The "infant mortality rate" is the talking point tell here. Comparing infant mortality rates in the developed world has very little to do with the quality of care and very much to do with other factors including the socioeconomic factors of who gets pregnant, the heroic efforts taken to save very premature infants, and the way infant mortality is counted (are premature infants who die shortly after birth counted or not?). And of course Canada (and other countries) spend less per capita than the United States because they get to enjoy the benefits subsidized by America's spending but skip out on paying for it through price controls. Being a parasite is a good deal until the host dies.

Unions can be good when they are initially formed to right a wrong. After the wrong is righted, they tend to lose their way as they try to find other reasons to justify their existence.

The problem with Progressive ideology is that their good intentions pave roads to Hell again and again, whether we're talking about the French Revolution, the Industrial unions, or the communists. Progressives to a decent job of identifying the flaws of the prevailing power structure and can do a decent job of tearing it down, but what they put in it's place always inevitably turns out badly if not horrifically. The final paragraph of Joshua Muravchik's book Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism does an excellent job of summing up why Socialism (and all Progressive variants) will inevitably turn into a bad thing:

By no means all socialists were killers or amoral. Many were sincere humanitarians; mostly these were the adherents of democratic socialism. But democratic socialism turned out to be a contradiction in terms, for where socialists proceeded democratically, the found themselves on a trajectory that took them further and further from socialism. Long before Lenin, socialist thinkers had anticipated the problem. The imaginary utopias of Plato, Moore, Campanella and Edward Bellamy, whose 1887 novel, Looking Backward, was the most popular socialist book in American history, all relied on coercion, as did the plans of The Conspiracy of Equals. Only once did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it.

Remaking society requires coercion and, ultimately, force against those unwilling to go along with the program. It starts harmlessly enough with regulations and laws but ends with re-education camps and death camps. The French Revolution didn't start out with the Reign of Terror but inevitably wound up there.

To Muravchik's point, I'll add two others. Where socialism, collectivism, and the management by elites can be maintained for however long, it sucks the creativity and productivity from society because nobody is going to work as hard to fulfill the goals and wishes of others as they will to fulfill their own goals and wishes. And when you put an elite in charge, there is no way to guarantee that the elite will be motivated by a desire to do what's best by everyone else rather than to enrich and cater to themselves. The reason why democracies are better than monarchies, dictatorships, or any type of oligarchy is that there is no reliable way for such governments to guarantee that those who succeed the rulers will be good people even if they start out with good people at the helm.

"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

There are some hard workers in government and that's how things get done. Unfortunately their positions are unionized so people get laid off based on seniority rather than the quality of their work.

When I was in college in the 80s, I attended two abortion protests, urged on by the all-female leadership of my college's pro-life club. The first was a March for Life and the second was a pro-abortion march as a counter-protester. I watched how the media covered both events, even then. At the March for Life, they went out of their way to find people who looked overtly religious, were wearing costumes, looked nutty, or some combination of those things while ignoring the large groups of normal Americans and young people because that fit their narrative. At the pro-abortion march, on the other hand, did they cover the usual left-wing nuts who were out in force? Of course not. They went out of their way to make them look like normal people (here is a great article about the media's bias in protest coverage).

Die, mainstream media, die*. You've pandered your propaganda long enough.

(* By "die", I mean that I want them to go out of business, not that I want any individuals involved to actually expire. I figured I'd add that before some seminar poster decided to complain about the irony of a pro-life person wanting people to die.)

Does he bring the teleprompter out with him on date night with his wife?

The whole point of these lists seems to be to generate a lively conversation in the replies and putting a lot of controversial entries on the lists and making controversial comments about the entries is a sure way to do that.

I'll add another recommendation for Split Second. The plot and creature are fairly silly but the characters and dialog are great. "We need bigger guns!"

And what's bad about them acting on fear like this is that they are sending a very clear message to Islamic radicals and they better hope it's a message that Christians sick of artists dunking crucifixes into jars of urine or depicting Mary with elephant dung never take to heart. That message is that if you really want liberals in the arts and media to respect you, they have to fear you and the best way to get them to fear you is to kill a few and threaten to kill more. In other words, they are proving that violence works.