You know your first New Year’s Resolution ought to be to preorder and then read The Happiest Life when it arrives on your doorstep 12/31/13 and act on in 1/1/14.

But your second resolution should be to sign up for and compete in the best half marathon in the land –or the 5 K if you are just getting started– the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Half Marathon, run in Irvine, California on Saturday January 11.

2014 Southern California

I have run –well, trundled– this race a half dozen times and it is flat, fast, and fun, full of high school and junior high kids training for the Los Angeles Marathon as well as thousands of oldsters, both serious and slow, on one of the nicest courses in the land.

Look at it this way: With Obamacare arriving, you had better get into and stay in shape.

Rick Gibson, the Athletic Director of Woodbridge HS in Irvine the student athletes of which have staffed the race for a quarter century joins me in the last half hour of today’s program to push fitness as the New Year’s resolution that shouldn’t wait until 1/1 to get started.  Go sign up now and motivate e yourself for the 11th!

Where does it come from, the constant and often bitter battle between left and right in the country?

One of the country’s leading public intellectuals, Yuval Levin, makes a compelling argument in a new book that we can blame it all on two very familiar names and their two very different views of human nature and politics: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine.

Yuval will join me in hour two today to discuss The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left:

Flash: Obamacare Dangerous to Health of Poor
By Clark S. Judge: managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute

Well, Halleluiah.  The Obamacare website is up and running.

Of course, at only half a million applications processed so far… and accounting for the ones that the system garbled or couldn’t verify or seems to have lost… and anticipating the tens of millions of Americans predicted to lose coverage once the employer mandate kicks in and it turns out to be simpler and cheaper for companies to send workers to the government’s back-up plan (the one paid for by the so-called “fine” that Chief Justice John Roberts correctly identified as a “tax”) than to navigate the troubled waters of Obamacare’s rules and costs… America should achieve the fervently promised universal coverage by — Oh, I don’t know — how about sometime in the next decade.  Maybe.

I guess that’s what you call close enough for government work.

To think of it.  A scant two months ago, 85 percent of the people in this happy republic had health insurance they liked, valued, and wanted to keep.  Period.  Now anger, anxiety and disgust fill the land. Continue Reading

On Monday’s show the New York Times’ Mark Leibovich talked about Manhattan-Beltway media elites and Hillary, Chris Christie and Obamacare.

On Tuesday’s program, Dr. Tevi Troy laid out in great detail exactly what the media needs to be examining about the claims the president is making about Obamacare.  (Troy’s new Commentary Magazine piece on Obamacare is here.)

The transcripts of both the Leibovich and Troy interviews will be posted here soon.  The answer to the problem Leibovich identified of Beltway media “group think” is outlined in Troy’s answers to my interview questions and in his article.  Wait and see if many (or any) MSMer start to scrutinize the president’s claims or seek serious metrics of performance for the program he continues to extol even as it fails in spectacular fashion to the great harm of millions of Americans.  Look especially for any MSMer recounting what the president promised in 2009 and again in 2012 and what is in fact happening in 2013-2014.

Troy’s new book, What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted, is the perfect Christmas book for the political junkies in your life, left, right or center.