Why the Republican objections and talking points are nonsense

One: there already are death panels in American health care provision. They are the accountants who decide how long the companies can afford to give healthcare to customers who have chronic or expensive conditions.

Two: the Republican notion that the current system can be tweaked or bullied to remedy such problems is nonsense. It is positively crazy. If seriously pursued, it will lead to a situation where corporations have to deficit spend to keep patients with chronic and expensive conditions alive, which will eat into their budgets and threaten the rise of a Fannie May and Freddie Mac situation.

Three: in order to deal with chronic, expensive or long-term cases, there is need of a body which is not only capable of but allowed to deficit spend. There is only one such body: the State. The State routinely deficit spends on such things as the police and the military, the courts and the jails, which never will bring in an income but which are indispensable for society. Indeed, Adam Smith's classic definition of the "expenses of the sovereign", by which he meant the public sector, is: all those expenses which are necessary for society but which the private sector cannot profitably pursue.

Four: it is an atrocious lie that people who demand a right to health care are "inventing new rights". The denial of health care to anyone is the denial of the three basic rights: life, because it places the person in the immediate and evident danger of death; liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, because it reduces what is left of life to a despairing struggle to be allowed to draw a few more breaths. If you think this is what the Founders meant, you are not only a fanatic, but a sadist.

A liar shown up

I hate Fascism in general and Nick Griffin in particular. Griffin is the head of the British Fascist party, the BNP, and as clever a villain as any in politics. I repeatedly said that he is the cleverest party leader in Britain - unfortunately. He has been ruthlessly positioning his party - whose core is made of unrepenentant thugs and Jew-bashers - on the right position of the culture wars, taking in a vast number of disgruntled and disenfranchised conservatives-with-a-small-c who post in conservative websites asking, if I cannot vote for the BNP, who can I vote for? Well, recent footage shows the bastard in the company of friends, making the point very clearly that he is using social conservatism as a cover to get the rubes in and win votes. Then, he said, he would start to get people around to think more and more his way. And he did not mean conservatively.

This is a fairly sickening situation to anyone who follows politics closely enough. In spite of all that is known about his past and his associates (he said he had been reading Mein Kampf since he was 13), every election, national, local or European, showed the party - originally little more than a fringe association of psychopaths who regularly got a few dozen votes per seat - becoming a more credible electoral force. They now have councillors all over England and two Members in the European Parliament. And the trouble is that every time the establishment tried to show their moral unworthiness and political fraudulency, it blew right back in their faces. To put it very simply, the whole societal leadership of the United Kingdom has no moral credibility left with anybody. Anybody. If the leadership of the Labour or Tory Parties, the press, or the churches, stand up and denounce the BNP, the majority of the public pays no mind, and a minority is actually motivated to search them out.

This time, though, they may have gone too far. Griffin may be a smart thug, but he is still a thug after all; and he has an unfortunate (for him) belief in the theory of the Big Lie. The Armed Forces are the one institution in Britain that have been gaining rather than losing respect, thanks mainly to their sacrifice in Afghanistan. Obviously, the BNP has been trying to capitalize on their reputation present and past; they even had the nerve to invoke Churchill and the Battle of Britain, obviously thinking that their public would not pay attention to the enormous absurdity of a bunch of Fascists claiming Churchill of all people for their own. But the armed forces have reacted. A group of present and past chiefs of staff, distinguished officers, and medal holders, have signed a declaration against the BNP. Griffin, who was on a hiding to nothing trying to argue against the military, has then compounded his error by telling a demonstrable lie live on screen (that wounded servicemen in Birmingham's Selly Oak hospital were forced to pay to watch TV programs). This was inevitably refuted within minutes. One hopes that Griffin has for once met something that he cannot subvert to his own odious cause.

Good news

The Pope's legal creation of a kind of Anglican Rite within the Catholic Church is the kind of thing I have been hoping for for decades. Anglican usage deserves to be preserved, whatever happens to the Anglican Communion.