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In a telephone interview with FOXNews.com, U.N. spokesman Fahran Haq explained that the MSD has a legal right to hire unlicensed doctors and nurses to work on U.N. property, because “U.N. headquarters is not part of New York.”

The Medical Services Division provides “basic health services,” according to its Web page, but the doctors and nurses who work there are not permitted to assume primary responsibility for U.N. employees during a medical emergency crisis, even though the department’s two-year budget for 2007-2008 accounted for more than $38 million in operating expenses. The U.N. receives most of its funding from national government bodies across the globe.

The Other McCain has a short fuse.

Remarkable, really, how the Left’s erroneous presumptions haven’t changed at all: If the social welfare state is synonymous with enlightenment, opponents of the welfare state must therefore be unenlightened. The only question remaining for the liberal theorist is to identify the variety of psychopathology that explains this (presumably irrational) opposition.

So it is that Max Blumenthal, who no doubt favors putting the federal government in control of America’s health-care system, effectively nationalizing 1/7th of the economy, presumes to diagnose opponents of such policies as suffering from “the fear of freedom.”

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Guess Communists take their property rights pretty seriously.

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If Mark Hopkins or any of his family contracted cancer, TB, polio, heart disease, or even appendicitis, they would probably die.  All the rage today is to moan about people’s access to health care, but Hopkins had less access to health care than the poorest resident of East St. Louis.  Hopkins died at 64, an old man in an era where the average life span was in the early forties.  He saw at least one of his children die young, as most others of his age did.  In fact, Stanford University owes its founding to the early death (at 15) of the son of Leland Stanford, Hopkin’s business partner and neighbor.  The richest men of his age had more than a ten times greater chance of seeing at least one of their kids die young than the poorest person in the US does today.

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In the meantime, though, greenwashing has become a virtual industry in the political and policy worlds. Take, for example, the growing push for economically regressive and environmentally problematic HOT (high occupancy toll) lanes. HOT lanes are toll lanes on public highways. Prices are set dynamically so that HOT lanes keep moving even if all the other lanes are stuck. Governor Schwarzenegger and many leading Democrats favor the idea and use it to paint themselves green. HOT lanes are also popular with many affluent motorists who love the idea of driving their SUVs in the carpool lane for what amounts to pocket change. It’s an odd alliance.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Paul Krugman has a long article in the NYT Magazine entitled “How Did the Economists Get It So Wrong?” which demonstrates quite nicely, by all the topics it avoids mentioning, how the economists got it so wrong.

Not to mention that “how Krugman got it wrong” is a hole with no bottom….

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When reading science fiction stories, I find it very difficult to accept alien species as really alien unless they are at least as incomprehensible as the Japanese.

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Now in its thirty-ninth year of operations, the government-controlled Amtrak provides good service between Boston, New York and Washington, and Los Angeles and San Diego. Elsewhere, it’s a land cruise company.

Beyond the corridors, Amtrak plies routes that were hastily drawn in 1971 to insure that they touch as many congressional interests as possible. That means meandering sleepers from New Orleans to Los Angeles, or Chicago to Seattle, which are a delight to vacationers (myself included), but inconsequential to the business of America, which drives or flies in order to get somewhere. Amtrak handles less than 1% of America’s intercity travel.

Perhaps stagecoaches will be the Next Green Thing — after all, they would reduce our Dependence On Foreign Oil, although the Emissions Problem might cause a few furrowed brows.

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Privacy disaster? You betcha.

But ten years ago we’d be horrified by what we nonchalantly share on Facebook and Twitter every day.

Some of us still are.

Read it. A very informative chart.

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Let’s hear it for the stimulus.

One of those laid off was David Wahl, 52, who had worked there for a decade and who sat behind the vice president at the town-hall-style meeting, soaking up the optimism of the moment. “With mass transit being pushed so hard,” Mr. Wahl recalled, “I figured I’d be able to work until I was 75.”

‘Put not your trust in Princes nor the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation.’ — Psalm 146

Gotta love Australians.

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Can a lawsuit be far behind?

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Their motto is “Be Prepared” but Scouts will soon have to survive without their trusty penknives on camping trips thanks to Britain’s growing knife crime culture.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in New York.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Crew members of the Arctic Sea have since told Russian news reporters that they have been told not to disclose “state secrets” further fuelling the speculation.

A Russian military source told The Sunday Times: “The official version is ridiculous and was given to allow the Kremlin to save face.

Hmmm.

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The collapse of Lehman Brothers, a year ago this week, was the biggest bankruptcy in corporate history. It was 10 times the size of Enron and, more crucially, the tipping point into the global crash, provoking panic in an already battered financial system, freezing short-term lending, and marking the start of the liquidity crisis.

Yet searching questions remain unanswered. Authorities had intervened on both sides of the Atlantic to rescue a litany of stricken institutions, from Northern Rock to Bear Stearns, and mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so why let Lehman go down? And was a rescue by Barclays effectively blocked by the UK authorities?

Indeed. Some people get bailed out, some people get their heads stepped on as they’re circling the drain. Wonder why?

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

It has been a half-century since have we seen a presidential inner circle so identified with our densest urban centers. The three most recent Democratic presidents — Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — all had substantial roots in small-town America that also helped them understand the aspirations of middle-class suburban and exurban voters.

In contrast, this is an administration steeped in the mystique of big cities. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is a tough-guy player from the variously effective and consistently corrupt Chicago city machine. The members of the Cabinet and top-tier apparatus are longtime residents of such large cities as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston and, of course, Chicago.

Yet for the most part, the big media have been too captivated by the president’s urbane mystique to delve too deeply into the Chicago morass. Largely denizens of big cities, the top media generally embrace the notion that dense urban places are inherently better, more efficient, culturally and environmentally sound than less glamorous, more spread-out places.

You can see this worldview almost daily in The New York Times or, more substantially, in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic, where writers often like to envision an American future bright for top-tier cities and pretty bleak for everyone else.

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The term ‘vegilante’ almost redeems with its cleverness the degenerative effect that it and similar locutions have on our culture. It is by such small and pleasant steps that we descend further and further into the Pit, until at last we grasp that we have laid up for ourselves, chip by chip, a future of discontent and shallow vacuity.

The Other McCain can always be counted on for pithy expression.

Welcome to the Obama Nation, where all criticism is subject to the accusation of raaaaacism. If Obama throws Jones under the bus, the Leader’s minions will depict it as a sop to right-wing hatemongers, and Jones will walk away with a platinum Victimhood Card, immediately redeemable for a six-figure book contract.

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Gotta watch out for that sort of thing.

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And this is, of course, an Important Subject, worthy of our attention.

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At a town-hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., last month, our uninformed lawyer in chief suggested that we physicians would rather chop off a foot than manage diabetes since we would make more money doing surgery. Then President Obama compounded his attack by claiming a doctor’s reimbursement is between “$30,000” and “$50,000” for such amputations! (Actually, such surgery costs only about $1,500.)

Physicians have never been so insulted. Because of these affronts, I will gladly volunteer for the important duty of controlling and regulating lawyers. Since most of what lawyers do is repetitive boilerplate or pushing paper, physicians would have no problem dictating what is appropriate for attorneys. We physicians know much more about legal practice than lawyers do about medicine.

This is pretty funny.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Allotment holders in Southampton have been told by their council that barbed wire will not be put up to protect their crime-plagued plots in case vandals hurt themselves.

Uh, I sort of thought that was the point?

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Oh, I’m sorry, it already is, along our sourthern border. Forget I even mentioned it.

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The great buildings of universities and cities alike are sermons in stone.  They aim to teach us something about the the fundamental commitments of an institution or a city or polity as much as what might take place inside those buildings.  And in the honor we bestow through the names we associate with such monuments, a society teaches something of significance to successive generations.   I would be the first to praise the generosity to a benefactor, and to encourage people of means to support a worthy cause – and it is meet to show gratitude in a fitting form.  Today, however, an older ethic of according honor  for lifetime service and sacrifice – or, more homely still, testimony to the geography of local places (e.g., Three River Stadium, now PNC Park) –  is increasingly crowded out in a race to leverage naming rights to the highest bidder.  What lesson are we teaching to our young through such sermons in stone?

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Note the implicit distinction between “Germany” and the German government. That’s what it feels like to be a European. That’s why our political establishment wants to be “more European”.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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China currently accounts for 93 percent of production of so-called rare earth elements — and more than 99 percent of the output for two of these elements, dysprosium and terbium, vital for a wide range of green energy technologies and military applications like missiles.

Perhaps we ought to ask the Chinese what it’s like to have a government with a foreign policy based on the country’s own interests.

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The tolerant outlook of an Arab with the democratic impulses of an African – a winning combination.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Massachusetts.

Read it.

I seem to remember hearing once that George Washington advised not getting involved in the fights of Europe….

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As the Labor Department’s Web site notes, the original intent for the holiday was a parade that would illustrate “the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations.” Over the years, however, Labor Day has morphed into little more than a three-day weekend signaling the end of summer.

So essentially it’s a semi-socialist pro-organized-labor holiday.

George Will has Barack Obama’s number.

In August our ubiquitous president became the nation’s elevator music, always out and about, heard but not really listened to, like audible wallpaper. And now, as Congress returns to resume wrestling with health care reform, we shall see if he continues his August project of proving that the idea of an Ivy League Huey Long is not oxymoronic.

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…which is perhaps why we ought not to take artists seriously when they talk about politics.

Hitler’s deluded view of himself as a genius is based on the confused system of thought emerging in the late 19th century, which centered on the idea that a genius — a strong personality who outshone everything else — could do anything and could do anything he pleased.

Sounds like a Kennedy.

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The real thing, this time: leaked British diplomatic correspondence published in the London Times appears to make it clear that Great Britain let Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi go in order to finalize an oil deal with Libya….

So where are all the Hollywood celebs with their Concerned T-shirts? Barbra? Viggo?

Apart from anything else, it is an argument for the death penalty. We simply can’t trust any Western government to be immune from bribery.

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Hey, if it were easy, anybody could do it. Oh, wait….

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Merely reinforcing what John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: “Get a government job!”

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According to a researcher with anti-spam company Cloudmark, 419 fraudsters have been relaying a “significant” amount of messages through the democrats.org domain name. The abuse, which dates back at least to the beginning of this month, helps evade filters that internet service providers employ to block the messages.

Birds of a feather….

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A 10-year-old homeschool girl described as “well liked, social and interactive with her peers, academically promising and intellectually at or superior to grade level” has been told by a New Hampshire court official to attend a government school because she was too “vigorous” in defense of her Christian faith.

New Hampshire is now officially a Blue State.

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Google has anointed an “approved list” of writers it thinks you should read. But not only is Google’s choice far from “Neutral” – there’s no libertarians, merely one (shrieky and not very representative) conservative, and a preponderance of Greens – there isn’t a Google critic amongst them. Well, there goes “neutrality”.

The tech pundits Google chooses are safe, flavourless, humourless, and uniformly Google-friendly – it’s a list of Google’s trusted pals, really. If you locked them in a room with some drugs, by the end of the evening you’d have heard no new original insight or wit – and the drugs would be untouched. For example, Chris “Long Tail” Anderson tops the list. Do you need to know more?

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The 48-year-old, who can’t be named for legal reasons, is demanding unlimited damages of more than £300,000 from his ex-wife and her lover, for the distress caused and the cost of bringing up the children he believed were his for more than a decade.

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Of course, pretty soon in France it will only be necessary to say “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you”, so it doesn’t really matter.

Foud Ajami nails it.

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the “loudest voices” are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama was tall and thin and from Illinois, and the historic campaign was launched out of Springfield. The oath of office was taken on the Lincoln Bible. Like FDR, he had a huge economic challenge, and he better get it done, repair and streamline the economy in his “first hundred days.” Like JFK, he was young and stylish, with a young family.

Darwin Award nominee.

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An excellent breakdown — no pun intended — of federal receipts and expenditures, with some nifty graphics.

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If you can’t get a Government Job, working for one of these companies is probably the next best thing.