PUBLIC MARKS with tags government & conservative

A scientist with Environment Canada was ordered not to launch his global warming-themed novel Thursday at the same time the Conservative government was quietly axing a number of Kyoto programs.

It seems that Medicare and Medicaid consider it fraud if a physician charges any patient less than the government must pay for a medical service. If a doctor feels compassion for some poor soul and offers a discount, he must grant that “discount” for every billing for every patient in the government programs. If he forgives one indigent from paying at all, the government never has to pay for any such procedure. ()() Is this insane or what? Doctors want to do good works, but Medicare/Medicaid rules prevent them from giving out free services. Crazy!

But reporters still ignore free market advocates who predicted it. Media coverage of problems facing the new Medicare prescription drug plan focused on elderly patients left in the lurch by bureaucracy, producing what CBS’s Bill Plante called a “political headache” for the Bush administration. But in the Jan. 16 reports on the “Evening News” and “World News Tonight,” both networks ignored conservative critics who had argued the plan was doomed to fail because it was a typical big government solution that ignored the free market.

Most debate about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has focused on his propensity to vote to overrule Roe v. Wade and the similarity between him and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. But despite the superficial parallels between the two conservative, Italian-American Catholic jurists, it is important to recognize that Alito has a substantial libertarian dimension to his jurisprudence as well as a conservative one. In several key fields of law, he is more likely than Scalia and other conservatives to be skeptical of assertions of government power. More important, there is much in his record that should appeal to libertarians and -- to a lesser extent -- even left-wing liberals.