The Daily Top Five: February 12, 2007

1. The Valentine's Picture of the year. Here is the story behind it, it appears to be real.

Hat Tip: Allahpundit from Hot Air.

2. Utah last week became the first state in the union with a universal school choice voucher program. A massive triumph for school choice advocates. Here is the floor speech of one Utah state senator who voted for the bill. Just when I think that politicians are all about soundbites, something like this comes up. Here is a snippet.

Now we have heard the public education community say time and again that we need to expand the size of the pie, we need to spend more on public education. But I would say that we need to spend more on education in general, whether public or private. This bill does some wonderful things in protecting all public education spending from being diminished by holding them harmless for five years for every kid who leaves. And in addition to that, it entices parents to add to the economic pie voluntarily, so that the amount we’re spending in Utah because of this bill will be greater collectively, not only protected in the public system, but expanded in the private system, so that Milton Friedman’s dream of allowing parents to vote with their feet will actually come to pass.

The Utah bill is a model that should be studied and emulated across the country.

3. Betsy Newmark has a good take on the political contest that became the Grammy's last night. I loved seeing The Police and I am glad I changed the channel after that. Admittedly I would have like to see Justin Timberlake perform with someunknown woman, but I didn't the pateience and Battlestar Galactica was on. The fact that politics often enters the artistic arena is not at all new or surprising, and i have no issue with that and frankly it rarely impacts my decision to by or not. Having said that though, politics should not be a deciding factor in artistic wins. There is not a single category that the Dixie should have won. Their song is nowhere near their best work and their album was, by their own admission, not even a country album. "Sexyback" by Timberlake and "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley are far superior songs and either should have won. The fact that the Dixie Chicks got slammed at the Country Music Awards is not a reason to give them a Grammy.

But award shows are now more about the politics and the fashion than about the substance of what is nominally honored, be it music or movies or anything else honored in La-La Land.

4. Is the press biased against Hilary Clinton? James Joyner tends to think no, despite protestations from some liberal bloggers.

In the more general sense, it strikes me that Clinton is being treated no worse by the press and her opponents than any other frontrunner in recent memory and no worse by her critics in the blogosphere this go-round than Rudy Giuliani or John McCain and better than Mitt Romney or, goodness knows, Dennis Kucinich.

Clinton is constantly lauded in the press for her brilliance, discipline, and work ethic. Aside from the more obscure elements of the conservative blogosphere, the scandals of her pre-Senate tenure are seldom mentioned. That she is eminently qualified to serve as president is simply presumed, despite a complete lack of executive experience and having served only one term as a Senator, to which she was elected almost entirely on the force of the celebrity she gained from being married to Bill Clinton.

While Barak Obama is being hailed as a savior, Obama has and advantage over Clinton on the issue if Iraq--he didn't have to vote for or against the authorization of military force--he hadn't even been elected yet. So in that respect, he gets a pass. Clinton has to defend her vote and Obama can simply say he opposed the war from the start, with no embarassing vote to counter his statements. Overall, I think Clinton is going a good job dealing with the 2002 vote, but it is an albatross around her neck that Obama does not have.

5. Michael Barone has, as usual, a good piece on the Bush Health Care proposal. This proposal, fairly well doomed to be lost in the battle of inconsequential resolutions on Capitol Hill, would fundamentally alter the way in which health care is provided in this country. By dismantling the connection between employment and health insurance, Bush's plan would allow individuals to get health insurance with the same tax deductibility that employers now enjoy.

The biggest problem with health insurance is not that there are too many people without it, although that is a serious problem. The issue is that modern health insurance is not insurance at all, in that it protects from catastrophic costs, rather it is really a thrid party payer program where the beneficiary (the patient) has little concept of how much health insurace costs or how much health care costs. This lack of knowledge has driven up costs in a ever increasing spiral without the normal price controls and free and open market impose.