Columnist.
Seven months after taking office amidst a religious-like faith that he was the one (or even The One) we had been waiting for, President Barack Obama is beginning to resemble a shooting star. A new USA Today-Gallup Poll finds that 57 percent of adults believe the president's $787 billion economic stimulus package is having "no impact on the economy or making it worse." The poll asked six questions and the answers reveal that Obama's short-term fixes are producing long-term anxiety. Fifty-four percent told pollsters they think the economy will still be in a recession one year from now. Forty-six percent are "very worried" that stimulus money has been wasted. Significantly, a combined 70 percent say the spending will either have no effect on their personal financial situation (36 percent) or that it will make it worse (34 percent).
PORTADOWN, NORTHERN IRELAND -- For the past month I have watched British media report and comment on the American health care uproar. American cable networks are also available here. The back-and-forth reporting and commentary resembles a replay of the War of 1812, this time with verbal salvos. Conservative American politicians and commentators fire at the British NHS system and the British fire back, sometimes on the same program, repeating the Democrats' mantra of how 47 million Americans are "uninsured" and how medical treatment in the United States depends on how much patients, or their insurance companies, will pay. Here, they say, health care is "free," thanks to taxpayers, a minority of which (i.e. the successful) bears ever-greater amounts of the burden.
PORTSTEWART, NORTHERN IRELAND -- The Daily Telegraph's headline is meant to shock, or at least get the attention of Europeans apathetic about the threat they face: "A Fifth of European Union Will Be Muslim by 2050." In a related article "Muslim Europe: the Demographic Time Bomb Transforming Our Continent," The Telegraph's lead sentence summarizes the problem: "Britain and the rest of the European Union are ignoring a demographic time bomb: a recent rush into the EU by migrants, including millions of Muslims, will change the continent beyond recognition over the next two decades, and almost no policymakers are talking about it."
The debate -- OK, the shouting match -- we are having over "health-care reform" is about many things, including cost, who gets help and who does not and who, or what, gets to make that determination. Underlying it all is a larger question: Is human life something special? Is it to be valued more highly than, say, plants and pets? When someone is in a "persistent vegetative state" do we mean to say that person is equal in value to a carrot?
