Maggie's Farm

Below is the translation from the Chinese government's first-ever White Paper on the Internet in China. Part Three of the six-part document is titled "Guaranteeing Citizens' Freedom of Speech on the Internet."

China Internet watcher Rebecca MacKinnon reports:

I've heard from several journalists and policy analysts (not people based in China, for whom such cognitive dissonance is normal) who at first glance thought they were reading The Onion or some kind of parody site. How, people asked me, can a government that so blatantly censors the Internet claim with a straight face to be protecting and upholding freedom of speech on the Internet? The answer of course is that China's netizens are free to do everything... except for the things they're not free to do.  The list of the latter, outlined in the next section titled Protecting Internet Security is long, vague, and subject to considerable interpretation:

...The Chinese government attaches great importance to protecting the safe flow of Internet information, actively guides people to manage websites in accordance with the law and use the Internet in a wholesome and correct way. The Decision of the National People's Congress Standing Committee on Guarding Internet Security, Regulations on Telecommunications of the People's Republic of China and Measures on the Administration of Internet Information Services stipulate that no organization or individual may produce, duplicate, announce or disseminate information having the following contents: being against the cardinal principles set forth in the Constitution; endangering state security, divulging state secrets, subverting state power and jeopardizing national unification; damaging state honor and interests; instigating ethnic hatred or discrimination and jeopardizing ethnic unity; jeopardizing state religious policy, propagating heretical or superstitious ideas; spreading rumors, disrupting social order and stability; disseminating obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, brutality and terror or abetting crime; humiliating or slandering others, trespassing on the lawful rights and interests of others; and other contents forbidden by laws and administrative regulations.

Other than that, people are totally free. What's more, the use of the Internet by the people to "supervise" public officials is praised. As long as - in the process of said supervision - state power is not subverted, "state honor" is not jeopardized, nobody is humiliated or slandered, and no "rumors" are spread. The rise of Twitter-like microblogging services is even praised. (Twitter itself is blocked by the "great firewall," though tens of thousands of Chinese Internet users are believed to access it anyway through third-party clients and circumvention tools).

Rebecca MacKinnon is a must read for those who try to keep up on China’s increasing censorship of the Internet.

The Hill, chronicler of doings in the US Capital, left a word out of its report that the “Senate bill to repeal health reform lacks backing from GOP leaders”, the missing word being “yet.”

The report makes clear that the GOP leadership “support repealing the Democrats' health care law and then replacing it with alternatives that lower costs while improving access.”

However, the political question is when to do that, and the reality question is whether it can be done.

Politically, it would probably be useless now. But, all GOPers should anyway sign on to the proposed legislation now to repeal ObamaCare.  It’s already clear that the repeal legislation is going no where under current Democrat majorities in the Congress. To allow the liberal media and politicians to use some GOP leaders’ hesitation in order to denigrate and divide Republicans is as unfavorable to the GOP 2010 chances as being forthright may also turn off a few waverers. But, those wavering who might be influenced are from those usually voting Democrat anyway, and many are likely to return to old habits anyway in the 2010 elections. The polled majority still favor repeal now, 60-36%. So, all GOPers should endorse repeal legislation, now.

Last February, my op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “No GOP Ideas?: Try These 10” summarized a 2-week earlier blog post of mine, “Republican Health Care Plan? 10-Steps, Post-2010.”  The op-ed emphasized that the 10 could and should be dealt with each as separate legislation, with no harm to the others, instead of in a multi-thousand page omnibus bill that no one understands and that contains much dangerous as the Democrats rammed through Congress.

The blog post, also, pointed out that for 2010 electoral purposes and for reality of getting passed,

Congressional Democrats and the liberal media would use a Republican alternative as an opportunity to shred Republicans as uncaring or not doing enough to meet their visions, and delusions, that there is a magic bullet that solves all real and purported problems.

However, after 2010, there is still a problem, as I wrote:

Washington is still Washington, regardless of party, and lobbies would again kick into high gear to tilt to their own narrow advantage Republican proposals.  Enough Republicans, like Democrat politicians, would be swayed, and Republicans as a whole would be tarred and Republicans’ most energetic base be turned off by smarmy politics as usual in Washington.

That’s why I proposed the 10 discrete improvements, after the 2010 elections, that could be acceptable across the political spectrum, except by those die-hard for universal medical care or  die-hard for no-government-in-healthcare.  You can see the 10 at either of the links above, to the op-ed in condensed form, or more broadly in the blog post.

So, GOP leadership is being political and cagey.  Only Obama and Congressional Democrats are hoisted by their own petard, and I say let them swing.

FYI, last year there was a Republican counter-proposal to ObamaCare, scored by the CBO, that actually reduced federal deficits and average medical premiums. That’s $2.5-trillion not spent by the Democrats to put us all and future generations in smothering debt, and preserve the high quality and access to medical care that over 80% enjoy. The major difference from ObamaCare: the CBO said it would increase coverage for about 3 million Americans, versus for 26 million supposedly with improved coverage under ObamaCare. There may be more we may choose to do, affordably, some of which is in the 10 I propose, but there is clearly no excuse for reducing the quality and access to care of the other 80+%, and of succeeding generations’ medical and fiscal health.

The New York Times' report on a study by some Harvard students tortures the facts and the reader with root omissions.

I posted a Comment to the NYTs report, as follows (cut-and-pasted from the "preview" that awaits the NYTs to decide whether to publish it or not):

I just read the Harvard students' report. It is carefully done. BUT, it rests upon several false assertions, not enumerated in the study: First, it fails to mention that the term \"waterboarding\" originated in 2004. Second, it asserts that the history of the technique of interrogation is coterminus with \"torture\" outlawed by preceding laws, conventions and directives. The former applications of let's call it water torture were more severe in duration, application and laxer in supervision and frequency. And, one must remember that the US used it in only three cases upon trained high-value resistors to interrogation who, then, revealed valuable, life-saving intelligence, to no lasting ill-effects upon their health. Even President Obama's executive order banning \"waterboarding\" implicitly excludes our civilian CIA when necessary and authorized. The named major newspapers often, usually indeed, made the same sensationalist errors as the Harvard students, but insofar as they explained the technique or added correct adjectives and adverbs should not be faulted. -- The author of this article about the Harvard students' study, BTW, doesn't provide either a link to the study, for readers to examine it, nor does he even attempt to provide needed context, instead writing his and the students' assertions as legitimate in itself.

If you want to weigh in, go to the Comment link above or to the NYTs report link. Of course, be succinct, informed, and direct to matters of fact. 

For over twenty years, I’ve been a scrupulous, multi-credentialed independent health care consultant and broker. I and others who actually know anything from the experienced, practical and studied perspective have warned that the medical loss ratios built into ObamaCare are dangerous to the quality and costs of medical insurance.

Medical loss ratio measures the percentage of premiums paid out in claims and for quality improvement. Just paying out more on claims does not reduce costs nor improve quality. Duh!

I wrote about this last April, that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) said that ObamaCare’s medical loss ratios were within 5% of nationalizing the health insurance industry, so the Congressional Democrats who rammed ObamaCare through kept the medical loss ratios just below the 90% at which the multi-trillion dollar costs of outright nationalization would have to be counted by the CBO. What we got is a sham, nationalization masquerading – bad enough – as a highly regulated utility.

The CBO and the American Academy of Actuaries both pointed out that medical loss ratios are both misleading and can easily be contradictory to restraining costs or improving quality. This is particularly so when the formula is drawn too narrowly or ignorantly. Politicians' soundbites and regulator rampagers fit those categories of malpractice.

The largest insurance companies were at least half-way in bed with ObamaCare, looking to their own preservation, but now both they and brokers and the public are impregnated with a problem baby.

As during the HillaryCare debates, health care consultants and brokers are in the lead in trying to get sense into the examining room. We are virtually the only organized groups really fighting to keep government quackery away from your health. Sure, our already low commissions are in play, but so is your ability to have knowledgeable, independent guidance through the thickets of medical insurance and coverage.

The Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, the National Association of Health Underwriters, and the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors  have joined to plead to state insurance commissioners and medical insurance companies:

But “we fear the adoption of a narrow and static definition will adversely impact spending on certain important health plan activities,” the groups say.

In many cases, moves to reduce costs improve quality, and moves to improve quality reduce costs, the groups say.

“The definition of ‘activities that improve health care quality’ should be crafted in a way that recognizes this,” the groups say.

Activities now shut out of the definition include utilization review, fraud prevention activities, and network management, and those activities “are essential to maintaining and improving the quality of health care that clients of our members receive on a daily basis,” the producer groups say.

“Our members know firsthand that less utilization review, fraud prevention, and network development means lower quality health care for their clients – in addition to higher costs,” the groups say.

But, hey, ObamaCare is not really about reducing costs or improving quality; it’s primarily about grossly enlarging government and its control of the economy and our lives.

If you care to weigh in on drawing the formula for medical loss ratios in ObamaCare to be more reasonable, you can write to Ethan Sonnichsen, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (the umbrella for the states' insurance commissioners) Director of Government Relations at his email  esonnich@naic.org .

Oh Yeah: This Mass. pre-experience of ObamaCare should help increase the medical loss ratio, pay large claims for those who dip in to coverage then stop paying premiums.

The number of people who appear to be gaming the state’s health insurance system by purchasing coverage only when they are sick quadrupled from 2006 to 2008, according to a long-awaited report released yesterday from the Massachusetts Division of Insurance.

The result is that insured residents of Massachusetts wind up paying more for health care, according to the report. …

New York State is typical of spendthrift states teetering on the hole they've dug of big deficits, looking for more taxes to fill the hole into which tax dollars are thrown.

The latest:

Many nonprofit organizations in New York are deeply concerned they will lose significant contributions from wealthy donors if a pending state budget proposal becomes law. The proposal would reduce the charitable-contribution deductions allowed for individual donors who are “high earners.”

Gov. David Paterson and the state legislature are in a bitter battle as they try to finalize a budget during the bad economic times, but they apparently have agreed on a proposal that would allow the approximately 3,500 New York taxpayers who earn more than $10-million annually to deduct on their state tax returns only 25 percent of their charitable contributions rather than the current 50 percent.

Yes, there’s this, for many donors, self-promotion ranks above helping the needy:

In New York, Arts Trump Social Causes for Philanthropic Recognition: Large donations to institutions such as the Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York City Ballet are well covered in the press, and serving on major arts boards can raise members’ social standing and improve business ties, Crain’s writes. By contrast, when the New York investment managers Fiona and Stanley Druckenmiller, who focus on medical and economic charities, ranked No. 1 on the latest Chronicle of Philanthropy list of top givers, “many in the city's nonprofit world wondered, 'Who?’”

Experts say the city's elite put great value on major arts institutions, and gifts to such organizations garner public attention because they are often landmarks frequented by residents and tourists, unlike new hospital wings or university buildings.

Yet, as the official tabulation of income taxes paid in New York shows, (page 5) of $29.6 billion in personal income taxes collected in 2007, 49% came from those with income above $500,000, about 1% of taxpayers, and their deductions were 8% of the tax deductions claimed by all taxpayers.

The well-to-do are more than contributing their part to the NYS government largesse with taxpayer funds.

But, according to the tabulation of the top US contributors to charities for 2008,due to the economic downturn their charitable contributions have fallen:

[T]he number of wealthy people making big gifts has shrunk. A donor needed to part with just $16.2-million in 2009 to qualify for The Chronicle’s list. In 2008 that number was $30.5-million; and in 2007 it was $39-million.

So, tell me why and how New York State driving its golden geese out of state will benefit the needy or the art-starved in New York State.

So, tell me how higher taxes will incent the most productive to invest more or earn more just in order to have more taken away.

So, tell me why higher taxes will not lead to lowered prosperity and thus to lower tax collections and charitable contributions, most of which goes to help the real and supposedly needy.

So, tell me whether adding more government-sector workers, at higher pay and benefits than among private-sector workers, the private-sector workforce shrinking, is really the priority of liberal nest-feathering politicians.

Ron Radosh, as well as other knowledgeable or honest critics, recognize the “travesty” of “Oliver Stone’s new documentary,  South of the Border, his ode to Hugo Chavez and South and Latin America’s new quasi-Marxist and not so quasi dictators.”

For some background into useful idiot Oliver Stone’s “standard far-left narrative that is part of a long line of propaganda films, a modern American version of the old agitprop”:

From the BBC report and from Robert Service’s bio of Trotsky, will the real Chavez and Trotsky please stand up or be excused by ignorant fantasist rationalizers of tyranny?

This morning I saw my son off to sleepaway camp. The mother of my son’s seatmate on the bus and I met and spoke briefly. It turned out we have family (all Jewish) and other friends in common back East.

She was in law school with Obama at Harvard.

She says that Obama was not particularly “political” at that time. [My thought: probably unnecessary as most there likely agreed on most things.]

She says that Obama is not an anti-Semite. [My thought: So what if he hires “court Jews”, hangs out with real anti-Semites, and even for – in his opinion – the best of reasons weakens Israel.]

She says that Obama is a good listener. [My thought: So what, if he only listens to those who agree with him.]

She is an Obama-loyalist, only offering the criticism that he is “indecisive.” [My thought: Only indecisive while trying to figure out how to get away with weakening allies or national security, or propel the US into further debts, enlarge government intrusion into and control over our lives, and undermine free enterprise.]

The Left, of course, and the usual fickle conservatives with more ink to expend than practical experience or judgment, have taken the McChrystal affaire and the difficult Afghanistan situation as a new opportunity to exhibit their emphasis on bloviation and lack of spine under difficult challenges regardless of impact on real persons’ lives.

What is notable, however, is that during the discussions of the relief from command of General Stanley McChrystal, most conservatives and professional military leaders came down – even with much misgivings – in favor. Military decorum and civilian control are primary, they affirmed.

Still, while not challenging civilian control of the military, what is missed is that our military’s current rulers have a long record of disrespect for the military and open antagonism to the missions to which we have sent them to struggle, all paying extraordinary sacrifices while politicians and most of the homefront focus on feathering nests.

Such as Andrew Bacevich, not missing yet another opportunity for another way to express his repeated defeatism and antagonism to firm foreign policy, laments instead:

Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. Not least among those values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics….But indications that the military's professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms.

Usually sensible Eliot Cohen puts the issue in a broader light:

Today, in the midst of the conflict, we cannot achieve the detachment that military historians writing 50 years from now will have. But we can at least cling to some basic principles in explaining our wars to ourselves.

The first of these is that the civilian leadership is always -- always -- the responsible party. It is responsible for choosing the war, responsible for the strategy, responsible for the military leaders it hires or fires, responsible for ultimate success or failure. It should never be off the hook. The second is the recognition that military institutions and their leaders are radically imperfect. The leaders vary in quality; few have all the attributes required to win, particularly in an era made more complicated by continuous news cycles.

Jules Crittenden, who has actually been to combat and deeply studied war, gets to the point, reminding generalizers of nonsense:

Given the governing party’s preference for strategizing by poll, and the president’s own ambivalence toward winning, there is little reason to be encouraged that he will hang tough in Afghanistan, see to U.S. national security interests there, and give democracy, women’s rights, civilization, that kind of thing a chance, plus render American sacrifices meaningful. Except for one key factor, vanity, which may be a reason for hope in this situation, the one thing that might compel the president to persevere on a foreign field of battle, especially now that the unassailable Gen. David Petraeus has his back.

President Obama, his civilian yes-men from the Left, and politically-chosen military advisors may have triumphed  - even rightfully - over the disrespect, deserved, openly expressed by General McChrystal and his staff. But, their record of disrespect for the military, its professionalism, and its life-and-death existence does not earn them any pass on their continued muddled confusion or purposefully dangerous weakness.

In WWII the US fielded a mostly draft military. In Korea and Vietnam, draftees filled the ranks. Today, we field a superbly professional voluntary military. The Obamaites, and the fickle conservative pundits, should feel lucky they have a professional military that restrains itself. Draftees and their families would never tolerate their heartless, gutless toying with their lives. That would be a real popular and military uprising.