Trial lawyers getting you down? Disgusted at the huge settlements they win, supposedly on behalf of the little guy, really for the sake of lining their bulging pockets with a third of whatever the insurance companies are made to fork over?

No, I don’t have a solution, other than to say if wishes were horses there would be an immediate cap on settlements and lawyers would have to make due with a much smaller contingency fee. But I do have, courtesy of a public-spirited friend, a simple, painless way to cause at least some law firms a modicum of inconvenience and expense.

You know those ads on Google? You search for “Peach Pie,” say, and running down the right side of the screen are a bunch of ads for recipes, peaches, and what not. All of those ads are paid notices. Every time someone clicks on them, Google gets a sum — quite a substantial sum, I understand, in the case of the ones near the top.

So here’s what you do. Search for something like “asbestos” or “mesothelioma” (an icky lung disease caused by exposure to asbestos) and up will pop a zillion articles about it and , along the right side, a bunch of ads for law firms angling for your business. Have a spare moment? Click on the top several. Do it more than once. Every time you click, they pay. No, it won’t make them go away, but it will register your irritation and, besides, anything that causes the trial lawyers inconvenience should be regarded as a public-spirited act. So go ahead: occupy an idle moment charging the trial lawyers. You’ll be glad you did. And encourage your friends to do likewise.

By the way, readers wanting to educate themselves about the costs and absurdities of our overly litigious society should be sure to check out the excellent web site overlawyered.com which, as its tagline puts it, chronicles “the high cost of our legal system.” After you peruse some of the articles there, you’ll probably come back to “mesothelioma” on Google and click a bunch more ads.

Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts is a B-list prep school, old enough and rich enough to merit the appellation “elite,” but academically a cut (or two) below such first-rank institutions as Deerfield, Exeter, and Andover. If you have a spare $44,000 and you wish to unload Junior for grades 9-12, I suppose you might consider Cushing an option.

If you care about Junior’s education, however, you’ll want to think twice about sending him (or her) to Cushing. Why? Well, despite boasting all of the accoutrements of a traditional prep school, Cushing has decdied to embrace the Brave New World of educational trendiness and dispense with its library and the contents thereof.

This was one of those eye-rubbing announcements that sparks a double response: incredulity, first, followed closely by outrage and contempt. The October issue of The New Criterion has a note on the subject.

Thomas Parkman Cushing, who originally endowed the school, was careful to stipulate that it be provided, in addition to other accoutrements befitting an educational establishment, with a “suitable library.” James Tracy, the current headmaster, finds the whole idea of a library, and the objects they traditionally contain, positively quaint. Speaking to The Boston Globe, he actually said, apparently without embarrassment, “When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books.”

Where, I wonder, were Cushing’s Trustees when their school was being vandalized? Were they happy to sit back and watch as the intellectual center of the institution was eviscerated? How’s that for leadership?

The Globe reports that Cushing is “one of the first schools in the country to abandon its books.” Is this embrace of the new illiteracy a trend, for heaven’s sake?

The story seems straight out of the pages of some third-rate satire: “In pursuit of a ‘bookless campus,’” The New Criterion reports,

Cushing is disburdening itself of its library’s 20,000 books and spending $500,000 to establish a “learning center” — the name, the Globe reports, is tentative, but whatever they settle on you can be sure the scare quotes will be appropriate. Of course, once you dump a library’s books, you have a lot of extra space to fill, so Cushing . . . will be spending $42,000 for some large flat-screen monitors to display data from the Internet as well as $20,000 for “laptop-friendly” study carrels. In place of the reference desk, the Globe reports, Cushing is building “a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.”

The cappuccino machine is a nice touch, I think you’ll agree. Here’s the bottom line:

at a moment when American students are positively inundated with various forms of electronic media competing for, and eroding, their attention, an institution entrusted with (in Thomas Cushing’s words) “strengthening and enlarging the minds of the rising and future generations” decides to jettison one of civilization’s most potent aids in furthering that project. Fifty grand per annum for a school without books.

You really can’t make it up.

A few days ago, I attended a small lunch for Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist whose image of Mohammed with a bomb for a turban is the most famous of the so-called “Danish cartoons” that occasioned one of those periodic paroxysms of rage, mayhem, and murder among followers of the religion of peace.

The lunch was off-the-record, so I’ll just say that Mr. Westergaard, now 74, is a gentle, soft-spoken fellow with a wry sense of humor. I liked his definition of a cartoon as “an idea with a line around it.” He was on his way the next day to Branford College at Yale, where he spoke before some 65 Yale students and faculty. You won’t be surprised to hear that Mr. Westergaard deplored Yale’s decision to censor Jytte Klausen’s book The Cartoons that Shook the World by forbidding at the last moment publication of the cartoons and other artistic representations of Mohammed.

Rabbi Jon Hausman was at the event and, guess what, the “Yale community” was the opposite of welcoming.

“The crowd was hostile, Rabbi Hausman reported in an interview.

There were a number of self-described Muslims. Those who did ask questions expressed displeasure with Westergaard’s work. The questions from these people were repetitive. One person described himself as a mildly Evangelical Christian who lived for a number of years in a Muslim country working. Yet, he took what I call a dhimmi view in his question — how far can Westergaard go in his work before endangering Christians who live in Muslim countries? I found this to be the most disturbing question and attitude of all.

Asked for his overall impression of Yale, Rabbi Hausman was blunt:

Honestly, I would not send my child to any school where there is such uniformity and conformity of thought and attitude. I was disappointed at the inability of those in attendance amongst the Yale community to place responsibility for the violence that has transpired on those who manifest such responsibility. Westergaard drew, but it was the Imams from Denmark who took those cartoons one year after publication and whipped up violent frenzies, destruction of Danish Embassies in the Muslim world, threats to the physical safety of Danish personnel, violence against indigenous Christian populations. Every questioner seemed to want to misplace blame.

Further, it is clear that the university suffers from the malaise of relativist truth and the multicultural ethic. There are no universal truths any longer. When I was in college, it seemed that the point of education at the university level was to use the subject matter under study to encourage independent, critical thinking. Today, all truths are equal. I abjure this notion.

In the final analysis, I believe that the university is lost.

That sums it up neatly, doesn’t it?

Andrew Breitbart is a national hero. Not only was he the impresario who brought the exposure of ACORN by filmmaker James O’Keefe and actress Hannah Giles to public attention, but he has just followed it up with a blistering exposé of how the White House has endeavored to use the National Endowment for the Arts as a propaganda arm for its left-wing agenda on health care, the environment, education, and “community renewal.”

Today, Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com posts the transcript of an August 10 conference call between Yosi Sergant, then director of communication at the NEA, Buffy Wicks, from the deliciously named Office of Public Engagement at the White House, and a score of artists and activists.

It is an amazing document, breathtaking and alarming by turns. I knew that the Obama administration was moving fast to socialize the United States. I had no idea that its efforts at enforcing conformity through propaganda had reached such an advanced stage.

Here are a few snippets from that conference, stitched together to bring out the gist of various points (though I have not tidied up the diction).

Mike Skolnick, a filmmaker who now serves as “political director” for Russell Simmons, the vegan proselytizer and hip-hop entrepreneur, started the ball rolling. “I have been asked,” he said:

… by folks in the White House and folks in the NEA [to follow up on] the role that we artists and thinkers and tastemakers and marketers and visionaries played during the campaign for the president and also during the his first 200 some odd days of his presidency. … I’m hoping that through this group … we can … get involved in things that we’re passionate about as we did during the campaign … to support some of the president’s initiatives … and push the president and push his administration.

Why was Mr. Skolnick asked by “folks in the White House” to help get artists to “support the president’s initiatives” and “push his administration”?

What is going on here?

Then we have Buffy Wicks — former Obama campaign activist, now White House enabler:

We won and that’s exciting and now we have to take all that energy and make it really meaningful. I’m in the White House now and what I’ve learned is that … change doesn’t come easy, but now that I’m actually in the White House and working towards furthering this agenda, this very aggressive agenda, I’m really realizing that
… we’re going to need your help, and we’re going to come at you with some specific asks here.

We wanted folks to connect with local nonprofit organizations in their community. We wanted them to connect with local city council members or local elected officials. We wanted them to connect with federal agencies, with labor unions, progressive groups, face groups, women’s groups, you name it.

Well, were I called upon to “name it,” I’d say it was a blatant misuse of executive power for the purposes of political indoctrination and partisan propaganda.

I just heard the sad news that Irving Kristol, “the godfather of Neoconservatism,” died today. I will have more to say about this remarkable man elsewhere, but I wanted to take a moment now to register my sorrow at the passing of a friend whom I greatly admired and a man whose intellectual labors did so much to preserve and nurture the vital traditions of American conservatism. Irving was a man of remarkable literary and political judgment. He was also a draught of good cheer. I never saw him without a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye. He positively radiated benignity.

Editor, essayist, instigator of numberless intellectual initiatives (including The New Criterion, which Irving helped to start), he possessed in a very high degree two complementary gifts. He had an uncanny knack for ferreting out talent in others. He was a superb editor, by which I do not just mean that he was a dab hand at strengthening your prose, but also–a much rarer gift — that he was a dab hand at strengthening your ideas. He instantly saw what was at stake in a controversy or battle of ideas, and he’d quietly, cheerfully help his writers seize that golden core.

That instinct for the pertinent was something his own writing exhibited with unfailing clarity. Most of Irving’s essays were quite short — an exception was a superlative, and lengthy, reflection on Tacitus and nihilism first published in Encounter, the English monthly that Irving edited in the 1950s with Stephen Spender. His favored form, though, was the literary surgical strike. Irving could pack an extraordinary amount in 1200 – 1500 words. Whether the topic was the welfare state, foreign policy, the totalitarian temptation, or the terrible legacy of the 1960s, Irving always articulated exactly what was at stake in the subject under discussion. He was a practical man, consummately attuned to what, for lack of a more elegant term, I will call the “policy implications” of ideas. But he saw with unusual perspicacity that ideas mattered. In a 1973 essay called “On Capitalism and the Democratic Idea,” he put it thus:

For two centuries, the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas — until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society — the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions — are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will — perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably — twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.

Well put, is it not? And how often we need to remind ourselves of that weighty moral.

Probably Irving’s most frequently quoted mot concerned neoconservatism, the intellectual-political movement with which he is indelibly identified. “A neo-conservative,” he said, “is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” That was the great gift Irving gave to his, to our, generation: an unforgettable reminder that ideas mattered because of the realities they nurtured or discouraged. He saw with a kindly but unflinching clarity what mischief the seductive lullabies of utopian fantasy had prepared for its acolytes. His passing is a sad loss not only to conservatives to but also to the nation: those eloquent reminders seem fewer and farther between these days, yet are ever more needful. RIP.

OK, here we go: the tendentious statistics brigade, underwritten by an Ivy-league university:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

Oh my God! One every twelve minutes! What a tragedy. Let me empty my wallet and please, Mr. Obama, sir, just take over my entire life, beginning with all the hospitals and medical clinics. We just cannot take care of ourselves any more. You do it for us.

What a crock. “Analysis”? Give me a break.

OK, so Senator Max Baucus has given the world his bill to transform American health care. It omits one of the most toxic proposals, the so-called “public option,” that Obama and other left-wing politicians favor, but it is still a horrible, economy- and freedom-devouring proposal.

For one thing, it will cost $856 billion — that is, that’s what the Senator is admitting to: who knows what it will really cost. One thing we do know: insurance premiums will skyrocket, since the bill would forbid insurance companies from denying coverage for preexisting conditions. It will also require all citizens and legal residents to obtain health insurance whether they want it or not: just think of the bureaucracy the government will need to enforce that!

There a lot more one could say about this silly and malevolent bill, but Jay Rockefeller, Democrat from West Virginia, let the proverbial cat out of the bag when he observed that, were this bill to be enacted, it would mean that

virtually every single coal miner is going to have a big, big tax put on them because the tax will be put on the company and the company will immediately pass it down and lower benefits because they are self insured, most of them, because they are larger. They will pass it down, lower benefits, and probably this will mean higher premiums for coal miners who are getting very good health care benefits for a very good reason. That is, like steelworkers and others, they are doing about the most dangerous job that can be done in America.

A big, big tax. It’s “not really a smart idea,” Rockefeller said, “In fact, it’s a very dangerous idea, and I’m not even sure the coal miners in West Virginia are aware that this is what is waiting if this bill passes.”

That of course is exactly what Sen. Baucus is counting on. It’s what Obama is counting on, too. “Tax cuts for everyone making less than $250,000 a year!” Remember that campaign promise? It was, seen from one angle, hilarious when Obama first said it. But that was before his $7, make that $9, oops, I mean make that $12 trillion deficit. That was before he got the ball rolling on paying for socialized medicine without — presto chango — adding a “dime” to the deficit. Even former Obamacons like David Brooks found that too much to stomach. (The House bill, Brooks mordantly observed, “would add $220 billion (that’s 2.2 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the first 10 years and another $1 trillion [10 trillion dimes] to the deficit over the next 10 years.” Buddy, can you spare ten trillion dimes?

It’s been clear since before Obama took office that he and his fellow Democrats believe the American public are made up of two groups: themselves and the rest of us, who are, they think, chumps. Are we?

An “outrageous, unfounded and potentially inflammatory remark about race.” That’s what Janet Daley, writing in The Daily Telegraph, said about Jimmy Carter’s contention that Joe Wilson’s outburst “You lie!” during Barack Obama’s address to Congress was “based on racism.”

Daley was absolutely correct. Carter’s comment was as outrageous as it was unfounded. I disapprove of Wilson’s expostulation just as much as I disapproved of all those who disrupted President Bush’s speeches with similar epithets. What I find even more unlikeable, however, is the cowardly, politically correct grandstanding of the U.S. House of Representatives, which just voted 240-179 to rebuke Congressman Wilson. According to a document called “Decorum in the House and in Committees,” members of the House may still “challenge the President on matters of policy” but are henceforth forbidden to

• call the President a “liar.”
• call the President a “hypocrite.”
• describe the President’s veto of a bill as “cowardly.”
• charge that the President has been “intellectually dishonest.”
• refer to the President as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”
• refer to alleged “sexual misconduct on the President’s part.”

But what if the President prosecutes his policy by delivering a hypocritical and mendacious speech that is as cowardly as it is intellectually dishonest? What if he pursues a foreign policy that, in the considered judgment of a member of the House, gives aid and comfort to the enemy? What if the President — not this President, but some other — in fact was guilty of sexual misconduct and we have the cigar, or at least the blue dress, to prove it? What then? Is it part of the Decorum of the House that the truth may not be told?

But I digress. Let me return to Carter’s “based on racism” comment. In fact, the operative “R” word here is not racism but revulsion. Rep. Wilson’s outburst was an expression of outrage, frustration, and revulsion at Obama’s studied mendacity. (And note, by the way, that it is perfectly OK for the President to accuse others of being liars and worse.) But Carter played the race card for the same reason that Charlie Rangel did when people stated asking about why he understated his income to the IRS by $500,000 or why Henry Louis Gates did when he was arrested for disorderly conduct by Sgt. James Crowley. In our culture, the charge of racism is not only a conversation-stopper it is a thought-stopper. We cannot publicly tell the truth about race, so the charge of racism always carries with it not only an element of intimidation, but also an element of exposure. Everyone knows that Al Sharpton, say, is a mountebank, but we must be chary of saying so because of his race. Ditto with Henry Louis Gates: his scholarly accomplishments are modest, to say the least, but we must not point that out because of his race.

Trust is a terrible thing to lose. Bitterness and disillusion are its inevitable progeny. In private life, the loss of trust forces a rearrangement of sympathy and affection. In public life, the loss of trust instigates a fundamental realignment of political affiliation.

But what causes a loss of trust? That is not as easy a question to answer as you might think. The simple revelation of mendacity is not enough. Why? In part it has to do with what William James, in a lecture of 1896, called “the will to believe.” When it comes to belief, James saw, assent is often determined as much by feeling as by fact. The decision to offer or withhold belief is just that: a decision, a matter of will as much as intellect. “We have the right,” James concludes, “to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will.”

James was speaking about belief in the matter of religion. But these days, when politics takes on more and more of the burdens of religion, his analysis applies equally to politics. The point is that, in politics as in religion, the wish can be father to conviction. We want to believe X. Evidence against X accumulates like rust upon a load-bearing chain. Up to a certain point, the chain holds. The will to believe provides a powerful inoculation against the corrosive virus of doubt, the calamity of shattered trust. Eventually, however, without reinforcement, the chain breaks and disillusionment follows.

Everyone, supporters and opponents, acknowledges that Barack Obama came to office surrounded by a powerful will to believe. In the run up to the election, and for a month or so afterwards, the press was full of stories about chaps who had “always voted for Republicans” but now were voting for “change.” You don’t hear much from those folks these days. But for a moment, their — what to call it? “credulousness” seems impolite, so let’s follow James and call it their “will to believe” — made Obama’s claim to be bi- or even post-partisan seem credible.

Then came

• The Henry Louis Gates affair,
• Van Jones’s exposure and resignation
• ACORN, the hooker, and the underage Salvadorian girls
• Yosi Sargent at the NEA,
• Eric Holder and the Black Panthers
• etc.

For most late converts, that illusion has now definitively shattered.

“You lie!” said Rep. Joe Wilson the other day as President Obama was addressing Congress about his plans to empower the government to annex health care. Wilson’s comment enriched his coffers but drew tuts from Republicans and tut-tuts from Democrats: whatever happened to civil discourse in American Politics? asked the people who brought you BushHitler and kindred examples of politesse.

Naturally, there has been a veritable avalanche of commentary on Obama’s big health care speech the other day. Under doctor’s orders, I gave it a miss, though I later glanced over a transcript. The general consensus, so far as I could tell from a random sampling, was that it was well delivered but short on detail and, finally, not the sort of speech that would convince anyone not already convinced.

There have been some excellent dissections — I think, for example, of Thomas Sowell’s astringent column contrasting Obama’s rhetoric with that most uncommon virtue, common sense. Many people noted the irony of Obama complaining about the “lies” and misrepresentations of his planned government takeover of health care while he blithely indulged in various truth-economies himself. As Sowell notes, “To tell us, with a straight face, that he can insure millions more people without adding to the already skyrocketing deficit, is world-class chutzpa and an insult to anyone’s intelligence. To do so after an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office has already showed this to be impossible reveals the depths of moral bankruptcy behind the glittering words.”

As usual, Sowell’s column is a model of clarity and perspicacity. Do read it. But the really tremendous piece on the speech is by Shikha Dalmia, an senior analyst for Reason Foundation, who took off the gloves, stepped up to the plate, and scored a touchdown (I am an equal opportunity sports referrer) with her Forbes column “Obama’s Health Care Plan: Put Up And Shut Up.”

The speech, Dalmia observed, showed the American people “the policy equivalent of the middle finger.” Exactly.

Obama came to power promising a new era of “post-partisan” governance in which comity and bi-partisanship would rule. But, as Dalmia notes, “If there was anything bipartisan about the speech it was that he embraced every bad big-government idea from both sides. If he prevails, the American public won’t get “choice and competition” as he proclaimed, but a one-size-fits-all government-prescribed health care plan that it dare not refuse and dare not challenge.”

I like this lady. She tells it as it is.

Perhaps the most striking–and disturbing–thing about the speech was the unblinking confidence Obama exuded while breaking key campaign promises he made to voters. He had raked poor Hillary Clinton over the coals for admitting that her road to universal coverage was paved with an individual mandate. “Everyone would be forced to buy coverage, even if you can’t afford it,” warned Obama in an ad. “You pay a penalty if you don’t.”

Yet, there he was last night scolding “individuals who can afford coverage but game the system by avoiding responsibility.” Never mind that the prime gamers are not the uninsured (whose unpaid bills cost “the system” less than $40 billion every year) but the underinsured covered by Medicare and Medicaid (whom private insurers cross-subsidize to the tune of over $90 billion annually because the government refuses to pay the full cost of their care). Still, he hectored: “Improving our health care system works only if everybody does their part.”

Many commentators seem obsessed with the minutiae of the various health care proposals. They do not realize that “reforming” health care, or health care insurance, is merely the pretext for an almost unimaginable increase of government interference in your life. Dalmia has a few examples.

Obama didn’t say exactly how he would make “everyone do their part”–a question he posed repeatedly to Hillary. But his buddy Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., has some rather well-developed ideas on that score. Baucus has proposed a bill that would force the uninsured to pay fines on a sliding scale of income, with those making 300% of the poverty level having to cough up as much as $3,800 a year. In short, Americans would have to pay Uncle Sam for the privilege of remaining uninsured. If there were truth-in-labeling laws for Congress, it would be required to call this bill TonySopranoCare.