Just as Congress routinely adds riders and earmarks to bills that have nothing to do with those earmarks and riders (such as sticking abortion funding in an armed services supplemental bill, and the like) House Democrats slipped into the healthcare legislation racial preferences concerning minority students seeking entrance to medical schools.

It appears that the healthcare bill will give preferential federal funding to medical schools that “have demonstrated a record” of training students from “underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.”

Here is what Favish found:

On page 879-880, the bill states that the Secretary of Health and Human Services…

“shall make grants to, or enter into contracts with, eligible entities . . . to operate a professional training program in the field of family medicine, general internal medicine, general pediatrics, or geriatrics, to provide financial assistance and traineeships and fellowships to those students, interns, residents or physicians who plan to work in or teach in the field of family medicine, general internal medicine, general pediatrics, or geriatrics.”

On page 881-882 the bill states:

to entities that have a demonstrated record of the following: . . . Training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.”

On page 883 the bill states:

“The Secretary shall make grants to, or enter into contracts with, eligible entities . . . to operate or participate in an established primary care residency training program, which may include-(A) planning and developing curricula; (B) recruitment and training of residents; and (C) retention of faculty.”

On page 884-885 the bill states:

“In awarding grants and contracts . . . the Secretary shall give preference to entities that have a demonstrated record of training . . . individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds . . . .”

On page 887-889 the bill states that the…

“Secretary shall make grants to, or enter into contracts with, eligible entities . . . to operate a professional training program for oral health professionals, to provide financial assistance and traineeships and fellowships to those professionals who plan to work in or teach general, pediatric, or public health dentistry, or dental hygiene, to establish, maintain, or improve academic administrative units (including departments, divisions, or other appropriate units) in the specialties of general, pediatric, or public health dentistry, to operate a loan repayment program for full-time faculty in a program of general, pediatric, or public health dentistry.”

On page 889-890 the bill states:

“In awarding grants or contracts under this section, the Secretary shall give preference to entities that have a demonstrated record of the following: . . . Training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.”

On page 908-909 the bill states:

“The Secretary shall award grants and contracts to eligible entities” to do the same things for the field of public health as the Secretary can do for dentistry.

On page 909 the bill states:

“In awarding grants or contracts under this section, the Secretary shall give preference to entities that have a demonstrated record of the following: . . . Training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.”

Of course, immediately a question of qualifications arises. If you find that your doctor was admitted to school solely because he was a person representing an “underrepresented minority group” or had a “disadvantaged background” and not because he had excellent grades in medical or pre-med school, how comfortable would you feel with your medical treatment from that doctor? Would he be a doctor because he excelled at his studies, or because he enjoyed minority set asides, affirmative action, or racial gerrymandering?

It may not be so bad if your lawyer, your mechanic, or your hairdresser got by in life because of affirmative action programs. Maybe it’s not even the end of the world if your Supreme Court Justice only got where she is because of affirmative action. But your doctor, the man that holds your life in his hands and whose training can be paramount in the saving of that life? Do we want those folks passing through their training based on race and not grades?

Apparently the House Democrats are less interested in our medical student’s high grades and more interested in having the “right” number of minority students admitted to those medical schools. And they aren’t above using this so-called crisis on healthcare to get that racial gerrymandering put into place.

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com)

It is likely that even if you don’t picture a particular thing, at the very least your initial emotional response is a warm feeling of worthy accomplishment and an assumption of gaining the accolades that accompanies victory.

It is less likely that upon hearing or seeing the word “victory” an American would immediately get a feeling of defeat and humiliation or picture the end of anything. It is even less likely that a loathing would well up inside of the minds of an American when the word is broached.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama is not like average, patriotic, optimistic Americans. At least we can easily assume this to be the case by what President Obama recently said of our military efforts in Afghanistan.

You see, Barack Obama said on TV this week that “victory” isn’t his “goal” in Afghanistan. Why not?

Do you doubt that statement? Do you think that the benevolent father in Washington would never withhold medical care from those in need just because they are fat, old, or because they smoke or drink too much? Is this just fearmongering on my part as far as you are concerned? Au contraire. It is already happening in countries that have national socialistic healthcare systems and the sad tale of Gary Reinbach (RIP) of Dagenham, Essex, U.K. is exhibit number one.

You see the 22-year-old Reinbach is… or rather was, an admitted alcoholic. At that young age, he drank his liver into oblivion and needed a transplant. But the nationalized healthcare bureaucrats that governed what care Mr. Reinbach was “allowed” to have refused him a liver transplant because others “deserved” it more. So, Mr. Reinbach died of his liver disease at age 22. Killed as much by his self abuse as by a government that refused to treat his ailment.

Did he “deserve” to die? Would you say good riddance to him for being so gauche as to indulge in his freedom to abuse his own liver. Perhaps he got his just deserts when his young life was ended by self-abuse?

But here is the question: who is the government to decide that Mr. Reinbach wasn’t “worth” the effort to save his life? Who was the government to sentence him to death? What government has the right to decide that someone cannot change? What right does government have to say who lives or dies based on cost, waiting lists, and assumed worthiness?

Well, you say, that was England. It can’t happen here, right? Wrong.

You see, the only way that government healthcare can work is to arrive at definitions, limits, categories, check boxes, regulations, rules, and procedures. And in every instance those regulations and rules will be governed by bureaucrats. Not doctors, not patients, not family members. It will be pencil pushers, paper shufflers, rules-makers that make the decisions who gets what. Those will be the ones that have the power of life and death over every last American once Obamacare is in place.

So, if you fall off a bicycle, should government decide you don’t deserve to have your broken arm fixed because you are the one responsible for breaking it and “the people” aren’t responsible to pay to have it fixed?

Healthcare denied.

Will your overweight mother be denied heart surgery because she ate herself to that condition?

Healthcare denied.

Will your 2-packs-a-day uncle be told to go off and die without Chemotherapy for his lung cancer because, after all, he smoked himself to that disease?

Healthcare denied.

All of these are certainly possible denials of service by government. All it will take is one busy body Congressman to decide to slip in such a restriction into an appropriations bill one day and, voila, healthcare denied.

Then we have the other question: is it even fair to expect the taxpayer to pay for a guy to get a liver even if he is an admitted alcoholic? Many would spitefully say no. In fact, there are many activists against sugar, fatty foods, transfats, cigarettes, various drugs, even meat, that would vigorously assert that government healthcare should be denied to those that eat or do the “wrong” things, things that might cause them health problems.

So, where does that leave the so-called healthcare-for-all ideal? It leads it into a debate on worthiness instead of access. It leads to coercion instead of freedom. It leads to the destruction of personal decisions and the institution of tyranny.

It leads to the dismantling of America.

But, then again, that is just what most Democrats and their leader in the White House want.

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com.)

The L-E was all excited that it got “more than 1,000 comments” and received “712,251 page views” after Gordon’s July 14 story headlined, “Soldier balks at deploying; says Obama isn’t president.”

It became obvious Tuesday morning that the story, published on page A3 of that day’s newspaper, had taken on a life of its own.

Between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. Tuesday, there were 62,140 unique yearly visitors — or users who had not clicked on the site in the previous 12 months — to the newspaper’s Web site, said Jeff Hendrickson, the Ledger-Enquirer’s senior editor for new media. During the same hour a week earlier, ledger-enquirer.com had 864 unique yearly visitors.

By the end of the day, nearly a half million new readers had visited the newspaper’s Web site. Also, there were 712,251 page views — more than seven times a normal daily volume.

Yes, that is quite a lot of hits, to be sure. But is it news? Is a story about how many hits a story received actual news?

I guess I can understand the L-E’s excitement. After all, the first time I got a Drudge-alanche giving me nearly 200,000 in a two-day period, I was agog as the page counter whirred along. But did I write a big story about getting so many hits? Did I do it when it happened the second time or all the other times? No. Well… I did mention it here just now, but, you know what I mean.

What I am saying is that this story about its avalanche of hits is not news. It’s good news for them, of course, but it isn’t news that will enlighten the readers and keep them informed. But this does show that the Old Media is completely flummoxed by the New. The story is a waste of time, of course, but that it made the L-E so amazed, amazed enough that it reported on how amazed it was, well that is news in and of itself. It just shows that many in the Old Media just don’t understand the Internet age.

After all, if the folks at the Ledger-Enquirer really had a grasp of the ins and outs of the Internet, a Drudge hit would not be so amazing to them. They would realize that pages that get 100,000 hits a day are plentiful, that Drudge can make a story go viral, that the Internet is the means that often drives the news these days. That these facts were unknown enough to the folks at the L-E that when introduced to them for the first time they felt the need to write a whole story about it all is pretty revealing of the naiveté at the paper. It would be as if the L-E just realized that men walked on the moon and wrote a story about the grandeur of it all.

Yes, this all goes to show that too many in the Old Media just don’t “get” the new age in which we live and it tends to prove why papers are disappearing all over the country.

Does that seem like a hyperbolic statement to you? At first blush, it might. But a considered look at the direction in which we are quickly heading will prove that, compared to the British Parliament that raised the ire of our forefathers so long ago, today’s Congress shows many signs of the same, oppressive, haughty, disinterested politicians that considered their national government more important than the local’s interests and needs.

Representation is the key word, here. What does it mean? What did it mean then? Of course, the problem was that it meant two different things to the opposing sides of the Revolutionary era, hence the conflict. In England, representation meant that Parliament “represented” the whole of the country and that each member of that body was elected from their home to go forth and become a member of the whole. British politicians generally did not imagine that they were representing their hometown when they went to Parliament.

As an example of the basic assumption of Parliamentary representation, a pamphlet published in 1765 in London asserted that, “every Member of Parliament sits in the House not as a representative of his own constituents but as one of that august assembly by which all the commons of Great Briton are represented.” (“The Regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies and the Taxes Imposed Upon Them, Considered,” by Thomas Whately)

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, the American political system had evolved in the opposite direction. The distance between colonies, the fact that they didn’t all meet together and each represented distinct and separate proto-states, this tended to propel the colonial political scene toward local interests and control. Consequently, when someone was sent to any political office in the colonies, it was expected that he would represent those that sent him, not the greater body into which he entered. Local interests were premier.

Consequently, when it came time for Parliament to consider tax policies to be imposed on the colonists (the Paper Tax, Tea Tax, Towshend Duties, et al), there was no expectation among them that the colonists themselves needed any members of their own sitting in Parliament to represent their fellows. Parliament itself was considered the proper representation of all Great Briton’s possessions regardless of what individuals sat there.

The colonists, however, were quite upset that their own people had no voice in the national body and were incensed that taxes descended upon them without their ascent to the policy. Parliament seemed haughty, disinterested, unconnected and unconcerned with the colonist’s needs and desires and Americans felt as if enslaved to far off masters that never asked for as much as a by your leave. The people and the government seemed in no way connected to the colonists.

Now, doesn’t that sound like Congress today?

Of course, this is not to say that Congress is in every way a far off body of disinterested masters haughtily unconcerned with the voices back home. But who cannot see that it is becoming more like that every day?

Repeatedly, for instance, we find Congressmen and Senators suddenly adopting the national party line and doing a 180 from previous positions — the ones that got them elected — or succumbing to giant piles of cash from interests outside the state that elected them. Remember Al Gore, the staunchly anti-abortion politician from Tennessee that suddenly became a Roe fan once he entered Congress and decided he had national political ambitions? Even this year we saw Senator Gillibrand from New York do an instantaneous about face on the Second Amendment once she entered the Senate. She was well known as pro-Second Amendment and then she got appointed to the Senate and, voila, she’s suddenly anti-Second Amendment. Additionally, Republicans in Illinois just discovered that Congressman Mark Kirk is a proponent of Cap and Trade proving himself amenable to destroying the entire energy industry and laying an oppressive tax on every American despite what they might want. Why did he do it? Because he got money from the enviro-wacko lobby from outside his state and decided to give them his vote instead of the people of Illinois, that’s why. It was a simple, unprincipled dash for the cash.

Increasingly nationally focused Non-Governmental Organizations are gathering large sums of money to influence Congressmen to their cause whether the people back home care about the lobbyist’s issue or not and this is not to mention the increasingly demanding control of the national party establishment forcing Congressmen to spout the party line often times in contravention to what those at home support.

There are many reasons for this. The 17th Amendment, for instance, dangerously detached members of the Senate from local control by making them beasts of the party and elected by “the people,” instead of sent by the states to represent state interests. And there is the increasing cost of running for election. Any more, only the ultra rich can run a campaign without having to worry if the national party will support them financially — and that support is often keyed toward whether or not the candidate assumes the party line.

As it happens, the voice of the folks back home is receding farther and farther into the background as members of Congress pay increasing heed to national issues, donors outside their state, and party doctrine instead of local interests.

How long will it be until Congressmen will firmly decide that they represent “The United States” instead of the individual States there from? In fact, Congress is already far down that road toward ignoring the voices back home and deliberating on what they imagine is good for the whole of the country instead of those that sent them to D.C. in the first place.

So, how are they getting away with it? One way is that, while these unconnected, haughty pols make laws they deem it in their political interests to pass, they hide behind baubles and pork sent home in an insincere attempt to make it seem as if they are “doing something” for the folks back home.

Still, our voices from home can force a Congressman to change course. But it takes the collective outrage of the people back home to force that course correction because all too often it seems as if Congress is intent on its own agenda with no mind to what the little people back home might want. Instead of going to Congress with their constituents first and foremost in their minds, the people are an afterthought as the national agenda is pursued.

Congress may not quite yet be a perfect emulation of the Parliament that taxed American colonists without including them in on the decision making process, but how much longer will it be until that hubris is revisited on the people of this nation?

We should not entirely despair, of course. The true system that the founders created is still there underneath all the garbage that later generations piled on top of it. It will take dedication of the citizens to hold their representatives accountable to return this system to a more pure one, but more than that it will take education. As Ben Franklin is reputed to have said to a woman wondering what the founder had wrought, we have a Republic “if we can keep it.” That takes educating ourselves on the issues as well as just how our government is supposed to work.

All is not lost, to be sure. But with the poor education we are now offering our youth, it cannot be much longer before no one has the slightest clue what it was that the founders created and just why it is special enough not to let slip through our fingers.

We conservatives serve as the stopgap to the degradation of our country. Liberals and the uneducated see no reason not to rush headlong to wholesale destruction of what the United States “is.” They just don’t care a whit about what we are. Like Buckley said, it is our duty to stand athwart their path and yell STOP. But our duty is not just to be bellicose. Ours is to educate and keep this country on the straight and narrow and one of those duties involves holding our representatives accountable within the American system. We can fix it, if we have the fortitude. The alternative is to lose the world’s greatest nation and to see our great experiment end in failure and that is just what the left wants.

Was there a Richard Brookhiser in attendance or a Larry Schweikart? Was there someone like Forrest McDonald at Obama’s secret dinner? Nope. Except for one attendee, the invited historians have all used their status as historians to make all sorts of ahistorical proclamations about modern politics which is quite un-historian of them.

The fact is, no real historian would comment as an expert on contemporary events. A real historian knows that it takes decades of time to go by before history can be written. It takes decades for records to become available, generations of biographies and autobiographies need to be written and much time must pass before actions made in one decade can bear their ultimate fruit. All this information has to be reviewed and weighed before history can be written and very often the words of participants cannot be taken for gospel. Any real historian will know that commenting on contemporary events can only be opinion and guesswork not FACT.

But that is not the stripe of “historians” that Obama invited to the White House, the sort that wait for due time to pass so that the proper research can be done to determine what really happened in a given era. No, what Obama sought out were activists that pretend at the historian’s art.

So what lefty “historians” were invited to the super-secret dinner? Here’s a list.

Michael Beschloss – Mostly a slavish John Kennedy aficionado, Beschloss once wrote a ridiculous piece in 1993 for The New York Times in which he predicted that the Republican Party would engage in all manner of extremist behaviors once President Clinton and “President” Al Gore left office. It featured an ex-president George H.W. Bush being lambasted by history as a troubled president dogged by his “pardoning of Casper Weinberger.”

Douglas Brinkley – Is well known as the hack writer that belched out a wholly uncritical take on John F. Kerry’s life during the Senator’s doomed run for the White House against George W. Bush in. The book was little else but a sunny campaign hagiography that was worthless as a work of history. Before that, Brinkley prostituted himself all over TV as the chief mourner for John Kennedy, Jr. when he flew himself to his death in 1999. Brinkley’s over-the-top celebration of Kennedy and his ubiquity on TV during those days we so bad that Kennedy’s George Magazine even removed him from their masthead as a contributor. Brinkley was so ridiculous that even the lefty Slate.com said, “Even amid this week’s staggering hyperbole, Brinkley’s emotional profligacy has distinguished him.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin – The “woman” of the bunch, Goodwin is another Kennedy sycophant. Goodwin also has tackled Lincoln and LBJ. She was seen all over TV during the last few presidential elections punditizing for Democrats. She has also been caught in a few embarrassing plagiarism scandals where she was caught lifting work from others. Why this literary thief keeps getting praise as a premiere historian is beyond logic. But she is good for the left party line, so I guess that is all the qualifications she needs to stay the darling of the Old Media.

Garry Wills – This guy is a truly devoted lefty. Wills long ago went from being a mere historian to being an activist that uses his reputation as cover for his activism pretending that he knows better than anyone else because he knows some history. He has written castigating the Catholic Church for its stance on abortion, he excoriated the Bush administration proclaiming that Bush had somehow become a theocrat, and he has been outspoken in many other contemporary political fights. One of the worst works of history I ever read was by this hack. “Negro President” was supposed to explain why Thomas Jefferson was elected because of the three-fifths clause in the Constitution. But, after reading the thankfully short thing one will quickly realize that Wills never addresses his own point and doesn’t prove a thing to settle the thesis. It is truly a horrible book.

Robert Dallek – Dallek never met a Kennedy or Roosevelt he didn’t revere and hasn’t found much of interest in any Republican to write about… except, unsurprisingly, Nixon and then only because he hates him so much. Dallek signed his name to a letter of support for Obama back in 2007 during the late campaign and wrote a piece for The New York Daily News that said that Obama’s lack of experience didn’t matter and we should elect him anyway.

Robert Caro – Chiefly known for his multi-volume bio of Lyndon Johnson but he also wrote that George W. Bush was a “dangerous” president. He also has praised the socialist, mess that is the Great Society as LBJs “great achievement.”

H. W. Brands – Brands also wrote disparagingly of the Bush years while IN the Bush years. He is also a proponent of big government taxes, high spending and Barack Obama. Like many of his leftist ilk, he was sure that we had lost the Iraq war.

Kenneth Mack – Mack is a “race identity” guy, whatever that is supposed to mean. I suppose that Mack was Obama’s token black historian at this dinner because he is not even close to the league the others are playing in. I guess it didn’t hurt that Mack supported Obama heavily during the campaign.

David M. Kennedy – OK, I don’t have as much trouble with Kennedy. So, I haven’t too much to say negative about him.

In short, nearly every last one of these historians violate the very core of an historian’s art; research. They have all made pronouncements with the color of “fact” about current events when they each know darn well that the “truth” of what will become history cannot be known for a long time after events are set in motion. They may be rightly celebrated for their work on the past. But their biased notions of what IS now can and should be discounted as mere opinion and should not be given the color of “history” merely from the fact that those that claim to be historians are involved in the saying of it.

In the end, when each of their biased notions is reviewed, a simple liberal perspective is revealed. And if they were real historians, they’d know modern liberalism is a failed notion in and of itself. Historians or no, it seems they are true believers and fellow travelers all.

Not all Democrats want to tread this suicidal path, granted. We’ve discussed the efforts of the 40 self-professed Blue Dogs several times before (Here and here) as last week they sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Stenny Hoyer of the Democratic leadership in the House warning them that they weren’t necessarily on board with the current direction that Democrats in the House were going on healthcare.

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com)

The Article, titled “Where the New Deal Went Badly Wrong,” was written by Harold L. Cole and Lee Ohanian. Harold L. Cole, Ph.D. Economics, University of Rochester, 1986, is a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Lee E. Ohanian, Ph.D. Economics University of Rochester, 1993, is a professor of economics at UCLA.

The pair have noted that the New Deal strengthened unions and gave to them powers for striking that brought industry to its knees just at a time when the country needed as many new jobs as it could get to tug itself out of depression. Unfortunately, the power given unions caused the depression to last far longer than it needed to last.

We have calculated that New Deal labor and industrial policies, which raised wages and prices 20 percent or more in many industrial sectors, were directly responsible for stretching the Depression through the decade of the 1930s. All told, we estimate that these 24 The Milken Institute Review policies kept the economy below the growth rate one would have otherwise expected for an extra seven years.

Additionally:

It’s fair to say, then, that the consequences of New Deal policies are widely misunderstood. Roosevelt’s industrial and labor policies retarded recovery by restricting employment and output in the name of raising profits and wages.

So, the wild demands of unions uncoupled to market forces and with the weight of the government behind them caused untold misery to continue for seven long years, many years longer than it needed to.

Amusingly, the article notes that even Roosevelt came to rue the power he handed the unions and he had to force them to forgo their demands during the war because the war effort was being harmed by union thuggery. He made a monster and it came back to bite him.

Through a discussion of history, the article shows that the mess FDR made is the same one that today’s Employee Free Choice Act will lead us back to. Unions are not interested in what’s right. They are only interested in what they can take regardless of who it hurts or how badly it mars economic recovery. FDR proved that in the 1930s. Barack Obama and the EFCA will prove it today if allowed to become law.

But, here is the thing: when they work, charter schools work because they have less union meddling involved in their operations.

In their adopted resolutions, the NEA paid lip service to the “potential” reforms and “creative teaching methods” that can more easily be adopted at charter schools. Yet the following resolutions seemed determined to undermine and eliminate the very freedom and flexibility it paid lip service to at the outset. One is struck by the logical disconnect. Why, exactly, do the unions imagine that the freedom realized at charter schools lends itself to that innovation in the first place? Conversely, why is innovation not seen in public schools?

There are several troublesome resolutions that, if widely adopted, would spell the end of the effectiveness of charter schools, turning them into just another public school outlet ruled by union bigwigs and uninterested in the children’s education, not to mention the end of all that innovation the NEA initially praised.

Take this resolution, for instance:

Charter schools should be subject to the same public sector labor relations statutes as traditional public schools, and charter school employees should have the same collective bargaining rights as their counterparts in traditional public schools.

In other words, the union expects all charter school employees to be placed inexorably under the same union contract that the other public school employees are governed by. Of course, one of the chief successes of charter schools is that school administrators have more power to hire and fire teachers to get just the right balance to fit their program. Being forced under regular union restrictions would eliminate this flexibility outright.

Another resolution seems to lay the groundwork for making it tougher to even create a charter school.

A charter should be granted only if the proposed school intends to offer an educational experience that is qualitatively different from what is available in traditional public schools.

This one almost sounds reasonable until you begin to wonder exactly who it is that will determine when the charter plan would be a “qualitatively different” educational experience? If left to the union, one might expect that never would be the answer to the question of when a charter school might be authorized if they were the ones to set the criteria.

One other statement from the NEA is suspect:

NEA shall oppose any initiative to greatly expand the growth of charter schools and assist its state affiliates in identifying any effective practices incubated therein that could subsequently be implemented in our traditional public schools. By no means should this effort conflict with the ongoing and necessary work of organizing charter school teachers, nor should it conflict with charter schools that meet NEA guidelines.

That is a sly piece of rhetoric, isn’t it? On one hand this statement pretends at supporting charter schools right to organize, yet also sternly opposes them and announces the intent to try and steal what does work there and copy it in their own schools.

But, as I said, one of the chief reasons that charter schools work, when they work, is that they’ve gotten out from under union domination. So, as the NEA tries to impose its rules anyway, it claims that even if a charter school is lucky enough to survive and find success despite the union’s best efforts, then the union will copy the successful bit and further marginalize the charter school.

The kindly folks at the NEA cannot brook with success of charter schools. Do they care if it helps the kids? Not really. They only care if they are in control of it all.

Seventy some years later Barack Obama was praised as a second coming of FDR when he ran for office. His promises of everything for everyone were hailed as a second new deal. As we all know the economy took a dive at the tail of 2008, it continued apace into 2009 and once Obama took office he campaigned hard for a “stimulus” plan to lift America from its economic doldrums. It was an “emergency” he said, we couldn’t get by without it, he claimed. He cared about all of America, you see, and he, the great father in Washington, had the cure for what ails us. The great god of D.C. loved all his children we were sonorously informed.

Well, maybe not all. You see, just as FDR’s “help” only went to further his own political goals and not the country’s economic recovery, Barack Obama’s benevolence seems to have benefited mostly those that voted for him.

Apparently, the “stimulus” is only stimulating future votes for Obama. Apparently, Obama really is the second coming of FDR.

In his book FDR’s Folly, writer Jim Powell shows that most of the largess from Washington D.C. in the 1930s just happened to go to the states and counties that Roosevelt needed future votes from or areas that supported him previously. Even worse, most of the hardest hit areas in the country were excluded from FDR’s benevolence. And areas that didn’t vote strongly for FDR were left bereft of the projects and policies of government spending that the Roosevelt administration put into place.

Once again we flash forward 70 or so years and we see a similar pattern from man-god Obama and his supposed stimulus spending. As USA Today notes, “billions in aid go to areas that backed Obama in ’08.”

Billions of dollars in federal aid delivered directly to the local level to help revive the economy have gone overwhelmingly to places that supported President Obama in last year’s presidential election.

In an echo of FDR it appears that the stimulus is “politics all the way through.”

Now, the USA Today report goes to pains to say that Obama didn’t personally guide all this money to those areas that supported him in contravention of the need in areas that didn’t support him. I find this likely true. But the FDR echo I am pointing out isn’t that Obama is as crafty as FDR was by rewarding friends and excluding political enemies with the stimulus like FDR did with his government largess. The parallel is that the system that FDR created where Democratic strongholds are first in line for government largess is still going strong and Obama is benefiting from it.

I am pointing out that government largess isn’t about helping “America.” It is about securing Democrat constituencies for Democrat politics. It is about making sure that areas that have become addicted to Washington stay drunk with Washington’s “help.”

So, far from being the “new” era in politics, far from being the “post partisan president.” Obama is simply the latest master of Democrat Plantation Politics. Keep ‘em in thrall to D.C. and the votes will come.

It ain’t about “helping” anyone. It’s “politics all the way through.”