National Health Death Service Just Got Easier

New rules just published by the British National "Health" Service have abolished the need for a doctor to make the ultimate decisions in health care. The new rules will allow nurses – on their own – to end the life of patients under their care. No Physicians, no waiting.

For the first time in the history of the profession, senior clinical nurses have been given the authority to decide whether or not patients should be resuscitated.

The official guidance, issued by the British Medical Association, started a fierce debate last night. Although some medical professionals welcomed the new rules, patient groups voiced concerns that they could place unfair pressure on nurses.

Previously, only consultants and doctors of General Practitioner rank had the power to decide not to resuscitate. However, under the new rules, "properly experienced" clinical nurses will be able to make that judgment.

The BMA's guidance is partly in response to the Mental Capacity Act, which came into force earlier this month. This introduced the concept of a living will, which allows patients to state in advance their wish not to be resuscitated in the event of their heart or breathing stopping, or to choose someone to make the decision for them if they are incapable of doing so.

These changes have already proved controversial and granting powers to nurses over resuscitation has intensified the debate over the ethics of caring for the seriously ill.

Dr Peter Saunders, general secretary of the Christian Medical Fellowship, of which more than 4,500 doctors are members, said of the guidance: "Nurses should not be making such a decision.

"It is always going to be a difficult call to decide whether someone should live or die. The decision should always be taken after very careful consideration by senior doctors.

"There is absolutely no way this can be delegated to nursing staff. It's unfair on them to make such a call — they have neither the training or the experience."

No matter, the bureaucrats have spoken. Nurses (who I have great respect for, don't get me wrong here) will now have the ability to end lives. The American left wants the US to emulate the British model of socialized medicine. Still think that's a good idea, folks? What about when they authorize orderlies to make the call? What about when patrons in pubs are asked to decide?

Britain Reintroduces Slavery

A troubling story out of Britain from the Telegraph. It isn't the British government that is reintroducing it, it is criminal gangs. But it is a very scary thing.  A gang in Britain forced a man from eastern Europe into slavery, making him work in farm fields harvesting crops. The man was kept in a house, forced to work and denied even a change of clothing.

A starving man who was held as a slave has been freed by police.

The 22-year-old, believed to be the first human slave to be found in Britain since the trade was abolished 200 years ago, was duped into leaving his home in Eastern Europe.

The man had been forced to work long hours picking vegetables for the past year.

He was made to hand over his wages to the gang holding him and was even denied a change of clothes.

In a scene described as being from the Dark Ages, police discovered the bedraggled and hungry man in a house in Peterborough, Cambs, last week.

It is believed he was lured to the city with the promise of a good job and a better life.

His rescue comes as detectives, working on Operation Radium, hunt human traffickers who are forcing foreign women into the sex industry.

There are fears that more people could be being held against their will.

In 1807 the British outlawed the slave trade and unilaterally imposed that ban on the world's oceans. (Britain did not actually outlaw slavery itself until 1833.) The Royal Navy clamped down on slave traders, stopping and searching ships to ensure they were not trafficking in human slaves. Slavery is rearing its ugly head again – even in the nation that helped stop it 200 years ago.

It does not help that American politicians are advancing a form of human serfdom. Not outright slavery, not bonding the serfs to the land but rather forcing them to work for a specific business sector for a period of years. If it stinks like bondage…..

Butt Brown Bear, Brown Bear Bite Butt

A woman in Alaska has learned a valuable lesson about proper manners when encountering a brown bear.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – A volunteer at the Eagle River Nature Center is recovering after being bitten by a brown bear sow. Alaska Department of Fish and Game officials say Sarah Wallmer was bitten on the buttocks on the Crow Pass Trail, about a mile from the nature center.

The attack happened Thursday as Wallmer was traveling to the Rapids camp yurt. She was running with her dog, about 10 minutes ahead of another volunteer.

Officials say she was making noise on the trail to announce her presence, but the blowing wind probably obscured her voice.

The bear charged her, and she dropped her dog's leash and turned her back to the sow. The bear bit her once.

It is, of course, well known that bears are sticklers for proper etiquette. When meeting a bear it is considered bad form to show them your butt. They are liable to bite said butt in order to teach a lesson. Consider it a sort of a bruin Miss Manners.

</humor> Seriously: Bad idea to turn your back on a bear. Make noise, avoid eye contact but do not run or turn as if you are trying to do so. Quick rundown here.

What’s Right With America

From San Diego comes a perfect illustration of what's right with America. The Christian Science Monitor reports that volunteers are traveling hundreds of miles or more to pitch in and help. Not just with people, either. They are there to help animals as well.

San Diego – Rachel Hanley arrived in San Diego Wednesday after a 12-hour drive from her home in Colorado Springs, Colo. She parked her truck at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, home of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, and set to work caring for some of the more than 2,500 horses that have been given shelter there from the region's firestorm.

"There are a lot of displaced folks, but they seem to be taken care of," says Ms. Hanley. "But these animals are really scared, and not a lot of people can handle them. People are helping the fire victims of San Diego in all sorts of ways. Mine just happens to be with horses."

At least 1,000 volunteers have turned out in recent days, arriving at the fairgrounds and Qualcomm Stadium, evacuation central, to offer their services to the fire-besieged – everything from medical skills to yoga instruction.

Likewise, fire crews who've been battling the blazes since Saturday are seeing reinforce- ments arrive, as fires that had blackened nearly 500,000 acres by Thursday morning continue to burn throughout San Diego County. Eight deaths have been attributed to the southern California fires, and in a bit of bad news that represents the opposite spirit of the volunteer corps, authorities reported that arson is the suspected cause of two wildfires to the north – one in Orange County and one in Riverside County.

Among the firefighters who have worked to contain the San Diego fires are crews from Tijuana and Tecate in Mexico. "It is very important for Mexico to cooperate with the United States in situations like these because these fires affect the environment on both sides," said Capt. Marco Antonio Garambullo, Tecate's Fire Department director.

Mexico has also sent electricity to the area. A fire cut a main power link with Arizona, and a blaze near the Marine base at Camp Pendleton was, at press time, threatening the main north-south power corridor that connects San Diego with the rest of California.

And Still I persist has continued updates, photographs and maps on their site and have added a sidebar with more handy fire-related links. They have a photograph that illustrates the risks people took to help save horses. (It is not a happy picture – I hope there were no injuries, human or equine.)

Situations like this – tragedies where private citizens step up rather than waiting around for a government handout is what has made this country great. These folks deserve a hearty round of applause.

British Government Waste: Illustrated

A Tory MP in Britain has been campaigning for a crosswalk to be installed near a school in his district. The request was turned down as too expensive, so Oliver Letwin requested a breakdown of the costs with the idea that he could raise the funds locally. The Highways Agency promptly sent his the estimate.

£114,000 or $228,000 dollars. For a crosswalk. Oh, excuse me, a "zebra cossing". Like the Beatles' Abbey Road album shows.

How much would you think it costs to build a zebra crossing?

A couple of workmen, a few pots of black and white paint, two Belisha beacons – it doesn't sound like a lot.

Yet it emerged yesterday that the Highways Agency spends a staggering £114,000 on each new pedestrian crossing.

Incredibly, the figure for the familiar black and white crossing includes £11,000 for "design work".

A further £16,000 is spent on the beacons, electrical wiring and road signs while the remaining £87,000 is swallowed up by labour costs, the equivalent of three and a half years pay for the average worker.

Every year, just before school starts, the town I live in repaints all the crosswalks. Two guys put out road cones, block a lane of traffic and run their little paint machine to spray line on the pavement. They move to the next corner while the first one dries, then go back, move the cones and do the next lane. Takes them a day to do all the crosswalks in the areas around the schools.

I just have to ask them how much they charge for design work.

British Government Offers Jobs For Strippers

The British Department for Work and Pensions is carry a help wanted advertisement for webcam strippers. They insist that they have to do so. The job offers women £8/hour for performing acts on webcam live for paying customers.

A Jobcentre has provoked outrage after it was found to be advertising for women to strip for web cams on Internet sex sites for £8 an hour.

According to the advertisement, the role involves "explicit dialogue" and "performing for clients' or customers' fantasies".

Astonishingly, the Department for Work and Pensions insisted that it is legally obliged to carry the advertisements.

However politicians and family campaigners lined up to criticise the policy last night – claiming it legitimises the sex industry and encourages women to work in it.

The controversial advertisement was posted in a Jobcentre Plus branch in Cardiff, south Wales and nationwide on the agency's website.

It offered an hourly wage for women to work 15 to 40 hours a week, between 9pm and midday. There is no pension.

Placed by a company called Cybtrader, the advertisement – which remains within legal boundaries – is unshamedly brazen when it comes to describing exactly what the role entails.

Lovely. The British government is collectively off its rocker. But for those who are interested, here's a handy, illustrated guide on how to strip.

Born At The Right(?) Time

Me and my buddies we are travelling people
We like to go down to restaurant row
Spend those Euro-dollars
All the way from Washington to Tokyo
I see them in the airport lounge
Upon their mother's breast
They follow me with open eyes
Their uninvited guest

Never been lonely
Never been lied to
Never had to scuffle in fear
Nothing denied to
Born at the instant
The church bells chime
And the whole world whispering
Born at the right time

(Paul Simon, Born at the Right Time)

Peggy Noonan observes that The New Republic's cheerful acceptance and publication of the "Scott Thomas" stories casts quite a lot of light on how the editors view the world. Through Hollywood-tinted glasses:

On the Thomas stories, which I read not when they came out but when they began to come under scrutiny, I had a similar thought, or a variation of it. I thought: That's not Iraq, that's a Vietnam War movie. That's not life as it's being lived on the ground right now, that's life as an editor absorbed it through media. That's the dark world of Kubrick and Coppola and Oliver Stone, of the great Vietnam movies of the '70s and '80s.

If that's what you absorbed during the past 20 or 30 years, it just might make sense to you, it would actually seem believable, if a fellow in Iraq wrote for you about taunting scarred women, shooting dogs, and wearing skulls as helmets. This is the offhand brutality of war. You know. You saw it in a movie.

If you'd had a broader array of references, and were less preoccupied by the media that is the great occupying force in our own country, and you were the editor of the Thomas pieces, you might have said, "Whoa." Just whoa.

Noonan speculates on how this came to pass:

I'll jump here, or lurch I suppose, to something I am concerned about that I think I am observing accurately. It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been or are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business. They have had good lives, happy lives, but there is a sense with some of them that they didn't so much live it as view it. That they learned too much from media and not enough from life's difficulties. That they saw much of what they know in a film or play and picked up all the memes and themes.

In terms of personal difficulties, they seem to have had less real-life experience, or rather different experiences, than their rougher predecessors. They grew up affluent in a city or suburb, cosseted in material terms, and generally directed toward academic and material success. Their lives seem to have been not crowded or fearful, but relatively peaceful, at least until September 2001, which was very hard.

But this new leadership class, those roughly 35 to 40, grew up in a time when media dominated all. They studied, they entered a top-tier college, and then on to Washington or New York or Los Angeles. But their knowledge, their experience, is necessarily circumscribed. Too much is abstract to them, or symbolic. The education establishment did them few favors. They didn't have to read Dostoevsky, they had to read critiques and deconstruction of Dostoevsky.

It is also something I have long suspected. This post from Huffington Post by Sean Daniels illustrates it perfectly:

What really happened at Animal House? Delta Tau Chi or Delta House as its members called it was a place where everyone was welcome. People of all races and religions were embraced as was made clear when John Blutarsky welcomed freshmen Larry Kroger and Kent Dorfman after they had been summarily dismissed from Omega House. They were invited in to a party and offered refreshment and friendship. At no time were they subjected to any of the practices that came to light at Abu Ghraib……..

…….What happened in 1962 on the Faber campus should be remembered as a time when freedom loving individuals came together to defend the beliefs that they stood for.

But the fact is, of course, that nothing happened at Faber College in 1962 – or ever - because it is fictional. It is nothing more than a movie script. But that is not the way Daniels presents it. He states it as fact (and no, it isn't cherry-picked out of context). Is this, then, where the departure in world views is coming from? Children of privilege who have "Never been lonely, never been lied to, never had to scuffle in fear, nothing denied to" versus people who have had the opposite experiences? Is it that simple? Of course, it isn't going to apply universally there would be exceptions on either side of the divide. But is that where at least a good portion of it is coming from?

Noonan suspects so. As do I.

At Last

Something I can actually agree with Bill Clinton about. A 9/11 troofer yelled out that 9/11 was an "inside job" at a speech Clinton was giving. UPDATE: You'll have to click the link, LiveLeak's embed code is seriously hosed up. Second update: Got a YouTube embed.

And just a quick reminder of the sort of inside jobs the troofers can expect in their future employment endeavors.

The Soul Of A New Machine

Christopher Hayes, writing at The Nation, alleges that he has discovered a "new right-wing smear machine."

Such is the power of the right-wing smear forward, a vehicle for the dissemination of character assassination that has escaped the scrutiny directed at the Limbaughs and Coulters and O'Reillys but one that is as potent as it is invisible. In 2004 putative firsthand accounts of Kerry's performance in Vietnam traveled through e-mail in right-wing circles, presaging the Swift Boat attacks. Last winter a forward began circulating accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim schooled in a radical madrassa (about which more later). While the story was later fed through familiar right-wing megaphones, even making it onto Fox, it has continued to circulate via e-mail long after being definitively debunked by CNN. In other words, the few weeks the smear spent in the glare of the mainstream media was just a tiny portion of a long life cycle, most of which has been spent darting from inbox to inbox.

In that respect, the e-mail forward doesn't fit into our existing model of the right-wing noise machine's structure (hierarchical) or its approach (broadcast). It is, instead, organic and peer-to-peer. If the manufactured outrage over Kerry's botched joke about George Bush's study habits was the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster, the Gold Star Mother smear was like one of those goofy viral videos of a dog on a skateboard on YouTube. Of course, some of those videos end up with 25 million page views. And now that large media companies understand their potential, they've begun trying to create their own. Which prompts the obvious question: if a handful of millionaires and disgruntled Swift Boat Veterans were able to sabotage Kerry's campaign in 2004, what kind of havoc could be wreaked in 2008 by a few political operatives armed with little more than Outlook and a talent for gossip?

The smear forward has its roots in two distinct forms of Internet-age communication. First, there's the electronically disseminated urban legend ("Help find this missing child!"; "Bill Gates is going to pay people for every e-mail they send!"), which has been a staple of the Internet since the mid- '90s. Then there's the surreal genre of right-wing e-mail forwards. These range from creepy rage-filled quasi-fascist invocations ("The next time you see an adult talking…during the playing of the National Anthem–kick their ass") to treacly aphorisms of patriotic/religious uplift ("remember only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ…and the American Soldier").

For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with talk-radio, are an informational staple, a means of getting the real stories that the mainstream media ignore. "I get a million of them!" says Gerald DeSimone, a 74-year-old veteran from Ridgewood, New Jersey, who describes his politics as "to the right of Attila the Hun." "If I forwarded every one on, everyone would hate me…. I'm trying to cut back. I try to send no more than two or three a day. I must get thirty or forty a day."

Hey! Catchy name for a movie: Smear it Forward! Well, all I can say is that I never got any of the memos from the first VRWC, so I doubt I'll get any from the new one. But if Hayes had just asked us, we could have sent him pictures. First the old VRWC Smear Central:

And the new Double-Secret Smear It Forward Chief:

Which is up against the Hillary Mobile Cash Vacuum and Character Assassination Express (this is the smallest one in the fleet):

Bearglary In Progress

Yet another hairy situation in California as sheriff's deputies answered a call about a break-in at a residence in Bradbury. They caught the bearglar in the act.

A resident discovered a break-in when he returned home Thursday evening and he immediately called the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Sergeant Roberta Granek says deputies responding to the Woodland Lane address at about 6:30 p.m. spotted the "really hairy" intruder.

Department of Fish and Game officials were sent to the home and scared the bear off within a few minutes.

No one was hurt, but the house was a mess.

Bears are lousy house guests, incidentally.

A Marriage Not Made In Heaven

There have been two major forces behind the attempts to encourage illegal immigration into this country. One is the desire to gain votes from a permanent underclass, the other is to secure a source of cheap labor from that underclass. Today, the Politico is reporting a marriage of the two interests in yet another attempt to secure an amnesty bill.

The legislation that Goldstein and Hughes are pushing, called AgJOBS, shorthand for the Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits and Security Act, has attracted broad support, including from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and more than 800 other organizations, such as church groups, as well as state agriculture officials.

“Without AgJOBS, there will be shortages, crops will rot and American agriculture could face significant disruption,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in a statement.

The California Democrat has been busily schmoozing her fellow senators, including sympathetic Republicans, to build support for the bill.

She may try to add it to the farm bill or an omnibus appropriations bill, according to her staff. “We must get to 60 votes and ensure that there is a stable and reliable source of labor for American agriculture,” Feinstein said.

On Oct. 16, the chamber sent a letter to members of Congress warning that the current “enforcement-only approach” to immigration policy is causing American businesses, and jobs, to move overseas, not only in the agricultural sector but also in the economy that surrounds it, such as equipment manufacturers and distributors and financial services.

Despite the bill’s broad backing from business and labor, however, stiff opposition remains.

“That’s the same group that supported [immigration reform] last summer,” Sen. Jeff Sessions said in an interview, referring to the comprehensive immigration overhaul that contained a version of AgJOBS and that was defeated despite strong support from the Bush administration. “I don’t believe AgJOBS has any chance of passing.

“You have to have a lawful system and not reward those who came illegally,” Sessions said. The Alabama Republican claims the bill would lead to citizenship for 3.3 million farm workers and their families.

In an attempt to allay the accusations by Sessions and others, such as Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), that the AgJOBS legislation would provide “amnesty” to people who broke the law, the bill would require illegal migrant workers to pay a substantial fine and to remain in U.S. agriculture for three to five years before they can earn legal status.

Essentially creating a serf class in the country, tied not to the land itself but to the businesses that control the land. Labor undoubtedly hopes to unionize the underclass, Democrats hope for a steady stream of new voters beholden to the Democratic party and the agribusiness sector cheerfully cooperates because it gets cheap labor. Never mind that they will also get the eventual redistribution of their wealth.

Again: A high fence, a wide gate and a hearty welcome for those who come here legally. It is a winning strategy. These continued attempts at back door amnesty are getting old. (And a farm bill is not the place to stick an immigration policy change.)

There's a nice trigger for the amygdalae here. "Democrats for Serfdom!"™

Bump In The Night

They're built like light
and they dance like spirits in the night (all night) in the night (all night)
Oh, you don't know what they can do to you
Spirits in the night (all night), in the night (all night)
Stand right up now and let it shoot through you
(Bruce Springsteen, Spirit in the Night)

Just in time for Halloween, a new survey is out that claims that about one third of people believe in ghosts.

Those things that go bump in the night? About one-third of people believe they could be ghosts.

And nearly one out of four, 23 percent, say they've actually seen a ghost or felt its presence, finds a pre-Halloween poll by The Associated Press and Ipsos.

One is Misty Conrad, who says she fled her rented home in Syracuse, Ind., after her daughter began talking to an unseen girl named Nicole and neighbors said children had been murdered in the house. That was after the TV and lights began flicking on at night.

"It kind of creeped you out," Conrad, 40, of Hampton, Va., recalled this week. "I needed to get us out."

About one out of five people, 19 percent, say they accept the existence of spells or witchcraft. Nearly half, 48 percent, believe in extrasensory perception, or ESP.

The most likely candidates for ghostly visits include single people, Catholics and those who never attend religious services. By 31 percent to 18 percent, more liberals than conservatives report seeing a specter.

Those who dismissed the existence of ghosts include Morris Swadener, 66, a Navy retiree from Kingston, Wash.

He says he shot one with his rifle when he was a child.

"I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a white ghost in my closet," he said. "I discovered I'd put a hole in my brand new white shirt. My mother and father were not amused."

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have long been in the forefront of paranormal investigation. Our spectacular images of real ghosts are the talk of the ward town. There's the haunted inn, the haunted bar and the famous ghost ship. All those pale in comparison to the most horrifying image of all, however. That's right we're talking about the haunted chicken, also known as the poultrygeist. 

A Great Place To Be From

Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher, a native of Louisiana, writes about his home state and the pride and hope that Bobby Jindal's victory brings to expatriates like him. Unlike most people who leave Louisiana, Bobby Jindal went back.

Louisiana has been at or near the bottom of "quality of life" lists for so long that you start to believe that there's something genetically wrong with its residents. For 15 out of the past 17 years, Louisiana has been either America's Least Livable State or runner-up in the annual Morgan Quitno research firm's comprehensive rankings, which combine educational, economic, health, environmental and crime statistics. No wonder Louisiana has for at least two decades experienced a steady out-migration of young professionals.

You notice something, though, when Louisianians meet in exile. Everybody misses home and will take any opportunity to talk about it. Our friends–Yankees, mostly–get the biggest kick out of our honest-to-God tales of Bayou State life (political and otherwise). My wife, a native Texan, confessed that when we first started dating, she thought my stories about my homeland revealed me to be a pathological liar–until I took her there to see for herself. She visited my Uncle Murphy's grave and saw the headstone he'd won playing bourré (a Cajun card game) with an undertaker. He had it inscribed with the epitaph: "This ain't bad, once you get used to it."

Louisiana makes a lot more sense if you read the beloved picaresque "A Confederacy of Dunces" as an exercise in literary naturalism. There's simply no place like Louisiana. You will not find more generous and life-loving people anywhere, and Lord knows, you won't eat or drink better. It's hard to get over that. But you do, mostly. Last Sunday, I ran into a couple I know at a Krispy Kreme shop here in Dallas. We got to talking about the Jindal victory, and the wife, a non-native who had fallen in love with Louisiana as a Tulane student, said warmly that she'd love to move back. The husband gave her a look that telegraphed, "Yes, we all would, dear, but come on."

Despite all the sentimental longing for LSU Tigers tailgating and the scent of Zatarain's crawfish boil on your fingers, moving home rarely crosses the minds of us expatriates. Louisiana is a great place to be from, but the sense of fatalism that pervades life there casts doubt on whether it will some day be great place to be. In Louisiana, to be educated is to love the state and hate the state–and, for many, to leave it.

But Jindal did go back, despite his great education and virtually unlimited possibilities anywhere he decided to go. The son of immigrants from India, a Republican in the quintessential corrupt Democratic machine-run state, a convert to Roman Catholicism with a fancy education has gone back and vowed to fight the corruption. Dreher has hope for his state again. Maybe it won't just be a great place to be from. Maybe it will be a great place to live again.

Half Empty, Half Full

Charles Krauthammer looks at the Republican presidential candidates and dismisses the moans from some quarters about the field. Far from being an unsatisfactory bunch, there are some fine people running. It's only a matter of picking the one to captain the ship.

Major grumbling among conservatives about the Republican field. So many candidates, so many flaws. Rudy Giuliani, abortion apostate. Mitt Romney, flip-flopper. John McCain, Mr. Amnesty. Fred Thompson, lazy boy. Where is the paragon? Where is Ronald Reagan?

Well, what about Reagan? This president, renowned for his naps, granted amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants in the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill. As governor of California, he signed the most liberal abortion legalization bill in America, then flip-flopped and became an abortion opponent. What did he do about it as president? Gave us Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, the two swing votes that upheld and enshrined Roe v. Wade for the last quarter-century.

The point is not to denigrate Reagan but to bring a little realism to the gauzy idol worship that fuels today's discontent. And to argue that in 2007 we have, by any reasonable historical standard, a fine Republican
field: One of the great big-city mayors of the last century; a former governor of extraordinary executive talent; a war hero, highly principled and deeply schooled in national security; and a former senator with impeccable conservative credentials.

So why all the angst? If you'd like to share just a bit of my serenity, have a look at last Sunday's Republican debate in Orlando. It was a feisty affair, the candidates lustily bashing each other's ideological deficiencies — Mike Huckabee called it a "demolition derby" — and yet strangely enough, the entire field did well.

Go read it all,  it is short and direct, enumerating Krauthammer's perceptions of the relative strengths of the candidates. There will never be a perfect candidate that appeals to everyone. What needs to happen is that the most acceptable candidate be settled on.

Trillion Dollar Baby Monster

The Opinion Journal rips into Charles Rangel's trillion dollar Mother of all tax increases. The largest tax hike in American history. They have rather a lot to say about it – including the fact that there is no chance of it passing this year. But it sure indicates what will happen in 2009 if the Democrats win Congress and the White House. Worst of all, it is a smoke screen to cover the Democrat's role in the Alternative Minimum Tax, a Frankenstein's monster enacted by Democrats to soak the rich that now is devouring the middle class.

All of this is done in the name of tax "fairness," but it's hard to see how this would make the U.S. code more equitable. Millions of those who'd receive the tax credits already pay no income tax, so they would merely be getting another government subsidy. The group that gets slammed hardest is the entrepreneurial class. Tax Foundation data show that three of four taxpayers in the highest income tax bracket are small business owners or farmers. If Mr. Rangel's plan ever becomes law, look for millions of Americans and small-businesses to "incorporate" themselves so they can pay the lower corporate rate. Previous tax reforms have tried to keep the corporate and top income tax rates equal precisely to avoid this kind of tax gaming.

We sympathize a little with Mr. Rangel, whose bad luck has been to take over his tax chair just when the AMT is becoming the tax that ate the middle-class in the high-tax "blue" states of New York, California and New Jersey. Democrats are desperate to avoid blame for this, even as they've boxed themselves in with their "paygo" promise to offset every tax cut with a tax increase or entitlement spending cut.

Remember, the AMT was enacted by the Democrats because a couple of dozen very rich people had avoided – legally – paying any income tax. But because the Democrats have steadily revised what constitutes "rich" downward, the AMT is hurting more and more people. Give that history, how long do you think it will be until Rangel's trillion dollar monster runs amok and further destroys the middle class?