Thanks for nothing

A new study claims that obesity among children is leveling off. But the battle is not over!

However, experts caution there’s still much to be done to improve the health of American children because the number of youngsters who are overweight today is still triple what it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

“The rates are still very high. But this study suggests there may be some cause for optimism as the rate appears fairly level over eight years,” said study author Cynthia Ogden, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, whose findings are published in the May 28 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The story claims that researchers went as far back as 1999, compared obesity data and discovered no statistically significant differences in the prevalence of overweight children.

And since only recently has government gotten “serious” about childhood obesity and passed laws to “help” fat kids change their habits and educate parents and teachers, we can deduce that nannyistic programs have done absolutely nothing to help the problem.

I don’t see “economic justice” in the Constitution

Despite all his promises, I don’t trust John McCain will pick judges that practice “judicial restraint.” But it’s incredibly disturbing that the Obama campaign can’t even mention the Constitution as it panders on potential Supreme Court appointees.

“The Straight Talk Express took another sharp right turn today as John McCain promised his conservative base four more years of out-of-touch judges that would threaten a woman’s right to choose, gut the campaign finance reform that bears his own name, and trample the rights and interests of the American people. Barack Obama has always believed that our courts should stand up for social and economic justice, and what’s truly elitist is to appoint judges who will protect the powerful and leave ordinary Americans to fend for themselves.”

Throw us a bone and pretend the Supreme Court is still around to uphold the Constitution before using collectivist-laden phrases like “economic justice” – which I can assure you scares the holy crap out of tons of Republicans and Independents.

Your fair share

What the candidates are inadvertently saying on taxes in my column today.

Watership Down

I watched Watership Down with my daughter today. I can’t think of any modern animated movie that is as well made or engrossing. Nor can I think of a movie I enjoyed as much as an adult as I did a child. If you can get your hands on a copy, I would recommend it — or better yet, read the book.

Reading about a newish theatrical version staged in London not long ago, I came across this quote that sums of the feel of the story:

The closest humans come to feeling like rabbits is under war conditions. Imagine what it would be like if every time we stepped out on the street, we know we could be picked off by a sniper. We’ve tried to capture that anxiety in the way the rabbits speak -lots of short, jerky sentences.”

This is the conservative soul?

Andrew Sullivan writes that Ron Paul “seems a little more comfortable with a president Obama than a president McCain” based on, among other things, Obama’s “integrity of the Constitution” (except on the Second Amendment – on the rest, we lack any evidence of reliability) and “walking back the doctrines of pre-emptive war.” *

In reality, we never know what a president will do. That’s why trust is such an important election issue. But Sullivan’s hyper-fawning over Obama has never been about policy, it’s about the power of personality and perception. And his take bears no resemblance to the political philosophy of skepticism he wrote about in his book.

“I don’t think you have to agree with Obama on many things to want him to succeed,” writes Sullivan, echoing his past writing on the topic. Well, why in hell not? In the end it should be about policy, shouldn’t it? Obama, outside of foreign policy, believes in the expansion of government control: higher taxation, attack on profit, draconian controls on energy, socialized health care, etc … why would a conservative of any flavor want Obama to succeed? (The best a classic liberal or libertarian can hope for in this election, in my humble opinion, is gridlock government.)

In any event, I thought those thick-headed Americans who voted for candidates they could envision themselves having a beer with exposed a deeply unsophisticated electorate. That’s how we got Bush. After 9/11, we listened to Dear Leader, because we trusted him, and found ourselves on our present disastrous course– or so the story goes.

Supporting Obama based solely on his messianic allure is just as simplistic. Obama’s (untapped and unproven) transformational power to bring folks together hasn’t panned out, anyway. Fact is, as it stands now, Obama can’t even bring his own party together. He doesn’t deserve such adoration. No politician does.

On this topic, everyone would benefit from Gene Healy’s superb “Cult of the Presidency.” This kind of veneration for a candidate, Bush or Obama or anyone else, just doesn’t strike me as something from the “conservative soul.”

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* … unless, it makes sense for Obama.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama issued a pointed warning yesterday to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying that as president he would be prepared to order U.S. troops into that country unilaterally if it failed to act on its own against Islamic extremists.

I realize this Obama quote is from last year, but a unilateral invasion of a sovereign nation which has fallen short of our expectations in the War on Terror seems as adventurous and irresponsible as anything in the Bush Doctrine. Surely Saddam’s sins were as dreadful as Musharraf’s? Is harboring terrorists enough of reason for an invasion? Or only certain terrorists? What about the unforeseen consequences of such an invasion? Imagine all the anger it will generate on the Muslim street? A new tool for terrorist recruitment and so on … Why don’t these issues apply? We may believe bin Laden is holed up in Pakistan but, for all I know, he’s in Somalia or Sudan or Sacramento.

Old news, I know. But, looking back at it now, I think it illustrates the problem with the perception of Obama vs. the reality of Obama — and the complexity of the world. He’d be just another president who would have to deal with the Middle East. It’s going to be ugly. It always is.

“The chronic goad of fear”

This outstanding quote — I’d never heard before — leads a Slate review of the new Iron Man flick: iHero — Why Iron Man is like Steve Jobs.

“Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.”—Alan Greenspan

Self-perpetuating orgy of negativity

The top corner of Drudge looks like this today:

GLOOM LIFTING? Employers cut fewer jobs in April, jobless rate falls…
Sense of Optimism Begins to Ease Onto Wall St…
Dow crosses 13,000; Dollar UP…
GUSHER: CHEVRON profit rises 9.5%…

My column today begins: “A self-perpetuating orgy of negativity regarding the economy begins with the media, which collect every morsel of daunting economic news and jump to a logical conclusion — which is to say, Armageddon.”

Hopefully we’ve turned a corner. Both in terms of a slow economy and in how the slow economy is covered.

Just wondering

So there will be no global warming for the next ten years … and there has been none the past ten years. Are we knuckle-dragging flat-Earthers allowed to be skeptical yet?