Rights in Maryland.

"But despite the fact that there were social controls against doing such things, people did mix with other races," Smith said. "Some had their own moral compasses and abided by them. They had a sense of what was the decent way to behave in this world."

After practice, Berry drove his teammate home. On occasion, he stayed for dinner as Vaughn's mother filled his plate with chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans and biscuits despite the protestations of the weight-conscious Berry.

"We really did have a good time," Vaughn said.

If they heard racial slurs on the street, neither man remembers them.

"I didn't pay attention to what other people were thinking," Berry said. "Besides, I wasn't raised to think that way."

After football season, the two went their own ways. Berry played 12 more years with the Colts and made the Pro Bowl six times. He retired with 631receptions, then an NFL record. Berry later became coach of the New England Patriots, taking them to the Super Bowl in January 1986.

His stand on civil rights never wavered. In 1964, he was serving in the Maryland National Guard when race riots broke out in Cambridge. Guard officials chose Berry to lead a human relations committee to help restore peace. The All-Pro receiver spent six weeks in the Eastern Shore town. Ultimately, calm prevailed.

And Vaughn? After a two-year Army hitch, he tried a comeback with the Colts in 1958 but got hurt early in training camp.

" Jim Parker [the Hall of Fame tackle] stepped on my right knee and popped the cartilage," Vaughn said. "I was finished."

He turned to education. Vaughn taught high school chemistry, earned a doctorate and retired a high school principal in Norwalk, Conn.

He never forgot the time spent with Berry. When his son, Mo, showed promise in baseball, Vaughn spent countless hours tutoring the youngster. Each practice seemed to last forever, but Vaughn kept pitching them in there, high balls and low ones, just as he had done years before with a determined, if nearsighted, split end.

"Of course, those [football] workouts were on my mind," Vaughn said. "Mo liked to work, just like Raymond. And if you want to improve in anything, you have to practice."

Last year, when Berry finally tracked him down, Vaughn was stunned to hear his voice.

"I was tickled to death to get the call," Vaughn said from his home in Virginia. "We're going to get together [soon], to sit around and reminisce."

Berry, for one, can't wait.

"It's been a long, long time," he said. "I think we'll probably laugh a lot."

Surely they will record their friendship again.

Said Vaughn: "We'll find one of those old photo booths and have another picture taken - 53 years later."

Sun researcher Paul McCardell contributed to this article.

From The New York Times:
Grief Marks Anniversary of Triumph of Castro
By DAMIEN CAVE

December 31, 2008

HIALEAH, Fla. — Four months after they appeared in the waters between Havana and Miami, the four dead men remain nameless. At a morgue in the Florida Keys, they lie on stretchers stacked like bunk beds, their bodies chewed by sharks, their faces too putrified to be recognized.

The police suspect they were Cuban rafters. Nilda Garcia thinks one of them might be her son — and the thought makes her weep. Fourteen years after she left Cuba on her own makeshift boat, she finds herself wondering once again: When will it end?

“How many mothers are going through this?” Ms. Garcia said in an interview at her daughter’s apartment here as she awaited DNA results on the bodies. “How many more are crying for their losses? How many young people have drowned in this sea? How many?”

Fifty years ago today, many Cubans cheered when Fidel Castro seized power in Havana, and even now, the revolution attracts many fans — as evidenced by the Canadian tour agencies advertising trips “to celebrate five decades of resilience.”

But the bodies speak to a different legacy. Here in South Florida, where roughly 850,000 Cubans have settled over the years, repeated waves of painful exile and family separation define the Castro era. The revolution never met their hopeful expectations, the island they love has slipped into decay, and for many, this week’s golden anniversary provides little more than a flashback to traumas, old and new.

“It pounds in everybody’s conscience every day,” said Ramon Saul Sanchez, 54, the founder of Movimiento Democracia, a Cuban-American group known for using boats to stage protests. “Fifty years is something very hard to accept.”

Some Cubans remain defiant. Huber Matos, a former revolutionary leader who came to Miami after Mr. Castro sent him to jail in 1959 for suggesting that the Cuban government included too many Communists, said that the anniversary inspired him to keep pushing for change.

“When you think of what you have to do, you can’t be sad,” Mr. Matos, 90, said. “To continue working, that’s the key.”

But for many, the revolution’s 50th anniversary has inspired a period of reflection. Cubans across Florida say they are mourning privately, or trying to forget, and formal commemorations are being kept to a minimum. If Miami in the 1980s was a place of militants, where “Havana vanities come to dust,” as Joan Didion wrote, today it is also a home to newer arrivals who ask, Must the pain go on?

A poll released this month by Florida International University shows that 55 percent of Cubans in Florida favor lifting the United States embargo against Cuba, up from 42 percent a year ago. It is the first time a clear majority has held that position since the survey began in 1991.

President-elect Barack Obama — while backing away from an earlier pledge to meet with Cuban leaders during his first year in office — condemned the current “failed policy” during the presidential campaign and promised to make it easier for Cuban-Americans to visit relatives on the island or send them larger amounts of money.

Even among those who support the 46-year-old embargo, like Senator Mel Martinez, a Republican, continued damage to families has become a more prominent concern.

“This is an ongoing tragedy,” said Mr. Martinez, who left Cuba at age 15 and spent four years without his parents. “How many people today are still being separated? How many people in Cuba are making plans to leave?”

Ms. Garcia was a “balsera,” one of the 38,000 rafters who fled Cuba in 1994. She said she left her suburb of Havana because her daughter needed medical care she could not get in Cuba for a brain tumor. Her son, Osmani, stayed. He was 20 at the time, a speaker of English and French, who became an independent journalist.

His work often put him at odds with the Castro government. In one dispatch, published on Oct. 26, 2007, he condemned Cuba’s foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, for mischaracterizing comments from President Bush.

“I will not take the time to point out all the lies told by Felipe Pérez Roque at this press conference, but I will say there was a worried look on his face and those of his cohorts,” Mr. Garcia wrote, in an article posted online. “It almost seems that they too are realizing there is little time left to the Castro dictatorship and that change is very near.”

Instead, over the next year, political pressure on Mr. Garcia increased. In June, according to a report in a Cuban online forum, he was arrested and interrogated by state officials. Two months later, his mother said, he was filmed by a Cuban television reporter at a protest against the government, scaring him enough to flee.

Mr. Garcia’s relatives said that on the night of Aug. 15, he climbed aboard a boat with no motor and seven or eight other people, pushing off from an area near Havana with hopes of reaching Florida within a few days.

The pace mattered; the sea was churning. By early Monday morning, Tropical Storm Fay had moved through Cuba into the Florida Straits, bringing nearly a foot of rain, swells of several feet and winds that would strengthen to 60 miles per hour.

Ms. Garcia, 64, a home health aide, said she was not sure if her son had known the storm was coming. Even if he had, she said, “he was desperate and needed to go.”

She said her son had done all he could to change Cuba from the inside. “How can Cubans confront the government, with rocks and sticks?” Ms. Garcia said. “Everyone has nothing, and the people are afraid.”

She found out about the bodies from the news. The first one, tagged 0107 in morgue records, appeared in the waters off Craig Key just after 5 p.m. on Aug. 21. A fisherman called the Coast Guard, and two Monroe County police officers pulled the dead man from the teal-blue sea. Three other bodies followed, appearing offshore over the next 24 hours in a line heading north.

Detective Terry Smith, one of the lead detectives investigating the case with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department, said the locations and currents suggested that the bodies had probably spent several days in the water, drifting from somewhere to the south, though the Coast Guard’s computer analyses were not definitive.

Their identities have been even harder to determine. E. Hunt Scheuerman, the medical examiner for Monroe County, which includes the Keys, said all four bodies were naked and gnarled, with only three defining characteristics. Body 0107 wore a ring with a Celtic cross and green stone on the fourth finger of his left hand; 0109 arrived with a white sock and blue Lotto running shoe on his right foot; and 0110 had a tattoo on the inside of his lip that said “Raquel.”

Ms. Garcia said the ring sounds similar to one she gave Osmani, but the ring in the morgue is yellow, suggesting gold, and the ring she gave her son was silver.

She said she hoped her son was at the American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where she was processed before coming to the United States. And initially it seemed possible. The Coast Guard stopped a boat near the Bahamas with eight or nine Cuban rafters a few days after Aug. 15. But it must have been another group, Detective Smith said; Mr. Garcia’s name could not be found on the Coast Guard’s list of repatriated refugees.

At least two other Cuban families in Miami are in a position similar to Ms. Garcia’s. In emotional phone calls, they have told Detective Smith about relatives who left Cuba on Aug. 15 in a boat, never to be heard from again.

“What if the four we received are not any of their relatives?” the detective said, discussing what haunts him most.

DNA may be the only way to know for sure. In September, Detective Smith swabbed Ms. Garcia’s mouth and sent the sample to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a comparison with the bodies. For the other two families, the DNA must be collected from closer female relatives, who live in Cuba.

Mr. Sanchez, of Movimiento Democracia, has been trying to arrange for secure samples from the island. “There are hundreds, probably thousands of Cubans who think they lost relatives in the high seas,” he said. But so far, he has received little help from either the Cuban or American governments.

And so the cycle continues. According to Coast Guard statistics, 10,489 Cubans have been stopped at sea since the beginning of 2005, more than double the 4,223 who were caught in the previous four years. A report in May from the Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami found that 131,000 Cubans had settled in the United States permanently over the last four years, and its title predicts more of the same. “Not Going Away,” it says. “Cuban Mass Migration to Florida.”

Ms. Garcia said she just wanted an end to the 50-year pattern: the uncertainty, tears and tales of woe.

Three months after her DNA reached the F.B.I., she is still waiting for answers. Conversations about her son are drenched with tears, and she is never far from a photograph that shows him staring straight ahead, with a stern face, a few wrinkles and thick, dark hair.

It looks like a passport picture — of a man who may have only reached a Florida morgue.

From THE TENNESSEAN:
Kennedy Center Honors celebrate
life and music of George Jones
By Peter Cooper

December 9, 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With a rainbow-colored ribbon around his neck signifying his position as a Kennedy Center Honoree, George Jones paused for a moment.

He stood on the most surreal red carpet in America — earlier that Sunday evening, that carpet had been crushed under the feet of Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Wonder Woman Lynda Carter and the R&B musician who goes by the stage name Ne-Yo — and pondered a weekend spent amid Washington power players and fellow honorees Morgan Freeman, Barbra Streisand, Twyla Tharp and Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey of The Who.

"We've met some beautiful people, and they kind of feel like old friends," said Jones, who at 77 is largely acknowledged as possessing the greatest singing voice in country music history. "We met Aretha Franklin, and she's real nice. And Barbra Streisand, she's just right down to earth. Barbra's husband, James Brolin, he's just about as country as you're going to get. I mean, he loves country music. I'm very surprised that so many of them are familiar with my work."

Jones' wife, Nancy, then explained how she was going to have to crack the whip around their house over the holidays to keep Jones' head from a perma-swell, given all the kind words directed his way in Washington during the nation's most prominent annual arts celebration.

Praise flows

Host Caroline Kennedy praised Jones' "tear-stained voice and raw emotion." Laura Bush introduced the Jones tribute section of the Honors by saying that she and her husband "have heard few sounds more lovely than the voice of George Jones. It's a beautiful gift to the world." Lily Tomlin professed her fandom, Alan Jackson called Jones "the last great voice of real country music," and Randy Travis said, "George has probably influenced more country artists than anyone that's ever been in this business, or ever will be."

Jones' official tribute included versions of his songs from Travis, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Brad Paisley, and a stirring version of "Amazing Grace" from Shelby Lynne, whom Jones took under his wing when she was a teenager. That gospel song was a nod to Jones' love of religious music and to his own life story, which involved plenty of shenanigans on the way to late-life sobriety.

Thirty years ago, Jones would have been cowed by the notion of sitting in starched clothes under chandeliers that snaked and gleamed like the rhinestone design on some giant's Manuel suit, in between a president and a movie star. All that would have been more than enough incentive for Jones to get bombed out of his skull and miss another plane, giving yet another reason for folks to call him "No Show Jones" instead of his more respectable nickname of "Possum."

Somehow, though, Jones seemed perfectly in place throughout the evening. As ambassadors and A-list celebrities, senators and statesmen found their seats, the sound system played Streisand's elegant version of "Somewhere" and The Who's nearly operatic "Love, Reign O'er Me," and then came piano tinkles and a honky-tonk beat and a Bible Belt voice that sounded at home inside the capital beltway: "In North Carolina, way back in the hills/ Lived my old pappy and he had him a still," began the recording of Jones' "White Lightning."

The official program began with Kennedy's welcome, and with some video from a Sunday afternoon White House ceremony. At that meeting, outspoken Bush critic Streisand met the outgoing president for the first time, and their cheek-peck was surely the most uncomfortable screen kiss of her career. The apparently recession-proof Kennedy Center audience — some of the 2,300 audience members had paid as much as $4,000 for tickets — guffawed at the footage. Jones and Bush eschewed comedic possibilities and opted for a handshake.

Then the tributes started, with Denzel Washington and Clint Eastwood talking about Tennessee native Freeman, who basked in blues performances from artists including 80-year-old Koko Taylor, 93-year-old Honeyboy Edwards, 95-year-old Pinetop Perkins and 83-year-old B.B. King. Daltrey and Townshend's segment was next, and that one featured music from Dave Grohl, Bettye LaVette, Rob Thomas and Chris Cornell, as well as a riotous introduction from actor Jack Black, who praised The Who for "A collection of (expletive)-kicking songs the likes of which will never be seen again."

Dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp's portion of the evening involved intricate, flowing movements that in no way resembled the stuff that Jones has seen a thousand times from, say, the Melvin Sloan Dancers at the Grand Ole Opry. And major stars — Beyonce, Glenn Close and Queen Latifah — participated in the Streisand section.

Friends helped celebrate

Jones' moments came after the intermission, just prior to Streisand's show-ending tribute. President Bush, who earlier had thumbed distractedly through a souvenir calendar while Kennedy spoke, appeared energized and enthused about Jones: He mouthed the words to "The Race Is On" while Brooks sang, and several times he patted Jones on the back good-naturedly.

Laura Bush spoke for several minutes about Jones' legacy and "one-of-a-kind voice," and then a video aired that documented Jones' artistic triumphs and personal struggles.

"We're celebrating his life," Honors producer George Stevens, Jr. said during a rehearsal. "And so first we want to tell his story, and to do it with a certain grace."

Paisley played and sang a version of Jones' hit "Bartender's Blues," and Travis introduced his take on "One Woman Man" by saying, "The Lord only made one George Jones. … Probably thought, 'That's enough. Better stop right there.' "

Jones seemed thrilled by Jackson's restrained, respectful "He Stopped Loving Her Today," and Brooks performed what the script referred to as "The Possum Medley": "White Lightning," "The Grand Tour" and "The Race Is On."

Lynne's "Amazing Grace" concluded the Possum portion, and thousand-dollar dresses rose from $4,000 seats as Jones received a standing ovation. He smiled and waved there in the Presidential box, looking at once regal and just as down to earth as . . . his new pal Barbra Streisand. George Jones was 700 miles from home and years removed from many dangers, toils and snares.

From Opinion Journal:
Obama Will Ration Your Health Care
Think of his health plan as a federal HMO.
By SALLY C. PIPES

People are policy. And now that President-elect Barack Obama has fielded his team of Tom Daschle as secretary of Health and Human Services and Melody Barnes as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, we can predict both the strategy and substance of the new administration's health-care reform.

The prognosis is not good for patients, physicians or taxpayers. If Mr. Daschle meant what he wrote in his book "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis," Americans can expect a quick, hard push to build more federal bureaucracy, impose price controls, restrict medicines and technology, boost taxes, mandate the purchase of health insurance, and expand government health care.

In his book, Mr. Daschle proposes a National Health Board to regulate the way health care is provided. This board would have vast powers in regulating the massive federal health-care system -- a system that includes Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs. Under Mr. Obama, it is likely that that system will be expanded and that new government insurance for the nonelderly, nonpoor will be created.

Given the opportunity, Mr. Daschle would likely charge the board with determining which treatments and drugs are cost effective and therefore permissible to use for patients covered by the government. And because the government is such a big player in the health-care market (46% of health-care spending comes from the government), the board would effectively set parameters for private insurers.

It is nearly certain that the process of determining which drugs and which treatments would be approved for use would be quickly politicized. The details of health-care policy may not be kitchen table conversation, but the fact that a Washington committee can deny grandma a hip replacement due to her age, or your sister a new and expensive drug, is. Health care is personal and voters will pressure lawmakers on access to care.

Liberal experts, Mr. Daschle included, believe that America needs to ration new technology and drugs. In his book, Mr. Daschle complains about overuse of new technology and praises the United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), a rationing system that controls government costs. NICE's denial of care is legendary -- from the arthritis drug Abatacept to the lung cancer drug Tarceva. These drugs are effective. It's just that the bureaucrats don't consider them cost effective.
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Americans will not put up with such limits, nor will our elected representatives. Mr. Daschle himself proves this. He punts the hard decisions about rationing to an unelected board. Yet his main proposals are not only about expanding subsidized programs to cover more people but about adding the massively expensive benefit categories of mental health, which has a strong lobby behind it, and long-term care, which is important to the broad middle class.

One of the great myths in health care is that the uninsured are responsible for driving up private premiums by shifting costs. Uncompensated care certainly shifts some costs to private payers. Yet these costs are actually quite manageable in the aggregate, akin to what retailers lose due to shoplifting. The major cost shift is from government programs -- Medicare and Medicaid -- to private plans. The government pays doctors to treat Medicare and Medicaid patients. But the rates it pays, on average, are less than the cost for providing care to these patients. This is why Medicaid patients, and increasingly Medicare patients, struggle to find doctors. Putting more people on these programs will destabilize the remaining private system and create a coalition for price and wage controls.

Americans will never tolerate this. Remember our managed-care experiment in the 1990s. It succeeded in its main goal of controlling costs without an aggregate reduction in health quality. But in asking Americans to limit their choices, it prompted a bipartisan act of Congress to provide patients with a Bill of Rights. Now Mr. Daschle proposes nothing less than a giant HMO with a federal bureaucracy setting the benefit plan.

Mr. Daschle's model is Massachusetts. But Massachusetts's plan is an unfolding disaster and demonstrates how Mr. Daschle's private/public model is merely a stalking horse for government-dominated health care.

The headline claim is that the program has signed up 442,000 more people for health insurance. The reality is that 80,000 of these were simply put on Medicaid and 176,000 more on the taxpayer-subsidized plans. Costs have exploded, requiring additional tax hikes and the entire system is only possible due to sizable transfers from the federal government. The plans are so unaffordable that in 2007, 62,000 people were exempted from the individual mandate. So much for universal coverage.

The only way the Massachusetts plan will survive is with continued and increasing federal subsidies -- that is, tax revenue from the residents of other states. The only way Mr. Daschle's proposed plan would survive is with massive deficit spending -- that is, with taxpayer money from future Americans, many of whom are not yet born.

Mr. Daschle and the Democrats have spent years developing both the policy and political strategy to make the final push for taxpayer-financed universal health insurance. They have the players on the field, a crisis providing a sense of urgency, and a playbook filled with lessons learned from years of health policy reform disasters -- most recently that of HillaryCare in 1994.

The big questions for believers in private medicine are at this point political and strategic. With employers and most insurers reportedly on board with the new administration's desire for radical overhaul, who will step in to ask the tough questions? Will these issues get raised in time to provoke a meaningful, fact-based debate? Americans could easily find that Mr. Obama's 100-day honeymoon ends with a whole new health-care regime they hadn't quite bargained for.

Ms. Pipes, president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, is the author of "The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen's Guide" (Pacific Research Institute, 2008).

From VDARE.COM:
Tale of Two Presidential Workout Fanatics—
A Study In Media Bias
By Michelle Malkin

December 26, 2008

Ah, the perks of media affection. On Christmas Day, the Washington Post delivered a front-page paean to Barack Obama's workout habits. The 1,233-word ode to O's physical fitness read more like a Harlequin romance novel than an A-1 news article.

Sighed smitten reporter Eli Zaslow, "The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games." [As Duties Weigh Obama Down, His Faith in Fitness Only Increases]Drool cup to the newsroom, stat.

Zaslow imparted us with vital information about buff Bam's regimen: "Obama has gone to the gym for about 90 minutes a day, for at least 48 days in a row." The Washington Post enlightened us with more gushing commentary from Obama friends and associates, who explain how, as the subtitle of Zaslow's opus put it, "Gym Workouts Help Obama Carry the Weight of His Position."

For adoring journalists, you see, Obama's workout fanaticism demonstrates the discipline and balance in his life. Apparently, what's good for Obama's glistening pecs is good for the country. Zaslow quoted Obama Chicago crony Marty Nesbitt, who offered this diagnosis: "He doesn't think of it as something he has to do—it's his time for himself, a chance for him to reflect. It's his break. He feels better and more revved up after he gets in his workout."

And when Obama feels better, the skies will part, the sun will shine (in moderate, environmentally correct, non-global warming-inducing amounts, of course), and peace will reign worldwide!

Too bad the doughy, McDonald's-chomping, coffee-guzzling members of the White House press corps couldn't see the merits of White House exercise over the past eight years. After giggling about his out-of-shape colleagues in the media, Zaslow mentioned in passing that President George W. Bush shares Obama's commitment to health. What he failed to acknowledge is that the same reporters who so greatly admire Obama's lithe figure derided Bush for his training schedule.

Former Washington Post writer Jonathan Chait famously attacked Bush three years ago in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times headlined "The (over)exercise of power." Recounting how President Bush ran 3.5 miles a day and preached more cross-training to a federal judge, Chait fumed, "Am I the only person who finds this disturbing? ... What I mean is the fact that Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy."

Chait argued that Bush's passionate devotion to exercise was a dereliction of duty. "Does the leader of the free world need to attain that level of physical achievement?" he jeered. "It's nice for Bush that he can take an hour or two out of every day to run, bike or pump iron. Unfortunately, most of us have more demanding jobs than he does."

Can you imagine any member of the Obamedia mocking the incoming gym rat-in-chief this way?

Chait was not alone. Reuters journalist Caron Bohan weaved the same unhinged themes into a piece on Bush's two-hour, 17-mile bike ride with cycling champ Lance Armstrong in Crawford, Texas, in 2005. After noting his six-day-a-week workout schedule, Bohan steered the piece into an anti-war screed:

"Bush says exercise helps sharpen his thinking. But some of his critics view his exercise obsession as an indulgence that takes time away from other priorities. Among them is Cindy Sheehan, the Vacaville, Calif., mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, who until late last week was camped out down the road from Bush's ranch seeking a meeting with him to discuss her opposition to the war. Sheehan, who left her vigil on Thursday to tend to her sick mother, has said she believes Bush should take fewer bike rides to have more time to focus on the 'the nation's work.'"[Bush tests his mettle in bike ride with Armstrong, August 20, 2005]

Fit Republican president = Selfish, indulgent, creepy fascist.

Fit Democratic president = Disciplined, health-conscious Adonis role model.

The good news: In just a few short weeks, W. will be able to exercise in peace, free from the disapproving glares of journalists now rushing to mop the sweat—er, the glisten—from Barack Obama's hallowed brow.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin's latest book is "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild."

From Real Clear Politics:
The New Culture War
By Rich Lowry

Barack Obama's election was supposed to signal the end, or at least the diminishment, of the cultural issues that the GOP had feasted on electorally for 30 years. The "wedge issues" of old had been a Republican contrivance anyway, and once freed of them, American politics would be more praiseworthy (and, not coincidentally, more liberal).

This storyline lasted all of a few weeks, as Obama's inaugural ceremony has become embroiled in a nasty cultural spat. In a nice (and shrewd) gesture, Obama invited the evangelical Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation Jan. 20. The ensuing firestorm sheds light on two questions: Is there a real culture war in this country, deeper and more abiding than any one political party's electoral strategy? And who is the aggressor in it? The answers, respectively, are "yes" and "the cultural left."

Warren is comfortably in the American mainstream. The pastor of the Saddleback evangelical mega-church in Lake Forest, Calif., he's the author of "The Purpose Driven Life," which sold more than 20 million copies. He's worked to broaden evangelicals' public concerns, widening them out from abortion to alleviating world poverty and fighting global warming. Passionate about fostering a civil discourse, he's twice welcomed Obama to forums at his church.

Warren, in short, is an unlikely hate figure, more Billy Graham than Pat Robertson. But he has a black mark against him for those yelping in rage about his participation in the inauguration. He believes what a majority of Americans do, what the vast majority of the planet does, and what all major religions maintain about marriage: namely, it should be defined as between a man and a woman.

Warren supports partnership benefits for gay couples, but not marriage. According to a recent Newsweek poll, he's among two-thirds of Americans against gay marriage: About a third of Americans favor gay marriage, a third favor civil unions but not marriage, and a third favor no legal recognition. Even Barack Obama - the liberal paladin whose inauguration allegedly will be besmirched by Warren's presence - says he opposes gay marriage, although apparently few of his supporters believe him (for good reason).

Warren is a particular provocation to the left after the passage of Proposition 8 in California. The ballot initiative - supported by Warren - amended the California Constitution to define marriage as a union between man and woman.

The vote was necessary only because the California Supreme Court had imposed gay marriage on the state earlier this year. As in so many other culture-war battles, the traditionalists were the ones in a fundamentally defensive posture. They defended an age-old definition of marriage, while the left sought - using its favorite tool, the courts - to run roughshod over majority sentiment.

Now, traditionalists will have to beat back an attempt to define their view of marriage as out of bounds, as the moral equivalent of racism. Mormons who contributed financially to Prop. 8 have been vilified and intimidated, and California Attorney General Jerry Brown has deemed Prop. 8 so illegitimate he won't defend it in court even though it's his duty to do so.

The attacks on Warren are part of this strategy: If Pastor Rick can be defined as a hatemonger undeserving of a prominent public stage, surely the same can be done to any opponent of gay marriage.

In a story about Hollywood's outrage at Obama's choice of Warren, Democratic political consultant Chad Griffin told the Los Angeles Times: "Rick Warren needs to realize that he is further dividing us at a time when the country needs to come together. I think he needs to gracefully step aside."

Ah, yes, "gracefully step aside." That's essentially what the cultural left has been asking traditionalists to do for 30 years now, to politely shut up while it goes about redefining the country's mores. The answer must now be, as it has always been, "No way, no how."

From The Times Literary Supplement: Another good review of an essential book:
Americans in the gulag
The little-known story of US citizens trying to escape the Depression
Adam Hochschild

December 23, 2008

Mountainous Kolyma, only a few hundred miles west of the Bering Strait, is the coldest inhabited area on earth. During Stalin’s rule, some 2 million prisoners were sent there to mine the rich deposits of gold that lie beneath the rocky, frozen soil. In 1991, when researching a book about how Russians were coming to terms with the Stalin era, I travelled to the region to see some of the old camps of Kolyma, legendary as the most deadly part of the gulag, some of whose survivors I had interviewed. In a country beset by shortages of building materials, all of the hundreds of former prison camps accessible by truck had long since been stripped bare. The only ones still standing were those no longer reached by usable roads, and to see them you had to rent a helicopter.

I spent a full day being flown across this desolate territory, its gravelly mountainsides streaked with snow even in June. We descended into three of the old camps, finding rickety wooden guard towers, high fences of rusted barbed wire, and, in one camp, an internal prison of punishment cells. Its roof was gone, but thick stone walls still stood; within them were small windows crossed both vertically and horizontally by heavy bars, the intersections further cinched with thick iron bands. At the end of the day in Kolyma, as shadows filled the hollows like spreading ink,we flew back to the town where I was staying. I sat in the helicopter cockpit between the two pilots. Beyond every jagged ridge, it seemed, in every valley, were the ruins of another camp, the wood blackened by decades of exposure, as if an angry giant’s hand had scattered them across the harsh, bleak moonscape.

No one knows exactly how many Soviet citizens met unnatural deaths during the quarter-century that Stalin wielded absolute power, but adding together those who were sentenced to death and shot, died in manmade famines, or were worked to death in gulag camps like these, authoritative estimates put the total at approximately 20 million. Like the other great horror show unfolding in German-occupied Europe in the same period, the Soviet story was one of mass deaths on an almost unimaginable scale. But, unlike the Nazis, the Soviets, in their first two decades in power, were partly sustained by great idealism on the part of people all over the world who were fervently hoping for a more just society. The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis is a poignant reminder of this. For his account of the Stalin years and their aftermath is seen through an unusual prism: the experience of tens of thousands of Americans who emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Many of them, like the Russians they lived among, fell victim. Bits and pieces of this story have been told before, mainly in survivors’ memoirs. But to my knowledge this is the first comprehensive history, and a sad and fascinating one it is.

Like the thousands of Western Europeans who arrived in the same period, these immigrants were driven by the Great Depression at home and the belief that a better, fairer way of life existed in the USSR. A quarter of the US labour force was unemployed, and millions of Americans were standing in line at soup kitchens or living in “Hooverville” shantytowns when they had lost their homes or farms. Was it not possible to construct a more humane society than this? Of course it was – and in Russia, apparently, they were doing it. Factories were hiring – particularly skilled workers and engineers, who were being offered what seemed to be lucrative contracts. And these factories were said to have nursery schools, clinics, libraries. Although many of the American immigrants had been socialists or Communists in the US, you didn’t have to be one to believe that somewhere in the world someone had been able to build a more sensible economy than the Depression-ridden American one. One of many intriguing facts Tzouliadis has unearthed is that an English translation of something originally written for Soviet schoolchildren, New Russia’s Primer: The story of the Five-Year Plan, spent seven months on the US bestseller list in 1931.

When the Soviet foreign trade agency advertised jobs for skilled American workers in Russia that year, 100,000 Americans applied. 10,000 Ten thousand of them were hired; untold thousands more headed for the country on tourist visas, hoping to find work when they got there. By early 1932, the New York Times was reporting that up to 1,000a thousand new Americans were arriving in Moscow each week – and that the number was increasing. The Times correspondent,, Walter Duranty, was a notorious fellow traveller and may have exaggerated; nonetheless, that year the number climbed high enough for the English-language weekly Moscow News to go daily. The Immigrants brought their children, and soon there were English-medium schools in at least five Soviet cities. For $40 million, Stalin bought 75,000 Model A sedans from Henry Ford, plus an entire Ford factory – which, of course, required expert technicians to run it, and so more Americans came.

With them, the newcomers brought baseball. Tzouliadis includes a group photograph of smiling young American players at Gorky Park in the summer of 1934, with the initials on their jerseys identifying their teams: the Moscow Foreign Workers’ Club and the Gorky Auto Workers’ Club. Paul Robeson, who had been a star college athlete before becoming a Communist and a famous singer, was named honorary catcher of one of the teams. Other American baseball teams sprang up everywhere from Kharkov in the Ukraine to Yerevan, Armenia. (A map in this book would have helped, incidentally.) The motif of baseball threads through The Forsaken, and some of its pages trace what happened to the men who played that day in Gorky Park.

Baseball caught on with Russians, and they began joining the American teams, or starting their own, although they considered the practice of stealing bases somewhat capitalistic. Then suddenly it was 1936, and the Great Purge had begun. Having already jailed, shot or exiled all his real political opponents, a paranoid Stalin now went after imaginary ones, in the process tapping a deep vein of Russian xenophobia. Waves of mass arrests swept across the country, with an estimated one out of every eight Soviet men, women and children being seized in the space of half a dozen years. At the show trials of high Communist Party officials, the charge was usually espionage for a foreign power. And so foreigners, or anyone connected with foreigners, were suspect. No more Russians joined the American baseball games. Very soon, there was no more baseball.

From Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other Russians who have borne witness, we know about the midnight arrests, the interrogations and forced confessions, the trains hauling packed boxcars of emaciated prisoners to the labour camps scattered across the Arctic, Siberia, Kazakhstan and elsewhere. Tzouliadis traces the story of the Americans who got caught up in this madness through a wide range of letters and documents, and the published memoirs of two men who played on American baseball teams in Moscow in the mid-1930s, Victor Herman and Thomas Sgovio. Unlike many of their fellow players, whom they occasionally encountered in the gulag, they survived their imprisonment: Herman in central Russia and Sgovio in Kolyma. No one knows how many of the American immigrants were caught up by the Purge and perished either in execution cellars or in the camps, although one mass grave with more than 140 American bodies was found in 1997 near the Finnish border. Tzouliadis does not try to estimate the total American dead. My own guess would be that the figure is in the thousands; if we add victims among Britons and other Westerners living in USSR at the time, the total would be in the tens of thousands.

The testimony of Herman and Sgovio has found its way into some histories of the gulag. But Tzouliadis’s most unexpected contribution is the sorry tale of how desperate pleas for help from captive Americans, some smuggled out of prison, some made by family members still at liberty who risked their lives by walking into the closely watched US Eembassy, were ignored by diplomats in Moscow and officials back in Washington. Tzouliadis has burrowed through hundreds of old State Department correspondence files for this evidence, finding even a wooden tag smuggled out of a camp with the words, in English, “Save me please and all the others”. Even though the conservative Ambassador of tiny Austria was able to save the lives of more than twenty Austrian left-wingers by sheltering them in his basement, US officials, contemptuous of the Americans who had come to Russia out of naive idealism, did virtually nothing. Yet they could have saved many lives if they had tried, for Stalin was shrewd enough to want to please a valued foreign trading partner. Again and again, the diplomats turned aside those begging for help, generally with the excuse that there was no proof that the prisoner involved was a US citizen. This was literally often true, for when Americans arrived to work in the Soviet Union, the Russians usually confiscated their passports – the better to exert control, and also to acquire a stash of US passports they could later doctor and use to send Soviet spies abroad.

Why were the officials so callous? For one thing, making too much noise might get you expelled from what was, for a rising young Foreign Service officer, a plum post. Beyond that, diplomats temperamentally are seldom troublemakers; the exceptions, like Raoul Wallenberg or Henry Morgenthau Sr, the US envoy to Turkey who did so much to publicize the Armenian genocide, are rare. And finally, behind those who played it safe at the US Embassy in Moscow in the late 1930s was another factor: their boss.

In the American practice of handing out ambassadorships to presidential chums and campaign contributors, never was there a more ill-fated choice than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s selection of Joseph E. Davies as US Ambassador to Moscow in 1936. Davies knew nothing about Russia; he had made a small fortune as a lawyer, defending corporations against government tax collectors during the boom times of the 1920s. He had then married the owner of a much larger fortune, the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, known for her array of extravagant homes, one of which was the world’s largest private yacht, the three-masted Sea Cloud, with a crew of sixty-two.

Davies “loved bigness”, Justice Louis Brandeis once said, criticizing him for his failures on a government commission that was supposed to curb monopolies. In Stalin’s Russia, Davies found bigness that satisfied him completely. To the horror of other diplomats, he attended several of the Purge show trials and told the State Department that justice had been done. It did not seem to bother him when Soviet acquaintances vanished. One Russian diplomatic liaison officer had taken Davies’s daughter and some friends out for dinner and dancing when two men came to their table and tapped him on the shoulder. “He was never seen again”, Tzouliadis writes. Nor was Mrs Davies much disturbed by any of this, even though, she said years later, from their bedroom at the US Ambassador’s residence, she could sometimes hear women and children screaming in adjacent apartment buildings as men were arrested in the middle of the night. Her main interest was in collecting art, jewellery and china that had once belonged to the Russian aristocracy, something she was able to do on a lavish scale as the government raised hard currency by selling off confiscated collections.

In 1937, the peak year of Purge arrests, ’sDavies managed to spend most days of the year outside Russia, some of it cruising the Baltic on the Sea Cloud, with his astonished Soviet secret police guards along as his invited guests. At the end of his stay in Moscow, he was overjoyed that Stalin granted him a two-hour audience, after the dictator had refused to meet other Western ambassadors. “He is really a fine, upstanding, great man!”, Davies told an underling at the Eembassy. Of all the foreign deniers and abettors who helped Stalin get away with mass murder, this staunchly capitalist couple were certainly among the strangest.

There is a later chapter to Tzouliadis’s story, for a second wave of Americans entered Soviet prison camps – at least 2,800 of them, according to one Russian document he cites – at the end of the Second World War, as the Red Army overran POW camps in Germany, and a third, smaller wave as the Chinese turned over POWs captured in Korea. The Russians refused to give back these men or even to acknowledge their existence. With the Cold War now under way, the leverage that the US had once had over the Soviet Union was lost, and more Americans met their end amid snow and ice.

Tzouliadis apparently does not know Russian, but aside from a few odd transliterations and an infelicity in his subtitle (the acronym gulag refers to the entire network, not to an individual camp), this has not limited his research. Soviet officials who dealt with Americans during the 1930s are by now all dead, many of them Purge victims themselves; and Russian archives, once briefly accessible in the early 1990s, are again now mostly closed to foreign researchers. This is an American as well as a Soviet story, and in telling it skilfully from a wide variety of rarely used and mostly American sources, Tzouliadis has etched a small piece of a great historical cataclysm and reminded us of how Stalin’s regime devoured not just human lives but hopes, dreams, trust. Those American baseball players who came to Russia found themselves in a tragic game with no umpire – either in the Kremlin or the US Eembassy. This book makes me wonder whether the several mass-grave sites I saw in Russia – one full of earth-stained, bullet-riddled skulls in central Siberia, and one of bones bleached white under an electrical transmission tower on a foggy, wind-swept hillside in Kolyma – might have contained any of my countrymen who were once catchers, pitchers, or first basemen.

THE FORSAKEN
From the Great Depression to the Gulags
Hope and betrayal in Stalin’s Russia
By Tim Tzouliadis
472pp. Little, Brown. £20.
978 0 316 72724 2

Adam Hochschild's books include The Mirror at Midnight: A South African journey, 2007, and Bury the Chains: A history of the antislavery movement in the British Empire, 2006.