How do we know?

Here we see it’s going down the right side of the bell curve both in terms of deaths and hospitalizations.

And there’s both a massive decline in samples submitted to CDC surveillance labs and a small decline in those testing positive.

College infections have essentially gone flat.

And finally we see from the Australian swine flu data in figures 1,2, and 7 that swine flu does indeed resemble the normal epidemiological curve. Once cases start going down they keep going down.

Unfortunately, the “hysteria curve” as indicated by emergency room visits is still at the highest level in the century. You can probably credit the Obama administration declaration of a “national emergency” for that.

UPDATE: Check out photos and video from today’s rally.

She called businessmen “America’s persecuted minority.” And today-as has been the case at least since the start of the Industrial Revolution-many businessmen and -women feel they are the victims of a special scorn directed at them not because they cheat or steal but, rather, because they grow wealthy through their own honest efforts by producing goods and services that they sell to willing customers. Politicians translate this disdain into higher taxes, regulations, and special criminal penalties on these producers.

On the centenary of her birth, Ayn Rand remains a unique defender of capitalism. She showed in both her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged-published in 1957-and in her non-fiction essays the disastrous effects of mixing politics with economics. But she went further than other laissez-faire advocates, emphasizing the moral foundations of economic liberty. In this way, she provided an even deeper understanding of how freedom is lost and how it might be protected or restored.

Here’s part of his conclusion on what’s needed to address the attacks on free markets:

Rand offered not only insights into statism but also the ethical antidote to the assault on free markets. Individuals must stand up for their rights. American businessmen and -women must reject unearned guilt and stop apologizing for creating the richest country on Earth. Those who value freedom must offer moral justice to entrepreneurs by celebrating their great achievements and recognizing that they should be proud of themselves. In a culture based on these values, politicians who offer to redistribute wealth or threaten to limit freedom would be treated like pickpockets or bank robbers, and thus would stick to their job of protecting the lives, liberties, and property of the citizens.

It is ridiculous that The Post has dedicated so much of the A section the past several weeks to the swine flu outbreak. Being a young “survivor” of the swine flu, I have to say that it was the most anticlimactic experience I have ever had. No deathbed, no fever.

The way the media continue to portray the virus is creating unnecessary panic around the world. Many people infected with the virus don’t even know they have it. The public should be outraged at news outlets that have caused mass hysteria and a mad rush for vaccines, medication and hand sanitizer.

Unfortunately, right now they’re too busy being outraged at the lack of the promised vaccine. But hopefully the day will come. Until then, you can read my bevy of swine flu anti-hype articles.

Between 1934 and 1937—during the heart of the Great Depression—GDP grew at by an average of 9.5 percent annually.  In 1934, GDP grew by nearly 11 percent, but it would be six more years until the depression finally ended.  Clearly, GDP growth alone cannot be taken as an indicator that the economy is on the upswing.

It is also disheartening that the two major contributors to GDP growth in the third quarter were housing construction and auto sales, both of which were propped up by government subsidies.  Auto sales were boosted by the Cash for Clunkers program, and housing construction was driven by the $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit.

Combine this with other spurious accounting maneuvers used to calculate third quarter GDP, and it begins to appear that GDP might actually have decreased during this period.

In addition to phony GDP growth, there are other signs that the recession is not yet over.  Employment during the third quarter fell by over 750,000, and it is expected to fall further still.  Employment has been called a lagging indicator of economic health, but when economic health is measured in terms of the financial well-being of the population, employment is not a lagging indicator, it is the indicator.

The recent bankruptcy of CIT Group is another sign that our economic woes are far from over.  A recipient of $2.3 billion in TARP funds—deemed likely unrecoverable—CIT Group Inc. filed for Chapter 11 today, seeking protection from $10 billion in debt.  CIT finances close to one million businesses, and conducts business with over 80 percent of all Fortune 1000 companies, so there is enormous potential for negative secondary effects stemming from the bankruptcy.

The CIT Group bankruptcy comes on the heels of nine more bank failures on Friday, which brings this year’s total to 115.  These bank failures came at a cost of $2.5 billion to the FDIC deposit insurance fund.

There is a clear political incentive for Geithner and others to make efforts to convince us that this economic slump is over.  It is unfortunate that these efforts include no actual facts.

Okay — it’s almost Halloween, so I should be forgiven for a non-policy posting on the Top Ten Scariest Movies.  I’ve picked a sample of top ten listings to check out any unanimity in the selections.  Not really, ‘though several films appear on almost every list - Psycho (1960), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Halloween (1978).  Most of the scariest are horror or sci-fi films, with lots of gore and special effects, but a significant number of the top ones are psychological thrillers.  Here are some links to the lists here, here, here and here.

There’s also a list of the 10 Top Terrifying Non-Horror movies here. Two of my own favorites in that category - but not listed - are Brazil (1985) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).

Here’s my compilation of the 10 scariest:

Psycho (1960)

The Exorcist  (1973)

The Shining (1980)

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Halloween (1978)

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Alien (1979)

Rosemary’s Baby (1979)

Silence of the Lambs (1991)

With truly scary things happening on Capitol Hill — government takeover of the health care system, attempts to suppress the use of energy through diabolical cap-and-trade schemes, more government controls on private markets together with expansion of government enterprises, and higher and higher taxes to finance the largess — maybe these films won’t seem so scary at all.

But the Swedish food police admit that they are some problems in balancing healthy eating with low-carbon-footprint eating.  And it doesn’t always work.  Their guidelines that form the basis for the labels tell people to eat carrots instead of tomatoes, and not to eat many bananas.  Have they not read or heard about the antioxidant properties of tomatoes? There are also a lot of questions about their methods of measuring climate-friendly production. In their view how the production contributes to the landscape is a big plus:

Cows and sheep that graze outdoors contribute to a varied agricultural landscape – open landscapes. This particularly applies to animals that graze on natural enclosed pastures, so-called natural grazing areas. Outdoor grazing also contributes to a rich diversity of plant and animal Life. Even livestock conventionally raised in Sweden contribute to a varied agricultural landscape and to a rich diversity of plant and animal life since Swedish law requires that all animals graze outdoors a certain period of time each year.
In well-forested Sweden, pastures are needed throughout the country in order to maintain landscape diversity and variation.

Some of the recommendations seem a bit off, mainly because values rather than science enter in.  For instance, in the guidelines this bald statement is made relating to their recommendations: ” Pigs and chickens do not contribute appreciably to a varied agricultural landscape or a rich diversity of plant and animal life.”  Who says so?  They certainly contribute significantly to the diversity of my diet.

Here’s an example of some foodstuffs and their emission levels:

Estimated kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents produced in a year per person with one serving per week.

Beef from dairy cows: 120

Pork: 35

Apples from New Zealand: 4

Apples from Sweden: 1

Oh, I forgot to mention that, of course, locally grown, Swedish stuff produces  lower emissions. Guidelines don’t state it but it’s implied: Imports are bad because of emissions from transportation — whether truck or ship or plane.

Downie’s idea of putting news in the hands of universities is destined to fail. Calling on universities to become news institutions is asking already-hard-up-for-cash colleges to take on a responsibility for which they have absolutely no obligation. Universities’ core function is to transform high school graduates into employable professionals or academic researchers (granted, some colleges and certain disciplines achieve this end better than others). Outside of that, many universities already support student journalism in the form of campus newspapers and radio stations. Some student journalists even go as far as to report on local and state issues. However, student reporters can only do so much, and in the wake of this year’s tuition hikes, taking on the responsibilities of failed newspapers is an expense that most public universities can’t afford.

Outrageously, Downie also wants to put telecoms on the hook for bailing out reporting, suggesting that the FCC collect fees from internet service providers to be used for a national “Fund for Local News.” He’s blind to the fact that telecoms and ISPs have done nothing but help disseminate news and information. There is more reporting, more information, more news available to us today than there ever has been in the history of civilization. It’s true that there’s a lot of garbage out there, but there’s a lot of very good online journalism as well. Nearly everything published online is subject to peer-review from a massive amount of people, and the success of sites like Wikipedia are proof that accountability, credibility, and accuracy matter just as much online as they do offline.

Downie’s most unbelievably bad idea is that the government should save journalism by fixing the tax code so that newspapers can operate as nonprofit entities. Whether the government directly bails out big newspapers or allows them nonprofit status, the result is the same: tax money doled out to one group has to be taken from another. But setting aside arguments against higher taxes, there’s an even more important question here: don’t these whining establishment journalists realize that government-supported journalism completely goes against the very idea of the 4th estate, the estate that Burke deemed “more important than them all?” The press are supposed to be the good guys, the ones keeping their eyes on the government, not the guys asking for government handouts. Only a fool would think that direct subsidies or preferential tax status won’t come with any political sanctions, explicit or implied.(And this administration isn’t above threatening legal action against companies that say things it doesn’t like).

It’s no secret that “Big Journo” can’t survive in the information age with its current business model. In his recent WaPo column, Downie proclaims that “preserving independent, original, credible reporting” is paramount to maintaining civil society. Yet his proposed methods for doing so are so far out of line with that goal that it calls his credibility into question, and instead makes him look like a shill for the big papers. CEI’s own Iain Murry explains the situation best: “American society can step in to preserve journalism by buying the papers. If they don’t, they have already said that they don’t want to preserve journalism as it stands. If a paper falls on the doorstep, and no one reads it, does it have a point?”

Something happened in Washington on Friday that had not occurred in 138 years of weather history: For the first time since the National Weather Service began compiling daily data here, the high temperature for Oct. 16 was below 50 degrees.

Now, just imagine if October 16 was the warmest in 138 years - where do you think the Post would have placed the article? Surely not buried in obituaries.

Today [Oct. 15, 2009], Rep. Darrell Isa (R-CA), ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. James Sensenbrenner, ranking member of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, released a joint minority staff report titled, The Politics of EPA’s Endangerment Finding.

I’ll say more about the report after reading the 146-page document. Key findings include:

• EPA prejudged the outcome of its endangerment finding to advance the Obama administration’s policy agenda.
• EPA’s effort to control greenhouse gas emissions will give the Agency authority over the entire U.S. economy. 
• EPA did not conduct its own analysis. Instead, the Agency deferred to the judgment of two external literature surveys — the IPCC reports and the U.S. National Assessment of Climate Change. 
• EPA erected internal barriers to stifle dissent within the Agency.
• EPA apparently refused to read the thousands of comments submitted in response to the previous administration’s Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.
• EPA punished and demoted whistleblower/skeptic Alan Carlin and retaliated against the office in which he works.
• Energy and Environment Czar Carol Browner may have violated the Presidential Records Act during fuel-economy negotiations between EPA, the Department of Energy, the State of California, and the auto industry.

These points seem spot on to me. The report, however, contains details I have not seen elsewhere. As aforesaid, I’ll blog about this later.

Update

Having read the Issa-Sensenbrenner report, I’d like to share a few details.

Non-responsiveness to congressional inquiries

• In a letter of March 12, 2009, Rep. Issa asked EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson for various information relating to public comment on the Agency’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), such as how many comments EPA received, how many of those were in favor of an endangerment finding, how did the Agency determine which comments were “key” and required a response. Ms. Jackson’s letter of May 18 was completely non-reponsive to these queries. Issa and Sensenbrenner justifiably conclude that EPA may not have read most of the comments on the ANPR. 
• Jackson’s May 18 letter was also non-responsive to Mr. Issa’s question as to whether EPA had ever before found a pollutant to “endanger human health” solely on the basis of indirect effects on weather and climate, and to his request for a list of precedents on which EPA relied to classify CO2 emissions as a health hazard due to their supposed indirect effects.
• All her letter says on this matter is: “EPA’s notice of the proposed endangerment finding identifies the precedents the agency relied on its making the proposal.” If so, then why not quote the relevant passage, or cite the pertinent pages? The public health discussion (pp. 18901-18902) in EPA’s endangerment proposal discusses no precedents and lists no previous examples of pollutants deemed health hazards by virtue of their indirect effects.

Bad-mouthing SBA

• On April 24, 2009, EPA posted an OMB-coordinated inter-agency review of its proposed endangerment finding. The review warned of “serious economic consequences” for small business, noted that EPA had not “undertaken a systematic risk analysis or cost-benefit analysis,” and said that EPA seemed to “stretch the precautionary principle” in making the case for endangerment.
• Obama officials dismissed these criticisms as irrelevant, claiming the author was “a Bush holdover.” In fact, the so-called holdover was a career civil servant originally hired by the Small Business Administration during the Clinton Administration. Her previous job was as an aid to a Democratic Member of Congress.
• OMB also disclosed the name of the “Bush holdover,” violating its own protocol designed to protect professional staff from political retaliation. OMB claimed it divulged the analyst’s identity to “correct inaccurate and misleading media reports.” However, the reports simply quoted the OMB document. OMB never clarified what “inaccuracies” its breach of protocol corrected.

Mistreatment of Dr. Alan Carlin

• Dr. Carlin, a 37-year EPA analyst, wrote a comment critical of the science on which EPA proposed to base its endangerment finding. Al McGartland, director of EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE), the office in which Carlin works, refused to transmit Carlin’s comment to EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, told Carlin not to discuss the endangerment proceeding with anyone outside of NCEE, ordered Carlin to discontinue all work on climate change, removed him from NCEE’s Climate Workgroup, and cut him from the group’s email list.
• In addition, McGartland reassigned Carlin to tasks (updating a grants database and an economic incentives report) previously performed by a junior staffer and an outside contractor.
• McGartland’s behavior appears to have been motivated by fear of reprisal from Agency higher-ups. His email to Carlin of March 17 states: “The Administrator and the administration has [sic] decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

EPA efforts to discredit Dr. Carlin

• To discredit Carlin’s comment, EPA initially stated that Carlin was “not a scientist” and “not part of the working group dealing with the issue.”
• However, Carlin holds a degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology, was a member of NCEE’s Climate Workgroup, and is listed as an author of the original (2007) endangerment finding Technical Support Document (TSD).
• In response to a July 17 letter from Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), EPA confirmed that “Dr. Carlin was one of several members of the NCEE workgroup that reviewed the [2009] draft TSD for EPA’s proposed endangerment finding for greenhouse gases.”

On July 8, 2009, EPA finally included Dr. Carlin’s comment in its endangerment docket — almost one month after the comment period closed. Alan Carlin still has a job — although he no longer works on climate issues. NCEE has not been defunded, despite concerns expressed by Carlin’s colleague John Davidson (and hinted at in McGartland’s March 17 email) that Agency brass could punish NCEE for committing climate heresy.

Public outcry over the treatment of Alan Carlin and the ongoing investigations by Reps. Issa, Sensenbrenner, and Barton have not produced an atmosphere of open and free intellectual discourse at EPA. Nonetheless, the outcry and the investigations can only help deter future acts of retaliation against climate skeptics.

For further discussion of these issues, see my blog post, John Broder’s spin job on Alan Carlin.

Please direct responses to fumento@pobox.com.

Thanks.

But is it?

The article concerns three windmills that some fear will obstruct the view of the awesome Mont St. Michelle Abby on the French coast, which becomes an island at high tides. Yet the article also points out that France is very accepting of nuclear power, which provides about 80% of the nation’s energy needs. Another 10% comes from hydro. And the number of windmills in question, three, provide less energy than the smallest nuclear plant made - which is to say those on naval warships.

No, this isn’t really about energy. It’s about politics. It’s making a statement. And quite literally, an ugly one.

As I’ve noted previously, every Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishes a new edition of FluView, which tracks all types of flu but currently only swine flu since that’s all that’s out there now. Most figures are from the previous week, though some are newer.

And every week the hysteria-minded media ignore it. But for those who do care about how our alleged pandemic is progressing, herewith the latest from the CDC with supplemental information from elsewhere.

As you probably know, the media proclaimed that THIS WEEK the epidemic finally took off. Of course, that’s what they said last week. Now they’re wrong again.

Total deaths since August 30 from “Influenza and Pneumonia-Associated” illness according to the CDC website are 1,397. But only 192 of those have been laboratory-confirmed as being flu of any type. And yes, people do die of pneumonia from many causes other than flu.

The CDC no longer publishes data on swine flu cases or deaths. However, the FluTracker website does, and as of today lists 149,359 total confirmed U.S. cases with 680 deaths, compared to last week with 136,268 cases and 644 deaths.

For the mathematically-challenged, that’s just 36 deaths in the past week. By comparison, the CDC estimates 36,000 Americans die annually of seasonal flu, or about 1,800 each week during the season of approximately 140 days.

FluTracker also provides a graph that shows new worldwide cases and deaths and that graph shows, rather graphically, that they are currently far below where they were two or three weeks ago.

And the massive outbreak on college campuses you’ve been hearing about? The American College Health Association’s latest weekly survey at this writing shows new cases have DROPPED by 19 percent compared to the previous week.

FluView reports that the percentage of samples testing positive for swine flu from the sentinel system of laboratories is down slightly from last week, at 22.8 percent, with the data here.

(Though as I write this the last week’s figures haven’t been entered yet.) Another way of looking at it is that only about a fifth of the samples that even doctors (much less scared patients) suspect may show swine flu do not show influenza of any type.

That’s one indicator of hysteria.

Another is that despite all the indications that there were fewer new flu cases, the percentage of visits to emergency rooms and outpatient clinics by people worried they have the flu - and worried enough to seek medical attention - is incredibly high. It’s about five percent of all emergency visits now.

Finally, deaths from influenza and pneumonia are well within the normal bounds for this time of year, or as the CDC puts it, “below the epidemic threshold.”

Repeat, there is no flu epidemic. There will be because now flu season has officially started. But all the pap in the papers? False.

But there is nothing more on those 21,000. Lots of talk about people swamping emergency rooms and school closings, yet not a single number regarding actual flu cases in a 765-word article.

What if it began “Flying saucers land on the White House lawn” and no flying saucers were mentioned again? And no, Fox fans, I’m not picking on your favorite network. Lots of people are tossing that number around; I just stumbled upon the Fox piece first.

Turns out the data are from the American College Health Association (ACHA) and are cumulative since August 22. So unless we assume that everybody who got the flu five weeks ago still has it, it’s hardly the snapshot implied by the present tense “are” and is worthless in determining whether the bug is “picking up steam” or “petering out.”

And the truly nifty thing about cumulative cases is they never go down. So next week they can use a higher figure and the week after a still higher one. Let’s play that with other diseases. “100 million Americans have cancer!” Or maybe, “10 million kids have polio!”

Cumulative figures are also useless for determining what’s happening right now - which is what this article and all the other scare stories are supposedly about. Nevertheless, the ACHA figures for the latest week at this writing show a 15% increase. Not exactly the end of the world, and in part it reflects that more institutions were reporting than the week before. Still, the increase for this week may prove much higher.

This is how you play the game, kids. But I’m guessing there are a lot of exhausted emergency room workers, along with truly ill patients being pushed aside by the worried well, who don’t really enjoy it.

Pandemic diseases have a way of revealing our vulnerabilities in quick order. Already we have been humbled by the virus’s exploitation of our fragmented health-care system, as families without insurance overwhelm emergency rooms, schools flounder without nurses, and people without a sick-leave option choose between going to work with a raging fever or getting fired. At the University of Washington, some 2,000 students have reported having H1N1 symptoms. At Emory University in Atlanta, sick kids are relocated to a dorm dubbed Club Swine.

Only universal health care - especially as proposed by the Obama administration - could have prevented this catastrophe!

Except that probably few of those students actually have the flu, but rather those ubiquitous “flu-like symptoms” stoked by panic purveyors like, well, Time magazine.

But to some left-leaning journalists who write about the Supreme Court, none of this has ever happened, and the Supreme Court, which is responsible for many of these liberal changes, remains a conservative boogeyman.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, America’s most famous Supreme Court reporter, writes today that in the Supreme Court, “big business always prevails, environmentalists are always buried, female and elderly workers go unprotected, death row inmates get the needle, and criminal defendants are shown the door.”

This is breathtakingly inconsistent with reality. Over the last dozen years, the death penalty has been dramatically cut back in cases like Roper v. Simmons (2005), as the Supreme Court has invalidated the death penalty when imposed on the “retarded” (even the mildly retarded) or juveniles (even 16 to 18 year-olds), or when imposed by judges rather than juries (as state laws long provided).

The Supreme Court overturned thousands of sentences given to criminal defendants in cases like U.S. v. Booker (2005), based not on their guilt or innocence, but on the fact that judges, rather than juries, had made findings related to those sentences (the so-called Booker/Apprendi line of cases). The supposedly “right-wing” justices Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas joined in these decisions.

Environmentalists won many cases, including perhaps the most economically-significant decision ever — Massachusetts v. EPA (2003) — which potentially opened the door to EPA regulation of virtually every human activity, on the grounds that virtually all activity (from industrial production to farming to cars) emits carbon dioxide and thus allegedly causes global warming. That decision also created a special rule of standing to allow state attorneys general to bring lawsuits that would otherwise be thrown out as meritless for lack of standing.

The Supreme Court recently allowed businesses to be sued even for products the FDA deems to be safe and effective, in Wyeth v. Levine (2009).

The Supreme Court progressively expanded businesses’ liability for discrimination against female and elderly workers. It continuously expanded the definition of sexual harassment, overturning earlier limits on vicarious liability (in Faragher v. Boca Raton (1998)), allowing institutions to be sued based on the acts of non-employees (in Davis v. Monroe County (1999)), and rejecting longstanding lower-court limits on lawsuits where there is no economic or psychological harm (in Harris v. Forklift Systems (1993)). It also allowed businesses to be sued for discrimination against elderly workers even absent any showing of discriminatory intent or differential treatment (in Smith v. Jackson (2005)). All of these decisions reversed lower court rulings in favor of businesses.

In short, Dahlia Lithwick’s perception of the Supreme Court bears no relation to reality. But it is shared by most of the nation’s leading court reporters, at publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times, who promote a similar caricature of the Supreme Court.

As a result of such reporters ceaselessly peddling this perspective to their readers, it is also the perception of much of the newspaper-reading public, especially in the so-called Blue States, many of whom view the Supreme Court as “too conservative.”

For example, factually inaccurate and dishonest reporting on recent Supreme Court decisions also contributed to recent election results.

A classic example is the Supreme Court’s recent Ledbetter decision, which many reporters wrongly claimed required discrimination plaintiffs to sue within a rigid 180-day deadline — when in fact, most pay discrimination cases could legally be brought for at least 3 years after the discrimination allegedly occurred, under laws unaffected by the Supreme Court’s decision (like the Equal Pay Act), and the 180-day deadline, even when applicable, had lots of common-sense exceptions to keep employers from escaping justice (such as tolling to protect hoodwinked employees)

(Regardless of whether the death penalty is good or bad, it is very clear that it is not unconstitutional).

It has issued a gag order to Humana, a health insurer that provides Medicare Advantage services, ordering it not to tell customers about how Obamacare could reduce the availability of such services.  The gag order clearly violates the First Amendment, according to law professor Eugene Volokh, the author of a leading treatise on First Amendment law, and a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.  The gag order has also been criticized by the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Examiner, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, yet the administration obstinately insists on enforcing it.

The Supreme Court has said the First Amendment protects the free speech rights of businesses like Humana even when they are government contractors, in cases like Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr, 518 U.S. 668 (1996).

Liberal Obama supporters hypocritically claim Humana should shut up because it’s receiving federal funds (an argument they would never make regarding artists funded by the National Endowment for the Arts), and because its claims are supposedly false (never mind that its truthful claims are echoed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which is headed by Democrat Douglas Elmendorf).

But as Professor Volokh and the Washington Supreme Court have recently noted, “false statements of fact about the government are generally protected” by the First Amendment.

Humana’s statements are predictions about the future, and thus by definition not provably false.   Moreover, they are chillingly accurate predictions, which is why Obama ally Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who is drafting Obama’s health-care plan, asked Obama to ban them:

“On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office director told Mr. Baucus’s committee that its plan to cut $123 billion from Medicare Advantage—the program that gives almost one-fourth of seniors private health-insurance options—will result in lower benefits and some 2.7 million people losing this coverage. Imagine that. Last week Mr. Baucus ordered Medicare regulators to investigate and likely punish Humana Inc. for trying to educate enrollees in its Advantage plans about precisely this fact.”

The fact that Humana is a government contractor doesn’t make this censorship any more acceptable, since the government simply has no business policing criticism of itself as “false”:  federal courts have ruled that even false speech by government contractors and employees on matters of public concern can be protected, as cases like Johnson v. Multnomah County, 48 F.3d 420 (9th Cir. 1995) show.

Nor is there any evidence that Humana is using federal money to disseminate its message.  And any subsidies Humana might be receiving would not justify the Obama administration’s blatant viewpoint discrimination against it, since Obama allies that receive lots of federal subsidies are being allowed to trumpet their support for Obamacare freely.  Under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rosenberger v. Rector of the University of Virginia, viewpoint discrimination is a forbidden, “egregious” form of discrimination even when the government is subsidizing a speaker; here, the federal government is plainly engaging in viewpoint discrimination, since it is letting AARP make blatantly false claims in favor of Obamacare that contradict CBO finds and basic budget math, while blocking Humana from criticizing Obamacare based on reasonable arguments echoed by the Congressional Budget Office).

The Obama administration’s position contradicts the position of the Clinton administration, which admitted that Medicare contractors have free speech rights.  (But then, Obama is well to the left of Bill Clinton and past presidents).

Obama’s health care plan would raise taxes, break promises, harm people with insurance, explode the budget deficit, destroy many inexpensive health-care plans, and take away important freedoms.

Obama earlier showed contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law by radically expanding Bush’s  auto bailout, violating federal bankruptcy laws and the TARP statute in the process.  (The Obama administration ripped off taxpayers and retirees in the General Motors and Chrysler bailouts, in order to enrich the left-wing United Auto Workers union, in unnecessary bailouts that have cost at least $70 billion, drawing criticism even from the liberal Washington Post. Many commentators argued that the auto bailouts were illegal, such as the Heritage Foundation and Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich.)

He also demanded that a small country in Latin America (Honduras) violate its constitution by allowing the return to power of its left-wing ex-president and would-be dictator, imposing travel sanctions on its ordinary citizens as punishment for a ruling by its supreme court refusing to reinstate the ex-president, who was removed for violating his country’s constitution.  (The ex-president, Mel Zelaya, is a paranoid, erratic bully who claims he is being subjected to “mind-altering radiation and poison gas” and targeted by “Israeli mercenaries.”)