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Keillor on Obama's Nobel

Some conservative pundit suggested that the president should've declined the prize, but it is not gracious to reject a compliment, one should accept it with becoming modesty, as Mr. Obama did, that's what your mother brought you up to do. The prize isn't about you, it's about Peace, or Literature, or Homecoming, or Champion Hog, or Male Vocalist of the Year, so walk up there and smile for the cameras, say thank you and sit down.

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The argument for the public option (in brief)

...the private health insurance industry is irreversibly compromised by its need to turn a profit. But we don't want people's access to health care to be governed by whether or not they're profitable.

Ezra Klein (link)

James Taranto on Authoritarian Impulses

From his Wall Street Journal column (link):

We still find all of this [rhetoric from the Obama administration that to some seems authoritarian] far from alarming. American institutions are strong enough, and the country’s culture of freedom deep-seated enough, to thwart any authoritarian impulses Obama and his men may have.

James Taranto on Calling Someone a Nazi

The conservative columnist for The Wall Street Journal had this to say about calling your political opponent a Nazi (link):

…we disapprove, on both rhetorical and moral grounds, of comparisons between Obama and Hitler or ObamaCare and Nazism. (It should go without saying that such expression is fully protected by the First Amendment.) One should never in earnest liken a political opponent to the Nazis if that opponent does not practice or advocate genocide or totalitarianism.

To do so is a rhetorical error because it calls attention away from the speaker’s message and toward his lack of perspective. It is a moral error because of that lack of perspective. There may be plausible arguments that ObamaCare is evil in intent or would be evil in effect, but it is insane to equate it to the singular evil of Nazism. The easy recourse to Nazi analogies--far more common on the left than the right--debases the currency of moral outrage and can only diminish moral clarity.

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