Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week’s SDA distinguished lecture, documentary & interview symposium. This week, for your delectation, here is Dr. Dan Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, presenting his Exploring the Frontiers of Happiness ¤ lecture, in 2005 (34:09). As usual, I’ll be our symposiarch for this episode of this series; please recall that this is not Reader Tips (our regular Reader Tips entry will appear tonight as scheduled), and that the topic here is Dan’s lecture and related matters (and the dress code is: no gratuitous insults). And now, as I wrote over three years ago: your table’s waiting, simply link this way. (Yeah, yeah, if I could link that way, honey… 😉

A Rasmussen poll released today shows Obama’s Approval Index sitting at minus 12 percent, his lowest number yet. 40 percent of American voters now strongly disapprove of Obama’s performance, compared to just 28 percent who strongly approve. Perhaps more significantly, a slight majority of voters now oppose his multi-trillion dollar health-care scheme, with the gap most notable among those who express strong opinions: 41 percent of voters now strongly oppose his planned reforms, with only 25 percent strongly in favour.
The lost ground certainly isn’t due to a lack of raw ambition or nerve on the President’s part. Within the last few weeks he slagged doctors as blood-money butchers (“The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out”), made clear that he views the very existence of a congressional debate on health care as a needless holdup, a throwback to the pre-Obama years (“The legislative process is a little bit like sausage making, and the sausage factory is not an attractive place”) and blamed Republicans for blocking his reforms, despite the fact that

“The Democrats won everything in last year’s election….(They own) the White House, a filibuster-proof Senate, and a 70-seat House majority. As one House Republican aide quipped: ‘We could have every GOP congressman and their parents vote against a Democratic bill and still not stop it.'”

There’s at least some degree of obstinate innumeracy in play. It can no longer be denied that Obama is trying to elide the issue of where the money for his multi-trillion dollar fast-track socialist rewrite is going to come from. When, during last week’s press conference, a reporter noted that Congress is “trying to figure out how to pay for all this reform,” Obama responded “Well, before we talk about how to pay for it, let’s talk about exactly what needs to be done.” Pretty bald, that, considering that his essential demand is for talk and debate to stop in the interests of facilitating passage of his glorious reforms. Questions, too, are evidently unnecessary at this point. From that same press conference:

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. On Medicare, there are obviously millions of Americans who depend on Medicare, and when you talk about bending the long-term cost down, or when you talk about cuts in the current proposal on Capitol Hill, you talk about cuts in Medicare and they talk about cuts in Medicare, but there are never many specifics. Specifically, what kind of pain, what kind of sacrifice, are you calling on beneficiaries to make? And even if not right away, aren’t future beneficiaries going to be getting less generous benefits than today’s?

President Obama: No. No.

Q: And a subsidiary question….

You get the idea. Earlier the President had sternly warned: “This debate is not a game.”

I think she’s missing the entire point of the battle.
Whether we are debating ethically turns for the most part on our intentions. Are we trying to get our point across in a way that is as productive and simultaneously harmless as possible? This is the ethical approach. Or are we trying to win by any means possible, including character assassination and the bullying of opponents into submission?
Those, such as Levant, who argue that human rights commissions should not have authority to regulate speech are, in my view, entirely right. But how some people advance that view is quite wrong.

“This is a president who needs a vacation,” says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart
I guess Pete thinks that date nights on Broadway, speeches around the world and talking about things he doesn’t know anything about constitute working.