North Coast Online

Health Care Hypocrites

Wal-Mart's critics often complain that by not providing health care benefits to all its employees, it's unfairly shifting its costs for those left uncovered to us -- the taxpayers.  But now that Wal-Mart's CEO has spoken out in favor of nationalized health care, I'm not hearing what I'd have expected.

After all, now it's proposing that the taxpayers support all of its employees.  Why no outcry?

Rudy Misfires

Though I'm generally supportive of Rudy Giuliani's run for the Republican nomination, he's showing himself to be particularly tone deaf on a few issues.  Gun control is one.

Rudy Giuliani addressed a potentially troublesome issue with conservative voters, saying his policies as mayor to get handguns off the street helped reduce crime in New York.

"I used gun control as mayor," he said at a news conference Saturday during a swing through California. But "I understand the Second Amendment. I understand the right to bear arms."

He said what he did as mayor would have no effect on hunting.

Both Giuliani and Mitt Romney come across as nothing but big-time city slickers when they address the 2nd Amendment as a hunting protection statute.  Most of us are not at all concerned with hunting.  We just want to be able to defend ourselves and our families.  If an intruder breaks into our homes, we won't settle for cowering in a closet like the Brits and Canadians -- defenseless -- until the police show up.  Until they get that through their pointy, little, urban heads, they're not going to make much headway with conservatives.

Gone Fishing

The Buffalo News editorial board whined yesterday that the dead-end Congressional investigation of Alfredo Gonzales is diverting the Democrats from the "real" corruption of the Bush administration.  Fred Barnes explains what that amounts to: must--get--Rove.

He is the chief target of Democrats, liberals, and the left, and they burn with a desire to see him discredited, fired, and jailed. If all else fails, and it has so far, they'll settle for tainting him as impolite [a la Sheryl Crow].

A few Democrats have talked of impeaching President Bush, but that idea is a nonstarter. Representative Dennis Kucinich has called for impeaching Vice President Cheney. But with enemies like Kucinich, Cheney doesn't need friends. When the Democratic presidential candidates were polled at a debate in South Carolina last week, they pointedly failed to agree with Kucinich. So that leaves Rove at the top of the Democratic hit list.

Rove is more than a symbol. He is the architect of Bush's election triumphs and an influential player in pushing the president's agenda. He represents Republican success. The Democratic strategy now is to criminalize that success by treating normal political conduct by the Bush administration, spearheaded by Rove, as a series of criminal acts.

[excerpted]

So what are Rove's crimes? That's what Democrats, now in control of Congress and armed with subpoena power, are desperately looking for. Their hopes initially rested with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. When he cleared Rove of wrongdoing in the CIA leak case, their disappointment was palpable.

Now they've turned to congressional fishing expeditions.

The Congressional Democrats, in other words, are playing Nifong to Rove's lacrosse player.

Abridged, Not

A civil rights victory in Kansas.

The Sky And The Dollar Falling Together

When global warming enthusiasts claim that we haven't seen "weather like this" for 50 years and that's supposed to prove that something alarming is afoot, do you ever think to yourself that -- yes, but we've already evidently seen this so what's the big whoop?  Well, the dollar has dropped to "historical lows" against the Euro, but as the Econopundit points out, the Euro hasn't been around all that long.

WHAT THEY TELL YOU: The dollar dropped to an all-time low against the euro after the U.S. government reported the economy grew at its slowest pace in four years.

WHAT THEY DON'T TELL YOU: The dollar's been around for quite a while. On the dollar-historical scale, the euro was invented last week. "All time" highs or lows aren't really very interesting under these circumstances. Similarly, "slowest pace in four (count them -- 4!) years isn't that interesting either (except as a scary headline).

Read the whole thing -- there's a lot more that "they don't tell you."

How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm?

Americans claim to love their farm subsidies -- of course they don't think about who pays them.

Here's the best survey I've ever seen on farm policy.  Big findings:

Farm subsidies are extremely popular.  Respondents had to choose between the following positions:

A. It is not consistent with the American way to have a whole sector of the economy dependent on government handouts at taxpayers’ expense. We should trust the market, not the government, to find the right balance between supply and demand.

B. There is nothing more important than food. The government needs to subsidize farming to make sure there will always be a good supply of food and that the price does not go up and down according to the whims of the market.

37% preferred the free-market position; 58% preferred the interventionist position.

I can't help but wonder what the responses might have been had the second question read something like this.

B. There is nothing more important than food.  Government needs to pass regulations that raise its prices above what they might have been in order to make sure that farmers never lose money and that prices do not go down when more food has been produced than is needed.

That's what farm subsidies do after all.

Campaign Finance Deform

Don Boudreaux explains why campaign finance reform is so foolish in a letter to USAToday.

To the Editor:

Drummond Drew writes that "We need to find a way to get money out of politics" (Letters, April 26).  He mistakenly supposes that carts push horses. Money is in politics only because politicians confiscate and control so much of our money.

The only way to free politics from the influence of money is to free our money from the influence of politics.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

He's correct, of course.  We have every right to support candidates who will reflect our own positions on the matters they will debate and pass laws on.  It's our lives and livelihoods they're potentially harming or helping after all.  But campaign finance reform has turned into little more than protecting incumbents against bad publicity from constituents opposed to them.

Have you noticed that campaign finance reform is a lot like lobbyist reform?  It's supposed to help us, but never seems to. When politicians set about to regulate lobbyists, they inevitably impose all sorts of rules on -- the lobbyists!   The lobbyists cannot take a Congressman to dinner and the lobbyists must not give him tickets to a football game.  The lobbyists may not fly her to the Bahamas and the lobbyists dare not . . . you get the idea.

Well, why not just create a rule that members of Congress can't accept anything of monetary value from a lobbyist or they'll be punished?  The reason that John McCain doesn't stand a chance in hell of getting the Republican nomination is his benighted campaign finance reform bill.  It's well-recognized now that it didn't deprive political candidates of a single dime -- it just limited the rights of the rest of us to support whom we wish, when we wish and how we wish without hiring a lawyer and an accountant to do it.

Now Governor Spitzer's proposing campaign finance reform for New York.  Well, when his proposal comes out, take some time and read it.  Decide for yourself whether it will limit the politicians' access to money or just the New York electorate's ability to influence elections.  I'll bet on the latter.

That Fiendishly Clever Bush

The Buffalo News editorial board claims that Alberto Gonzales's refusal to resign is just a distraction.

Good Republicans who don’t yet want to go so far as to call for Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to resign have begun referring to him, more in sorrow than in anger, as “a distraction.”

Of course he is. That’s the role Gonzales has been assigned in the damage control party that the entire Bush administration has become. As long as the focus is on the hangdog Gonzales and his apparent nonmanagement of the Justice Department, less attention will be paid to the White House political operation run by Karl Rove and its suspected mismanagement of the same department.

Gee, if a bunch of humble reporters in Buffalo have caught on to the Republicans' latest wily ploy, you'd think that Pelosi, Reid and Schumer could figure it out, too. Leave Gonzales alone and go after the big fish!  Hey, I heard that Al Gore's in town today; maybe he read the paper and can get word to someone in charge that the Democrats are being hornswoggled again.

Is This A Trend?

It’s nice to see teens opting not to eat meat

Yeah, there's more left for me.

Cheap Seats

Every year when these figures come out, it's worth another mention.

Buffalo Niagara International Airport ranks among the five cheapest airports from which to fly in the country, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

“This is the best we’ve ever ranked. This is excellent,” said Lawrence M. Meckler, executive director of the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority.

The federal air fare survey pegged the average cost of a round-trip ticket in the United States at $378 in the fourth quarter of last year.

In Buffalo, fliers paid a slim $295.58.

No matter how much I might disagree with the NFTA over other issues, I can't deny that it's done a stellar job building, managing and publicizing Buffalo-Niagara Airport.