If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. - Mario Andretti

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.

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.)

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Man, are they getting desperate, or what?  via Mish:

A federally funded ticketing blitz in the state of Virginia landed a total of 6996 traffic tickets this weekend. The blitz, dubbed “Operation Air, Land & Speed” coincided with frantic efforts by state officials to close a $2.2 billion budget deficit. Supervisors ordered state troopers to saturate Interstates 81 and 95 to issue as many tickets as humanly possible over the space of two days.

Jesus--the state police actually treated this like a got-damn military operation, and all because the state government has a hole in their budget the size of Obama’s ears. 

This is sheer desperation, plain and simple.  When you have to resort to traffic tickets to shore up your budget, it’s game-fucking-over.  And the most grotesque aspect of this whole mafia-style skim is that it was federally funded.  In other words, our tax dollars went to pay for this. 

Why are they resorting to measures like these?  A quick reminder:

Watching these states try to grapple with their underwater budgets is like watching a car wreck in real time.  You know it’s not going to turn out well, but you can’t look away.  Ponzi government is coming home to roost, kids.

Yesterday, while the AE-35 was on the fritz, I went out to check my snail mail and found something most curious—a letter from the Census Bureau.  I figured I’d take it in, write down “we got three here” with one of my daughter’s crayons and send it back.  But it was not my census form.  It was, instead, a stupid letter telling me to expect my census form soon.

Dear Resident,

About one week from now, you will receive a 2010 Census form in the mail.  When you receive your form, please fill it out and mail it in promptly.

Your response is important.  Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need.  Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely,
Robert M. Groves
Director, U.S. Census Bureau

Emphasis mine.

This little letter probably cost the Feds about $42 million.  That estimate is based on just postage, paper and labor.  But the government can’t wipe it’s ass for less than six grand, so I’ll assume that’s a lower limit.

To be honest, the cost doesn’t me.  $42 million is about what the government spends every five minutes.  Obamacare will probably spend ten times that much designing their logo.  The Census is already budgeted at ... holy shit ... $14 billion (three times the cost of the 2000 census) so complaining about the cost of this letter is like complaining about the font on the Stimulus Bill.

Moreover, the Bureau claims that these letters could save up to $500 million. The reason is that even a small increase in response rates will erase the need to send actual people out to chase up respondees, a process that is very expensive at government labor rates (they’re already hiring 750,000 people for it).  We all know how reliable the estimates are for government money-saving efforts, but this actually doesn’t seem too unreasonable to me.

So, no, I’m not bothered by the cost.  What got my boxers in a bunch was the phrase I’ve highlighted in bold.  I’m not happy with the Census Bureau telling us to fill out the form because it’s the only way to get out “fair share” of government lucre.  That is classic liberal redistributionist trope.

It’s also bullshit.  As we have seen with the stimulus and with the buying of healthcare reform, government money gets out doled based on politics, not need and certainly not the damned Census.  Did Louisiana get a $100 million payout in the healthcare bill because the filled out their Census forms?  No, they got it because Mary Landrieu sold her healthcare vote.  Are two-thirds of the stimulus jobs going to public education because of the census? No, they’re going there because education is the province of the nation’s most powerful unions.

Now this is my first time filling out a census form.  I was living with my parents in 1990 and was a vagabond grad student in 2000.  Perhaps the letter has always said this.  But even if this is standard Census boilerplate, I don’t like it.  We should not be encouraging people to think of government as giant bag of money from which you get your “fair share”.

Democrats ran and won in 2006, and then again in 2008, on the bad behavior of republicans. Republicans were successfully and correctly painted as having lost their fiscal sanity for the deficit spending prior to 2006, only to have democrats gain control of congress and the spending purse after the 2006 elections, and set new spending records they then blamed Bush for. The leftwing machine’s manipulations of the facts, with big-time help from a complicit media that didn’t point out democrats were always worse at that stuff anyway when in charge, allowed them to run on the lack of fiscal responsibility of the republicans in 2008 again, using the crisis of their own making that they then blamed on Bush yet again, to win big, only to then proceed to set new deficit spending records. Here is the graph for those of you that want to dispute the deficit spending facts, so spare us the bull:

As this projection showed Obama’s deficit spending in his first year ended up being more than all 8 years of Bush. Oh sure, as I already pointed out Obama is blaming Bush for having to do so. Democrats have successfully convinced so many that the financial crisis we are in isn’t tied to those idiotic collectivist economic lending practices they forced upon the market in the last 3 decades. Even worse, they successfully have covered up the rigged games Franks and Dodd set up with Fannie and Freddie to keep those faulty economic policies afloat, and how those trading scams then led to the implosion of the housing market and then the financial sector. But that “It’s Bush’s fault” excuse is wearing thin as people are slowly seeing the truth. Almost $2 trillion of the tax payer’s dollars has been funneled to democrats and their friends, through one collectivist economic scam or another promising salvation, but delivering nothing but a drastically growing government bureaucracy, while the private sector continues to bleed jobs and contract. And the WH remains focused on tacking on trillions more in new taxes and debt so they can give government control of healthcare moneys and decisions, with a scam which purports to reign in costs and be fiscally responsible by of all things taxing us for 10 years to provide 5 or 6 years of coverage, while ignoring the economic disaster they are leaving in their wake. And the one thing they should be addressing, the lack of jobs, gets nothing but some meaningless political play. In the mean time the hole is growing deeper and the spending of money we simply don’t have continues to rise. This year is looking like it will set even higher and wasteful deficit spending records as this February’s $220.9 billion single month record is showing. This seems to be our economic future thanks to the democrats and their economics. But the fact that democrats are destroying our economy, and are trying hard to destroy healthcare, is not the thing I want to address here. I want to talk a bit about one of the other lies they told to get themselves elected.

If you have been following the whole Eric Massa fiasco, you know this stuff has turned into a soap opera writ large. Frankly I do not know if Massa is telling the truth. He is a democrat after all, and lying is second nature for them. However, I do not put it past this WH to do what Massa has accused them of doing either. Based on what I have seen them do in just this first year, I have no doubt that this bunch is probably the most corrupt crew I have ever seen. We are dealing with Chicago politics here, and this – hope & change! - is SOP for these people. My bet is that since Obama wants this monster passed, his team is going to make it happen. Even if they have to do what Massa has accused them of. In fact I do not put it past them to resort to openly committing felonies to do so considering the vested interest they have in making this the law of the lad. After all, they control the levers of power and the press, so whose gonna be able to do anything about anything bad they do? If the stuff that has been going on so far hasn’t made the case yet, I doubt anything they do will.

And that brings me to my point about this whole Massa thing. If you don’t remember Nancy promising to drain the republican swamp and end the culture of corruption back in 2006, here is just one of the instances the sympathetic press gave her words play. Unfortunately, as case after case proves – Chris Dodd, Barney Franks, Charley Rangel, and a plethora of others – Nancy lied, and the corruption and criminal behavior, like the deficit spending and the fiscal irresponsibility I talked about before, is also setting new records. Don’t take my word for it. The case with Massa is more of the same. Even more important is the fact that while Pelosi is now claiming ignorance that’s a blatant lie because Nancy knew months ago about Massa’s behavior. And while Nancy is playing dumb, just a little research would have made it all obvious from records going back to Massa’s NAVY days showing that Massa was a time bomb waiting to explode.

As is the case in all these other stories of corruption that the MSM is ignoring or down playing, we are being lied to by these democrats that want to pretend real criminal activity and serious ethics violations, stuff that makes what happens when the republicans were in charge look tame, isn’t their modus operandi. And keep in mind that it is this scandal driven congress which is ignoring the will of the people and pushing forward with an unpopular government takeover of healthcare. Why isn’t the MSM up in arms about all this corruption and the will of the people being ignored? I guess that’s more of that hope and change for you.

I’ve not posted much of the reconciliation issue and whether Congress will use reconciliation to bypass the filibuster on healthcare reform.  I’m not overly fond of fillibusters, but this seems like a sneaky way to get an unpopular bill through.  I’m fully aware of the political games going on.  The GOP wants a victory over the Democrats.  The Democrats want a bill passed, no matter what’s in it.  And if the roles were reversed, I’m sure the Republicans would be screaming about the minority “thwarting the will of the people” and the Democrats would be sobbing about our “sacred Senate traditions”.  To me, the most important fight right now is in the House.  If Pelosi can’t even muster a majority—and it’s iffy—this thing is deader than Michael Jackson.

Still, it’s nice to have some facts on the subject. And for all the Democrat screeching about how Republicans have used reconciliation “all the time”, the facts belie this claim:

Almost every act passed under reconciliation (8/15) has in fact been a budget bill.  And most of those that weren’t (5/7) were tax bills.  The two outliers:  The 1996 welfare reform act and the 2007 student aid package.  Why those were passed under reconciliation isn’t made clear.

What’s also interesting is that the vast majority of these bills were absolute slam dunks.  Most (8/15) were passed by filibuster-proof supermajorities, meaning that reconciliation wasn’t used as an end-around to avoid a cloture vote.

There are only seven times in the last thirty years that reconciliation has been used to bypass the supermajority requirement and all seven were budget bills.  Those bills were:

(1) Ronald Reagan’s 1982 budget, which raised taxes and cut Medicare spending.

(2) George Bush’s 1990 budget, which raised taxes and cut spending.

(3) Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget, which raised taxes and cut spending (passed on Gore’s tie-breaker).

(4) George Bush’s 2001 tax cut (which was supported 58-33).

(5) George Bush’s 2003 tax cut.

(6) George Bush’s 2005 spending cut bill.

(7) George Bush’s 2005 tax cut.

The Lefties are mad because reconciliation was used to pass tax cuts they didn’t like.  And maybe ... perhaps ... they have a point on that.  But Bush did not use reconciliation to pass Medicare Part D or to start the Iraq War or to reform Social Security or pass the Patriot Act or anything else.  They have been crowing that welfare reform was passed by reconciliation.  But welfare reform was supported 78-21 in the Senate and 328-101 in the House.  It could easily have gotten cloture.  The most likely reason reconciliation was used was to fix the Medicaid budget adjustments and get a bill through that Clinton wouldn’t veto.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Remember my little spastic post about the IRS getting new shotguns?
Well now it seems that the Department of Education has decided it needs 27 more Remington 870s’.
And before y ou ask what does the Depeatment of Fucking education needs with combat shotguns, read the requirements part of the solicitation.

LOP are designated as the only shotguns authorized for ED based on compatibility with ED existing shotgun inventory, certified armor and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.
The required date of delivery is March 22, 2010.

Existing Shotgun inventory.
Certified armor
Combat training
WTF, i know some of the inner city schools are bad, but just WTF, do they need their own SWAT teams for?
I thought the purpose of the department of Education was to, you know educate?

I hate to chat about celebrity stupidity in this space.  But God-damn it do they make it easy sometimes.  Here is Sean Penn, on Bill Maher’s show, defending Hugo Chavez.

PENN: The collaborative opportunity in Haiti, when you talk about Hugo Chavez, and some of the other people who are demonized [think Castro], and you know, when some of these countries accuse us of an occupation—where I believe this was strictly a humanitarian action by the United States military, and an incredible one – I’m a little sympathetic. Because every day, this elected leader [Chavez] is called a dictator here, and we just accept it! And accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should – truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.

There’s Sean, calling for journalists to be imprisoned for calling Chavez what he is.  I can see the logic.  Chavez is already well on the way to doing that in his own country.  But we have that pesky First Amendment here and all that.

(And to address this election business: It’s true that the OAS and Jimmy Carter’s group have claimed that the Venezuelan elections were on the level.  On the other hand, Chavez has complete control of the economy and the media and has shut down TV stations and newspapers that criticize him, as I linked above.  Chavez’s loathsome rule is a perfect example of why “democracy” is not a synonym for “freedom” and why the latter is more important the former.)

Now to be perfectly fair, I think Penn is using hyperbole here.  He’s not actually suggesting that journalists be jailed.  And if that were all there was to this interview, I’d shrug it off.  But that’s just the tip of the stupid iceberg.  He also defends Chavez’s rule, claiming that Venezuelans now have access to dreams that only one in five Americans does.  Apparently, George W. Bush was controlling our dreams!  God damn it, why did he want me to keep having that dream where I have to take an exam in high school and haven’t shown up all quarter?  Bastard!

Anyway, I’ll let the Best Magazine on the Planet have its say on this:

As Penn says, the population of Venezuela now has “access to dreams” they never had in the past (could Penn even name the previous president of Venezuela?); a funny little formulation that unconsciously acknowledges that after 10 years of chavismo, the poor are still amazingly poor, the rich are now in Miami, having been replaced by members of the Bolibourgeoise, and the economy is a mess. The poor may have aspirations, but, as Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez discovered, they have seen no real material gains.

In short, Venezuelans can dream all they want about prosperity.  But, under Chavez, those dreams are no more likely to come true than my dreams about Lucy Pinder.  Equality is useless when it just means equal oppression.

And, of course, Penn’s latest outgassing gives me a chance to link to one of Lee’s best jabs at Penn watching an anti-American rally in Iran:

Check out the picture of this wormy fuck.  He’s crouching in that position so you can’t see the erection he got when he heard thousands of Muslims chanting “Death to America.”

Nothing changes, does it?  Penn was a wormy fuck five years ago when Lee wrote those words.  And he’s still a wormy fuck.  And long after we’ve all joined Lee in that Great Jack Daniels Distillery in the Sky (and Penn has gone to that Red Carpet Show Down Below), future generations will still think of him as a wormy fuck.

As the left actively but falsely tries to discredit O’Keefe’s work in exposing ACORN’s criminal activities, of all things by attacking his choice of clothing or by creating the false illusion that his video editing distorted the facts, it bears to point out that ACORN has a long history of other criminal activity. Oh sure, the left will say that it’s always about voter registration and unimportant because nobody can “definitely prove” there was any actual voter fraud, or some such, but the latest case says otherwise:

Milwaukee police officers sat on their hands for months last year instead of investigating possible voter fraud cases from the 2008 general election. It’s an incredible claim, but it’s coming from a credible source: Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf, the Milwaukee County prosecutor responsible for overseeing campaign and election issues. “Honestly, the Milwaukee Police Department largely ignored your double voter (and other) referrals received in January 2009 for the first six months of 2009,” Landgraf wrote in an e-mail to a city elections official on Jan. 26.

Speaking with unguarded candor, the veteran prosecutor said in his note that MPD’s tardy response had a major impact. The cases involve voters who may have cast more than one ballot, felons who may have voted illegally and other cases of possible election fraud. “Sadly, several probable cases of genuine voter fraud were harmed by that delay,” Landgraf wrote in an e-mail obtained through an open records request. The assistant district attorney was even more pessimistic about the investigation of more than 500 individuals who registered to vote on election day but whose addresses could not be confirmed later by postcard. “I do not expect them to ever get to the Address Cards,” he said of the Milwaukee cops.

On Friday, Landgraf declined to provide specifics, referring questions to his boss, District Attorney John Chisholm. Interestingly, Chisholm wouldn’t elaborate on his assistant’s concerns. “I’ll let the e-mail speak for itself,” he said while praising Landgraf’s experience and knowledge.

That emphasis is mine. We are dealing with accusations of voter fraud here, not voter registration fraud. I use “accusations”, because obviously there never was a real investigation despite the obvious. We all know better though. This is SOP from ACORN. It’s what they exist for. And it is clear that there was a delay, on purpose, to make sure any investigation in this case didn’t pan out. You have to wonder how many of these other instances are out there.

Oh yeah, for you clever lefties that will immediately point out that the Milwaukee Journal article never mentions ACORN, that’s likely on purpose. However, you can have a look at this AG indictment which clearly shows that 2 of those co-conspirators being looked at in this case were ACORN employees.

MILWAUKEE – Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen announced today that the Milwaukee Election Fraud Task Force has brought additional electoral fraud cases against five Wisconsin residents.  The Department of Justice, acting as Special Prosecutor for Milwaukee County, has filed felony charges against Maria Miles, Kevin Clancy, Michael Henderson, Herbert Gunka, and Suzanne Gunka, all alleging election fraud arising out of the November 4, 2008, Presidential Election.

“The integrity of elections is dependent upon citizens and officials insisting they be conducted lawfully. Wisconsin’s citizens should not have to wonder whether their vote has been negated or diminished by illegally cast ballots,” Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said.

According to the criminal complaints, Miles and Clancy served as Special Registration Deputies (“SRD”) for the City of Milwaukee in advance of the 2008 Presidential Election.  Each worked for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (“ACORN”).  Miles and Clancy are each charged with the felony offense of Falsely Procuring Voter Registration as Party to a Crime.  The complaint alleges that Miles and Clancy submitted multiple voter registration applications for the same individuals, and also were part of a scheme in which they and other SRDs registered each other to vote multiple times in order to meet voter registration quotas imposed by ACORN.

If you want the reference for that, it is here.

Clearly ACORN employees helped commit voter fraud. Sadly, the Milwaukee police dept dropped the ball, and the usual suspects are doing their best to not point out that connection. But we can continue to pretend the crook is the guy that dressed up as a pimp or not and got ACORN employees giving him advice on how to pimp children and/or foreigners that also might be under age, hide the income to avoid taxes, and then run for office as a democrat.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

I’m not exactly a fan of Sarah Palin, as you may have noticed.  But the latest ”gotchya!” is a bit of a reach.

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, a fierce opponent of Democratic health-care reform efforts who has said America under President Obama is headed toward socialism, told a Canadian audience her family used to go to Canada to get medical care when she was growing up.

“My first five years of life we spent in Skagway, Alaska, right there by Whitehorse. Believe it or not—this was in the ‘60s—we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse. I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn’t that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada,” Palin said a speech Saturday night, according to the Calgary Herald.

The healthcare reform cultists are jumped up and down about this.  But as Nick Gillepsie points out:

Canada was not born with the single-payer system it currently has. In fact, the full-blown socialization of its medical sector was a long time coming and was not in anything like its current state in the 1960s. In the early ‘60s, Canada had passed laws pushing universal access to hospitals; in 1966, the Medical Care Act allowed each province to create universal coverage systems, which took years to fully implement. It was only in 1984 that the current system really came online in the Canada Health Act, which banned patient fees and billing by doctors in excess of what the government paid.

There’s yet more irony. As we’ve noted many times on this blog: when you’re talking about the healthcare system we have now, there is no question which way the traffic is going.  Canadians who can afford to do so are streaming across our borders to pay for healthcare.  Need I bring up my uncle who would get cash in exchange for his services from Canadians?  Yes, I think I do.

But I’d like to trowel on another layer of irony that Gillespie dances around.  Sarah Palin’s story perfectly illustrates why we need to oppose Obamacare.  Canada’s system was not created as the rationed controlled system it is today.  It was moved there gradually, step by step, over the course of a couple of decades.  In Canada, we see the fully played-out incrementalism that went from a system that Sarah Palin happily used in the 1960’s to a system that few Americans would use now.  So, as usual, the debate proves the precise opposite point of the one the Left is trying to make.

Point, Palin.  For once.

Update: Speaking of Canadian healthcare…

That’s the title of this post, which argue that GM’s recent decision to spare six hundred dealerships from the axe makes them the USPS of cars.

The main reason that the USPS will never make any money is that it can’t get rid of its infrastructure.  It must have a post office in every district and letter carriers visiting every house six (soon to be five?) days a week.  They can’t get rid of their post offices because Congress pays the bills, and no congressman is willing to let their post office get shut down.  They won’t give up universal delivery because their unions, who help elect those congressmen, don’t want to give up those jobs with, say, requiring rural people to come into town to pick up their mail, like they do their groceries and sundries.

...

Now that Congress has similar control over Government Motors, are we seeing the same political pressure take hold in that firm?

GM is claiming they are acting in good faith, that the restored dealers were found to be necessary.  Maybe they’re telling the truth but the problem with a government-owned car company is that no one believes it.  There has certainly been political pressure brought on Congress and the White House to stop some of these closures.  And you have to wonder if those 661 reprieves are more connected with politics than economic reality.

Are we going to see the day when GM and Chrysler will tell the government that, like the Post Office, they plan to lose $200 billion over the next decade?  We can’t be very far from it. And is this the way healthcare is going to play out down the road?  That hospitals will issue special dispensations for those who complain enough to Congress?

This is why I hate getting the government involved in things.  It contaminates everything, it muddies the waters, it makes motives unclear.  Enough already.

Monday, March 08, 2010

Bigelow upended the Big Dog last night, sneaking the Oscar away from Avatar for her Iraq War film The Hurt Locker. I have not seen the film yet, but let me know if you guys have with your spoiler-free thoughts.  It’s nice to see a small film get the award, for once.

I’m behind on my movie watching for 2009 and, of the nominees, have only seen Up, District 9, and Avatar.  I thought Up was good but not as good as Pixar’s other efforts.  I enjoyed Avatar immensely but wasn’t sure it was the best picture of the year.  And I thought District 9 just as good, if not better, than Avatar.

Avatar did run into some political issues of its own.  Many people—notably Gregg Easterbrook—took issue with its (apparent) positive portrayal of US marines getting slaughtered by natives.  Some lefties, like Evo Morales, praised its supposed criticism of capitalism and imperialism.

Meh.  I’m not one for reading Big Political Messages into movie about giant blue aliens.  Avatar is not a subtle movie and neither are most of its characters—especially the villains. The human soldiers are mercenaries, ex- a lot of different services and cut off from command and from home.  Their behavior wasn’t shocking to anyone vaguely familiar with the Heart of the Darkness.  And as for the Evil Corporation ... our past is littered with companies that had armies of their own and used them to destroy natives they would have been better off working with (the East India company leaps to mind).  That’s not anti-capitalism or anti-Americanism.  That’s history, unfortunately.

I’ll agree that the movie’s moral landscape is simplistic.  But I didn’t feel like it was a political film and I tire of anything and everything being seen through the lens of politics.  But maybe your mileage differed.

Update: Sandra Bullock won both an Oscar and a Razzie, collecting both in person. I do think she had a point in her Razzie speech: most of the Razzie voters are voting based on the movie’s reputation and/or the personality of the nominees.  I doubt many of them have actually watched the films.

Update: Whatever one may think of the Hurt Locker, it sounds better than this.

Sunday, March 07, 2010

New Jersey is in a bad way, fiscally.  $2 billion in the fiscal hole.  Chris Christie is trying to dig them out by cutting spending.  But since there is no such as unpopular spending, he’s getting pilloried.

He’s not backing down. Here are some highlights of a speech he gave to the Jersey mayors:

You know, at some point there has to be parity. There has to be parity between what is happening in the real world, and what is happening in the public sector world. The money does not grow on trees outside this building or outside your municipal building. It comes from the hard working people of our communities who are suffering and are hurting right now.

I heard someone in the legislature say two days ago that they wanted no fare hike in New Jersey Transit, no cuts in service, and no cuts in subsidy. And I was thinking to myself, man I should have made this guy treasurer. [Laughter] Because if you can pull that one off, you’re obviously magic.

...

There’s no time left. We have no room left to borrow. We have no room left to tax. So we merely have room left now, to do this. We are all reaching the edge of a cliff. And it reminds me a bit of that part of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where the had a seminal decision to make. So what did they do? They held hands and they jumped off the cliff.

We have to hold hands at every level of government, state county, municipal, school board. We have to hold hands and jump off the cliff.

Read the whole thing.

This is a governor confronted by fiscal reality trying to do his best to get the house in order.  Eventually, something like this is going to have to happen on the federal level.  The question is: is there anyone out there who can take on Medicare, the elephant in the room?  Or will we get more Obama-style accounting gimmicks and vague promises?  Neither party is giving me hope.  The only man out there talking about the debt seriously is Paul Ryan and the GOP is backing away from him as fast as it can.

I’m actually slightly more optimistic after reading Christie’s remarks and the reaction to them.  The chattering class is appalled that he would have the temerity to cut government programs that consist of something other than “waste, fraud and abuse”.  But everyone with an IQ higher than their shorts size knows that this has to be done.  I see what’s going on in New Jersey (and to an extent, in other states) as the beginning of the fiscal revolt that has begun in this country.  At some point, that revolt will reach Washington.  We simply have no choice anymore.

Saturday, March 06, 2010

Locally, we have had a disturbing story, a so called man, 22 , was arrested for assault to a child. In addition to the broken arm the Doctors determined that there were 20 other bones that were broke and in various stages of healing. This is appalling i cant not fathom how anyone could do this to a 6 week old child. Words do not describe my disgust for this person., but sadly this happens all to often in our society.
IF i there was any justice in this world, this scum, after he been found guilty would be beat in a similar manner, and left to suffer, you know all old testament style.
Our legal system forbade this, and so when upon entering prison, i’m sure that word of his deeds will precede him. Prisons full of the worst scum of humanity, have their own code, and the irony is that even the worst, take a dim view to child abuse.

His prison stay will not be pleasant.