No legacy is so rich as honesty - William Shakespeare

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

I just had a fun time fisking Michael Moore’s latest letter at Moorewatch. This one has to be read to be believed.

Congress is about to use some chicanery they term “Deem and pass” to pretend they voted for a bill, when they did not, so they can push this massively unpopular government healthcare takeover on us stupid peasants that don’t know what’s better for us. Maybe people like me that end up owing the IRS taxes every April should also come up with such a nifty rule where we pretend we send in a check to them, but don’t really do it…

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Commonwealth Fund has produced this graph, quoted approvingly by the usually smart Ezra Klein and Andrew Sullivan* in support of HCR.  It’s a profile in absurdity.

(*I think I’ve figured out why Sullivan is so adamant on HCR.  It’s because he’s feeling guilty for running Besty McGaughey’s article 18 years ago that inside the beltway pundits blame for killing Clinton’s healthcare reform.  I find it difficult to believe that an article that 95% of the American people never heard of single-handedly spiked that HMO-fixated piece of shit.  But whatever works, I guess.)

That’s a projection of what heath care costs would have done if Nixon, Carter or Clinton had brought down spending by 1.5% per year.

I don’t know how to say this diplomatically, so I won’t.  This is, without question, one of the stupidest points made on the healthcare debate, pro- or con.  As McCardle points out, this is essentially arguing that if we’d lowered costs, we would have lowered costs.

There is no reason—none—to believe that any of the previous healthcare reform plans would have controlled spending like this without denying care, curbing innovation or rationing.  The government healthcare plans have grown faster than the private sector average, not slower.  Budget projections have almost always been massive underestimates, Medicare especially.  Just yesterday we found out that Social Security is in the red, a decade ahead of schedule.  Need I go on?  Where in the blue fuck does anyone get the idea that government could have cut healthcare sending 1.5% per year?  Would Congress have had more will to control healthcare spending with 300 million customers as opposed to 150 million?

That graph is basically an appeal to magic.  It presupposes 40 years of hard choices from a Congress that can barely pass a budget.  It claims that the very act of placing government in charge of healthcare would bring costs down.  Supporters will point to the OECD average and say, “But it can be done!”.  Yes it can ... when you ration; when you curb innovation; when you deny care; when you have an American healthcare system to absorb the overflow from yours.

The deeper we get into this healthcare debate, the closer we get to the fundamental problem with healthcare in this country, which is this: There is a huge disconnect between the people getting healthcare and the people paying for it.  As a result, people—even those with private health insurance—have little incentive to control costs, little incentive to forego care of dubious necessity and every reason to buy into absurd fantasies like the graph above.  No one is willing to admit that controlling health care costs will entail reducing services, one way or another.  They just believe that getting the government involved will magically bring costs down.  It’s “starve the beast” all over again.

In other news, the Democrats are considering a deam and pass maneuver in which they would consider the Senate bill passed and only vote on amendments.  This would enable them to pass healthcare reform while still claiming they didn’t vote for it.  The WSJ editorial runs down the usual arguments, but I think that misses the larger point.

How fucking stupid do they think we are?

In order for “deem and pass” to work, the Democrats have to pass the amendments.  In effect, this makes the amendment votes a vote on both the amendment and the bill.  If any Democrat votes in favor of the amendments, that will be just as good as having voted for the bill itself.  The GOP will not forget that.  And I guarantee you the voters won’t.

The simple facts remains.  If this bill were popular, the Democrats would have passed it months ago.  If this bill were good, they would have passed it even in the face of public opposition, confident that the future will vindicate them.  If they are having to resort to Kerry-esque “I voted for the bill and voted agains it” bullshit, what does this tell you about the bill?

Update: Boy, the desperation of the HCR supporters is really frying their brains.  Here are Ornstein and Mann claiming that the Democrats lost the election in 1994 because they failed to pass healthcare reform.  No, I shit you not.

To be sure, there were many reasons for Democrats’ massive losses in 1994, including scandals and angry gun owners. But the failure to fulfill their responsibility for governing contributed mightily to the debacle. That was the conclusion of pollsters from both parties in the aftermath of the November contests. Two weeks after the election, Republican pollster Bill McInturff found that “one of the most important predicates for Republican success was not having health care pass.” He noted that the collapse of the plan reinforced voters’ belief that Washington was in a dysfunctional state of gridlock. At the same time, Democratic pollster Mike Donilon, who worked on the losing campaign of Pennsylvania Senator Harris Wofford, said he believed that Wofford would have won had health reform passed.

This is extraordinary historical revisionism.  The reason Democrats lost in 1994 was because they raised taxes and tried to pass a massive an unpopular healthcare reform bill.  Only in the minds of deluded Leftists did people reject the Democrats because they failed to foist Clintoncare on us.

Yeah, it was all those angry gun owners clinging to their Colts. What a bunch of condescending twerps.

Scientists recently discovered that they could awaken previously unthought-of of regenerative abilities in mammals by removing a single gene. Soon we will all be able to regenerate tissue just like we were lizards that lost their tails! Well maybe not, but the findings are incredible.

A quest that began over a decade ago with a chance observation has reached a milestone: the identification of a gene that may regulate regeneration in mammals. The absence of this single gene, called p21, confers a healing potential in mice long thought to have been lost through evolution and reserved for creatures like flatworms, sponges, and some species of salamander. In a report published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from The Wistar Institute demonstrate that mice that lack the p21 gene gain the ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue.

Now if they could only find the stupid gene that makes people believe collectivism at anything other than the micro level can work despite over a century of proof to the contrary and remove it, then the human race would stand a chance. On the other hand, if they extend our lives and it becomes reasonable to live to the ripe old age of 200 then we are going to have to work for 180+ years of that life. Me, I think I will be glad to just go sooner. That’s some serious taxes you would end up paying during that span. They would take a bite out of ya and you would just regenerate right back to be eaten again. Maybe there is money to be made with this. Insta-bacon factory and all that. And I bet some people like John Bobbitt would have liked to be able to have the ability to regenerate appendages, if you know what I mean.

That Obama and crew are again being shown to have lied while campaigning, or the muted and low-key reporting by the few MSM outlets to carry the story that Obama’s team is more secretive than the Bush team ever was? Their actions are finally giving meaning to what they meant when they told us they were about “hope and change”, I guess.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal agencies haven’t lived up to President Barack Obama’s promise of a more open government, increasing their use of legal exemptions to keep records secret during his first year in office. An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law’s nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October. Among the most frequently used exemptions: one that lets the government hide records that detail its internal decision-making. Obama specifically directed agencies to stop using that exemption so frequently, but that directive appears to have been widely ignored. Major agencies cited that exemption at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, up from 47,395 times during President George W. Bush’s final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies. Obama was president for nine months in the 2009 period.

Right!!!! Obama told them not to, but they then went ahead and used it with such frequency - it’s almost double the number - that they set a new record! Either that means they think Obama a weakling moron and simply don’t care what he has ordered them to do, which is bad thing for the country in general because it projects the image that the executive has no control over it’s own government agencies, or the more likely truth, that Obama was saying this stuff during the campaign, but didn’t mean it at all, and the MSM, as they are wont to, is giving him cover with this kind of stupid writing in this article, which IMO is a much worse thing. My bet is - and this is based on the other promises not kept so far - that it is a combination of both, with the later being the bigger driver. And before you claim that these exemptions are happening for national security or military reasons, look at this:

In all, major agencies cited that or other FOIA exemptions to refuse information at least 466,872 times in budget year 2009, compared with 312,683 times the previous year, the review found. Agencies often cite more than one exemption when withholding part or all of the material sought in an open-records request. The AP examined the 2008 and 2009 budget year FOIA reports from the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the Federal Reserve Board. Other FOIA exemptions cover information on national defense and foreign relations, internal agency rules and practices, trade secrets, personal privacy, law enforcement proceedings, supervision of financial institutions and geological information on wells.

Now, before you rabid libs get all mad at me and say I am inconsistent or did not call the Bush administration out when they did the some of the same, know that I have no problem with the government’s legitimate use of exemptions to FOIA. I am writing this to point out how differently the MSM reports a much broader and intensive use by government of the FOIA exemption depending on who is running the government. Even more important, I am writing it to point out that Obama and the demcorats, yet again, lied to us during their campaigning. If anything, this government is more secretive, and less concerned with your freedoms, than the one BDS infected liberals accused of being fascists, and yet, we now get tepid articles that actually defend the same practices that a year or two ago sent these morons into a frenzy.

Much of the Obama administration’s early effort on FOIA seems to have been aimed at clearing out a backlog of old cases: The number of requests still sitting around past the time limits spelled out in the open-records law fell from 124,019 in budget year 2008 to 67,764 at the end of the most recent budget year over the 17 agencies, the AP’s review found. There is no way to tell whether those whose old cases that were closed ultimately received the information they sought.

I wonder how many of these back-log items were filed by liberals when they thought they could use it to hurt the Bush Administration, but now would if revealed would be inconvenient to them since they are the ones in charge. Nice when it hurts and hampers the fascist Bush administration, bad if we have to live by the same standards and rules we hoped to use against them. If anything, that should make you wonder how seriously these people take our security when they so callously and easily play political games with information that when someone else was running the country they wanted disclosed, even if it endangered us, but now that they are in charge, feel should no longer be disclosed. Keep that in mind the next time you hear a democrat tell you how much worse others are and especially when they promise you something.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Now this is inspiring:

Chicago’s Urban Prep Charter Academy has a mission—for its students to graduate and succeed in college. Now, for the first graduating class at the high school, it’s mission accomplished.

All 107 seniors were accepted to a four-year college, a significant accomplishment considering they are from one of the toughest neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago.

These are not so-called gifted kids at a private school. The public high school is open to all, choosing students by a lottery.

When they started, only 4% of the kids were even reading at grade level.  So what is the secret of their success?  Something you would not be allowed to do in our “don’t traumatize the kids” public schools.  They made it an all-male school, to eliminate female distractions.  They would not accept excuses, even giving the kids watches so they had no reason to be late to school.  Their schools days are longer and more intense on basic subjects like english, math, science and foreign languages.  The kids wear suits and ties.

And they’re thriving.  Look at the picture in the article, which show inner city kids studying their butts off.  This shows what can be done when you get outside the strictures of the government-run system.  The kids are the same, the teachers are the same.  It’s the culture that’s the difference.  The school is focused on discipline and education, not self-esteem, not the latest technological gizmos and not politics.

Just think what could happen if the millions of dedicate teachers in our country were liberated like this.  It doesn’t all have to be ties and discipline.  With suburban kids, a more relaxed environment might be fine.  The point is freedom, the ability of a school to find what works rather that stick to some Five Year Plan dictated from on high.

On the flip side, we have the travesty that went down this week in Texas.

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.

A liveblog of the meeting can be found here.  This is the school board that, until next year, is lead by Don McLeroy, the young earth creationist who has proclaimed that his science vision comes from the Bible and “someone has to stand up to the experts.”

There’s stuff in their changes that I think is appropriate, actually.  The idea that Republicans helped the Civil Rights movement enrages liberals, but it happens to be true.  Before they welcomed disaffected segregationists into the party under Nixon, the GOP was actually stronger on Civil Rights than the Democrats.  A larger percentage voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example.  I also think that it is entirely appropriate that Hayek and Friedman be added to the economics curriculum that includes Marx, Keynes and Smith.  Hayek and Friedman are the two most influential economists of the last half century while Marx is a joke.

On the other hand, the removal of Thomas Jefferson from the Enlightenment and the attempt to expurgate the separation of church and state is simply bullshit.  They are also trying to vindicate Joseph McCarthy because nine of the 159 people he accused of being Communists were implicated in the Venona transcripts.  This has been a pet cause of certain conservatives lately, Mann Coulter in particular.  It is, of course, ridiculous.  McCarthy was known to throw accusations in every direction, especially at political foes, and created a climate of fear in which a mere accusation could destroy someone’s career.  That there were real communist traitors in our midst did not excuse that.  If anything, McCarthy damaged the efforts to root out the traitors by throwing baseless accusations at such as General George Marshall.

But I think people miss the point of this story.  This wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t have such tight government control of the schools.  Granted, some idiots would be teaching their kids garbage in home schools or religious private schools.  But the damage would be limited and the debate far less vociferous.  Some liberals, notably our President, want national standards.  But that just expands the problem.  What happens if some religious nutbag gets into the White House?  What happens if a liberal ideologue like Cornell West or Noam Chomsky gets control?  We had this debate in the 90’s, when Clinton proposed a standard that was highly liberal.  The temptation to inject political views into school standards is simply too strong to resist, especially for the kind of people who gravitate to government.

The Urban Prep Charter Academy shows the best that we can get in education.  Last week’s travesty in Texas shows the worst.  Think about which we should be moving toward.  And think about which our President is moving toward.

Every now and then, when i least expect it,(I should know better) I find a story in the Internet that just make me ashamed to me in the same nation as someone else.
In this case it is Donna Simpson, who is attempting to attain a new world record, in being FAT

Take a good hard look at this fat ass, this woman, is setting the goal at 1000 pounds. 1000 Fucking Pounds! Right at this time she can barely walk and she needs a fucking scooter to mover her fat ass around at the store.

.
Oh yeah that is her kid too, her Husband like’em big and encourages her to eat.

Philippe, who counts watching his girlfriend eat as one of his favourite hobbies, says: “I’ve always been attracted to big women, but Donna is my fantasy. The more she weighs, the sexier she is.”

Her 49-year-old partner Philippe — who she met on a dating site for plus-size people — was encouraging her to reach her goal, she said.

“I think he’d like it if I was bigger ... he’s a real belly man and completely supports me,” she said.

To put on enough weight, Ms Simpson will need to eat 12,000 calories a day, which is six times the recommended daily intake for women.

In order to pay for the enormous amounts of food she is eating — her weekly grocery bill is $815 — Ms Simpson makes money by running a website where men pay to watch her consume fast food.

This waste of oxygen make a living by eating and letting men watch her on her web cam.......... excuse me while i go throw up, maybe i can get some one to pay me to watch that!.
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OK if that was not enough take a good look here.
And here, if you are brave enough.

Its bad enough that there are millions in this nation that are trying to reduce their waist line, while this woman tries to expand hers, with out regard to the health effects or the cost to her family. I wonder who pays for her health care? Any guesses? Then there is the fact that this woman is getting international attention over this, renforcing the views that America is full of fat disgusting blobs, like on the animated movie WALL-E.

She does not deserve attention or encouragement, she deserves scorn.

I really have nothing to say about the Eric Massa mess.  Last week, I kept drafting posts and the story kept getting weirder and weirder.  I’ve come to the conclusion that the guys is a lunatic, a serial groper or a space alien, possibly all three.

But it’s fucking comedy gold!  Here is SNL.  Jon Stewart is after the break:

It may have escaped people’s notice that Massa is, in fact, a lunatic Democrat, not a lunatic Republican.  Our gay lunatics have the decency to confine themselves to airport bathrooms stalls.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Imagine if you will, that you are home, asleep in your bed, when you get a phone call at 3 a.m. No, its not the Joint Chiefs calling to tell you that North Korea has detonated a Atomic bomb over Seoul.  Its not Al gore calling to tell you that the Antarctic ice cap has collapsed and we are all gonna drown. It is your Friendly neighborhood police calling to ask you to step out side for a little talk, about that gun purchase the other day.

WTF?, you ask? well Genital readers, it did happen to one David J. Pyles, of Medford, Oregon. Monday Morning at 3 a.m. the Sheriffs departments of two counties, the state patrol, and officers from the local police and from a nearby town surrounded Pyles home. With SWAT and Hostage Negotiators deployed he was awoken and asked to come outside.
Now all this sounds pretty serious, was Pyle a wanted terrorist?  A dangerous Drug Dealer? a known Obama Hater?
No,
He bought some firearms a few days before.

Concerns about an Oregon Department of Transportation employee who purchased several guns after being placed on leave prompted law enforcement across Southern Oregon to step in.

Negotiators and a SWAT team from Medford police safely took a man — whose name wasn’t released — into protective custody Monday morning in the 500 block of Effie Street, Medford police said in a news release.

He was taken to Rogue Valley Medical Center for a mental-health evaluation.

The man recently had been placed on administrative leave from his job and was “very disgruntled,” the news release said.

Oh yeah forgot that part, he was Disgruntled.  Now why was he Disgruntled?

ODOT Communications Director Patrick Cooney said there were administrative, personnel matters involved that limited what the department could discuss.

They cant say. However ODOT reported him to the State police and then they began watching him and after he purchased 3 firearms they moved in.

Authorities were “extremely concerned” that the man may have been planning to retaliate against his employers, the news release said.

“Instead of being reactive, we took a proactive approach,” OSP Sgt. Jeff Proulx said.

OK to be fair, workplace violence is a major concern and a disgruntled employee, who buys 3 firearms in 2 days might raise some red flags, but did they have any evidence that he was planning such a action?

After a phone conversation with negotiators, the man — who was alone in the home — agreed to come out, Hansen said.

Police seized the recently purchased firearms, as well as another .45-caliber Heckler & Koch handgun and a 12-gauge shotgun. Police are holding the weapons for safekeeping, but no criminal charges have been filed

They took the man in to custody and then entered his home and seized his firearms, all of which were legally purchased. Oh they also to him to the shrink at the local hospital for a mental evaluation.

Now my friends, if this sequence of events had happened to you, how do you think your mental evaluation would go, at that time?

Well there is more to this story.

Kevin Starrett, director of the Canby-based lobbying organization — which also has a foundation for protecting gun rights through court cases — had been monitoring the incident that landed Pyles in the hospital for a mental health evaluation and resulted in five of his guns being held by police for “safekeeping.”

“It’s chilling,” he said.

“I don’t know if this is just a gun case,” Starrett said. “It’s about whether your freedom can be taken away without a criminal case or charges against you.”

So what did Mr Pyle do to spark his leave from work and the resulting police use of “protective Custody” and to seize his Arms? Well even My Pyle is vague on this.

Pyles told Starrett that he had a conflict with a superior at work, but was working to resolve it through union processes.

The Oregon Department of Transportation confirmed that Pyles has worked there as a planner since February 2004. ODOT Communications Director Patrick Cooney said the department couldn’t discuss personnel or security matters

ok that doesn’t sound to serious, and if it was, should not the ODOT say so?
Well lets look at the rest of the story.

Pyles told Starrett he initially thought the early morning call must be a prank, but looked out to see his yard surrounded by police.

“They asked him to come out and said they wouldn’t handcuff him, arrest him or take him off the property,” Starrett recounted.

However, Pyles said, he then was handcuffed and taken to Rogue Valley Medical Center for evaluation.

“Because we had information that he could be a danger to others, we wanted a medical professional to evaluate him,” Medford police chief Randy Schoen said.

Police have maintained that Pyles’ surrender was voluntary, but Starrett noted that an intimidating presence of officers with rifles and SWAT gear can force people to agree to things they wouldn’t normally do.

“The thing that is really troubling to us is that this was not an arrest,” he said. “People in protective custody don’t even have the rights a person who has been arrested does.”

When undergoing a mental health screening, a person doesn’t have a guaranteed right to an attorney, for example, he said.

The evaluation took several hours and Pyles was released before noon on Monday.

Is anyone bothered by what the police promised not to do, but then did? Hey We got protections against this kind of crap in this Country. The ACLU should be allover this as a clear case of violation of the 4th Amendment, the 5th and maybe the 6th, not to mention the 2nd.

David Fidanque, executive director of the Oregon chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization wasn’t likely to get involved in an incident of this type, but said Pyles could have a case against police if he were taken into custody improperly.

If a Cop Farts on a suspect, the ACLU is allover them like stink on shit, and they are not interested in this case?
What has Mr Pyles said about this?

“To justify my being taken away in handcuffs, forced off my property, my real property as a Medford resident, as a citizen of Jackson County and a United States citizen, legal and all respect, it is most troubling what happened to me on Monday,” Pyles said.

Pyles has contacted the Oregon Firearms Federation for possible legal assistance.

But the good news is that the shrinks didn’t find cause to arrest him and the police have to return his arms to him
And they have apparently, and it is a closed case as far as the police are concerned.
So now i do have to ask.
IF this man was considered a danger, why where his purchases approved?
Why was he confronted at his home at 3 am?, did they WANT a standoff?
Why did they place him in custody and then seize his arms? The “threat” had been neutralized, why go into his home?
Did they have a Warrant to do that?

Now some would argue that the police was just being on the safe side by doing this, preventing a possible bloodbath, that the media would lap up.
however, with the fear of a possible criminal action one can now be ordered out of your home at night, oh and at gunpoint, taken to a hospital where they will give you a mental evaluation. You know just to see if you are cracked and that the guns you have are a indicator that you intend to raise violence upon your employer because , well you are cracked!
This Whole case bring up a number of issues. One of which is how far can the police go to be proactive in preventing crime. How far can they go? in the face of such flimsy evidence, I cant see why they took it on them selves to conduct such a operation,without investigating Mr Pyle first and try to determine if he was a risk or not.
To me this is more of the Police Run amok, im sure that they felt that they were protecting everyone else, but never once considered how they were trampling another mans liberties in the process.
But HEY!  You know its for the Greater good we oppress you so other can feel more relaxed.

I am not sure what to make of the claim by LaRhonda Pettit that her Father James Brown’s corpse is missing from his crypt.

LaRhonda Pettit, 48, alleges the body of Brown, who died in December 2006 aged 73, is being hidden to prevent a full autopsy being carried out. Ms Pettit said the official cause of death, which was said to be a heart attack brought by pneumonia, is not the real reason behind the Godfather of Soul’s passing. She said: ‘My daddy’s body has disappeared. I have no clue where it was taken, but I need to know where. ‘I’m convinced his death was suspicious and I want the people responsible brought to justice.

If it is really missing, and my guess is that this young lady s either trying to capitalize on those 15 minutes of fame or looking for some kind of pay day, my guess is that it is more likely to be because some kids stole it to make a bong out of his skull.

She is one of 12 people who came forward following Brown’s death claiming to be one of his illegitimate children. Brown’s body is said to have been sealed in a temporary crypt at his daughter Deanna’s South Carolina Home while arrangements are made for his permanent burial.

Yeah, OK. I am going with the “she is looking for a pay-day” scenario.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Matt Welch has one of the better lines I’ve seen on the budget crises going on all over the country.  Responding to an NYT article that asks if school taxes can be cut in a district with an average teacher salary of $97,000, he cries out:

Let’s see, is this mic on? Can I get a little more reverb? Good. WE ARE OUT OF MONEY, ASSHOLES.

Not only that, but we are out of money because YOU STOLE IT, FROM THE CHILDREN. And the rest of us.

According to the linked story, activists are claiming that the local school district spends $27,500 per student. While we don’t know whether that’s precisely true (shoot, why would you print the real per-student cost, in the newspaper article about controversies over school spending?), even if that number is half the size it’s a big blinking neon WTF.

He goes on to point out the perpetual budget cycle, which works like so:

(1) Economy does well, tax revenues boom;

(2) The government spends all the new money, raising the budget to unsustainable levels;

(3) Economy turns down, revenues fall (both 1 and 3 are exacerbated by our heavily progressive tax system);

(4) Even tiny cuts in bloated budgets are decried as “draconian”; raise taxes.

(5) Wash, rinse, repeat.  Occasionally wonder why businesses and rich people are leaving the state/country.

I must say, I am getting closer and closer the primal scream Welch makes.  And I think a lot of Americans are getting there, too.  I recently was talking to my mother, who asked if Obama knows that there’s a limit to the amount of money he can spend.  I don’t think he does.  I don’t think any of them do, Republican or Democrat (but especially Democrat).  They are so used, since the Long Boom began under Reagan, to government revenue always being there.  The idea that we could run out of money is something that simply doesn’t compute.  It’s like watching cave men trying to understand quantum mechanics (no, Oog, use the Schrodinger equation, not the spear).  They are vaguely aware of some concern about this “deficit thing” out there.  But they don’t really grok it.  If they did, we wouldn’t be having debates about the brutality of one quarter of one percent salary cuts.

That’s where these people should go:

Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and his partner Choi Mi-sun, 25, fed their three-month-old baby only on visits home between 12-hour sessions at a neighbourhood internet cafe, where they were raising an avatar daughter in a Second-Life-style game called Prius online, police said.

Leaving their real daughter at their home in a suburb of Seoul to fend for herself, the pair, who were unemployed, spent hours role-playing in the virtual reality game, which allows users to choose a career and friends, granting them offspring as a reward for passing a certain level.

The pair became obsessed with nurturing their virtual daughter, called Anima, but neglected their real daughter, who was not named.

Eventually, the couple returned home after one 12-hour session in September to find the child dead and called police. The pair were arrested on Friday after an autopsy showed that the baby died from prolonged malnutrition.

There is no emoticon to describe what I’m feeling right now.  I put this in the queue for 12 hours to try to calm down and it still fills me with rage.

The usual “Ah! Internet!” types are making a lot of fuss over how this proves we’re losing to the virtual world.  I don’t think so.  The internet is just one more way that truly vile people can neglect their kids.  If it wasn’t the internet, it would be drugs or booze or TV or something else.

Update: I’m sure some dipshit is going to try pass a law to prevent this sort of thing.  As it happens, there a great article in the times on the endless attempts of do-gooders to punish everyone else for one person’s stupidity and/or evil.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Here is how the economics behind government takeover of healthcare proposed in the current monstrous bill congress is going to pass against the will of the people by means of a gimmick, works. Obama’s congress proposes a monster that will cost close to $2 trillion over 10 years and gives government absolute and total control of all things healthcare. Even more frightening, the bill is set up in such a way that by that decade’s end everyone will have been funneled into a government controlled plan. People freak out. So Obama then tells congress they need to find a way to make it happened for a measly $900 billion to make the number more palatable. The congress then proceeds to concoct a scheme that charges you taxes over 10 years to come up with some $1.8 trillion dollars the CBO projected optimistically will be the cost of their behemoth takeover plan, but then offers no care whatsoever for the first four or five years. This then allows them to collect some $850 billion dollars in extra cash during that first 10 year stint, leaving us with a plan that they tell us will now only cost us a measly $1 trillion! Presto, healthcare costs are under control! I should mention that this $1.8 trillion CBO score is for the best case scenario cost of a government healthcare takeover, but we all know that as things go, these collectivist scams usually cost orders of magnitude more than was projected by the biggest pessimists, when they go live.

So after the first 10 years of Obamacare comes to a close, and we roll into the next decade of this wonderful collectivist experiment, we suddenly have government controlled healthcare that is at a minimum underfunded by $850 billion dollars for the next ten years, and likely to be behind a couple of trillion already too. Yet they and the MSM are all claiming this bill will save us money! Maybe they know that the collectivists elite in charge and pushing this plan through even though we don’t want it plan to confiscate our paychecks in their entirety and then distribute to us each according to our needs eventually, and then this stuff wont matter much. Barring that, you can fill in the gaps how they plan to deal with the vanishing of the “savings” they are now tauting sooner than later.

The recent revelation that came out, after some massive stonewalling by the WH which obviously knew it was damning, that many of Obama’s top legal appointees, including Eric Holder over at Justice, seem to have a conflict of interest when it comes to terrorism, seems to have lit a fire in the legal community. Whether you feel that there are issues with the whole terrorists are enemy combatants that purposefully avoid any uniforms or identifications vs. terrorist are just criminals, you can not fail to grasp that there is something problematic with having the very people that are now in charge of preventing another terrorist attack being sympathetic to that cause. And before you lambaste me for saying this, remember that, as this Andrew C. McCarthy article points out, these attorneys chose to go represent people that wanted to destroy this country, and we should be able to ask why. Especially when, as I pointed out, several of these attorneys are now the ones making critical decisions on how to handle not just captured terrorists, but how and how timely we get intelligence from these captured terrorists that can protect Americans from another attack. Here is the money quote:

The Justice Department lawyers who represented al-Qaeda were volunteers. Of all the causes to which they could have donated their services, they chose our enemies. They are no doubt sincere in claiming they sought to vindicate principles, not terrorists. But the other stubborn fact is that, since they took the helm at Justice, counterterrorism policy has become much more terrorist friendly.

Anyone that tries to make the case that those people asking for clarifications and pointing out the conflict, are just ushering a new era of McCarthyism, demanding we ignore the consequences and impact of the policies implemented by, and the actions taken by these lawyers now making the decisions to treat terrorists like common criminals, or worse tries to make the case that these policy shifts have made us safer, is an outright liar or moron. Maybe even both. I can guarantee you that the people that say this is much ado about nothing and that anyone that points out that these lawyers once chose to defend terrorists, would be singing a different tune if we had a clear conflict of interest like this with some government appointee that had links to the private sector. There is no excuse, and this is based on their won words and actions, even when you think that capitalism is a bigger threat than terrorism, to pretend that there isn’t a clear issue here. The truth is that these lawyers have made us all less safe. We have been lucky so far, but that luck won’t hold.

Update: It now looks like Holder wasn’t as forthcoming about his whole role in this and is now being looked at for failing to turn over briefs that would have been cause for concern. Oh, I am sure they will say it was an oversight, in fact they already are, nut what a convenient oversight huh? This is the mastermind that wanted to bring the terrorist show trials to NYC after all. The point is that Holder and his posse have an agenda, and that agenda makes plays havoc with our security. The left’s way of silencing those pointing this out is to accuse them of wanting to slime the lawyers for defending terrorists when the point is that these lawyers chose to defend the terrorists to undermine those that took terrorism seriously and treated this like a war and them like combatants.

Here’s a quick question.  Suppose you run a business and you’re not terribly moral.  Would you be in favor of legislation that:

(1) forces people or their employers to buy your product;

(2) forces people to buy the more expensive versions of your product;

(3) give them money to help buy your product; and

(4) creates a closed market so that they can only select from you and a few other companies?

Of course you would.  Who wouldn’t want that?  I mean, besides free market zealots.

Well, this is precisely what is happening with health insurance under Obamacare.  As Jacob Sullum points out:

If Obama’s plan works as advertised, it will be a huge boon to insurers. As he himself notes, “they’re going to have 30 million new customers” thanks to the government’s mandates and subsidies.

To distract us from the favor he is doing for insurers, Obama claims to be getting tough with them by demanding that they take all comers and charge them all the same rates, without regard to health. While abolishing risk-based pricing contradicts a basic principle of the insurance business, the industry has to weigh the loss of that freedom against the gain of government-guaranteed revenue.

Despite his talk about reining in “excessive” premium hikes, Obama’s plan commits him to keeping insurers financially sound so they can provide the coverage he is promising. Federal regulators, like their state counterparts, will find that “you can’t separate the underlying solvency of companies from the rates they charge,” as Wisconsin’s insurance commissioner recently told The New York Times. “From a consumer protection standpoint,” Kansas’ insurance commissioner agreed, “the most important thing we do is ensure the solvency of companies.”

This is why I could never be a Democrat.  This is why I sometimes get so angry listening to these jackasses on TV and the radio.  They are completely selling out our healthcare to the insurance companies on the one hand.  And then they turn around and say shit like this to established their liberal bona fides.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi concedes that Democrats allowed the health care reform debate to be “hijacked” by insurance companies and other interests set on killing the bill.

Yes, Nancy.  It’s the evil insurance companies you are beholden to that “hijacked” the bill, not your fractious dim-bulb party and the understandable nervousness Americans feel about government intrusion into any industry.

Of course, insurance companies, for all their demonization, are not the real problem with healthcare anyway, as Jeffrey Anderson points out:

According to the most recent Fortune 500 rankings, health insurers are not even among the top-30 United States industries in profit-margin. Health insurers rank 35th, with a profit-margin of just 2.2 percent — less than one-fifth the profit-margin of railroads. None of the ten largest American health insurers made profits of more than 4.5 percent, and two of them lost money. Health insurers’ collective profit-margin is less than one-eighth that of drug companies and less than one-seventh that of companies that sell medical products or equipment. It’s also less than that of medical facilities. Yet when was the last time you heard President Obama rail against greedy hospitals?

One thing at a time, my friend.  Once the Democrats have control of the insurance companies (partly by delaying the Medicare SGR fix and buying off the AMA), they will then explain the inevitable cost over-runs as the result of greedy doctors and drug companies and reign them in.  Divide and conquer.

In all, the combined profits of the 14 largest American health insurers (the ones who crack the Fortune 1000) are $8.7 billion. That’s less than 0.4 percent, or 1/250th, of overall U.S. health-care costs, which are $2.5 trillion.

The Democrat are like a football team run by morons.  They really only have one play in the book—envy.  Greedy rich insurance companies, greedy rich doctors and greedy rich Republicans are the enemies. Democrats are the nobel gallants standing between us and exploitation.  And even as they climb into bed with insurance companies, unions and “green energy” interests, they continue to peddle this myth.

Whatever works, I guess.

(In other news, the Senate Parliamentarian has limited what the Dems can do with reconciliation.  Expect outrage and bombast and demonization of man who’s just doing his job.)