Newsweek tells us to get ready for polyamory
How to save the economy. It's simple.
The city of Altinum discovered.
Scientists revolt against the warmening propagandists. A growing movement.
Ellen Degeneris digs deep. Anchoress
The decline of Britain. It begins:
Even in the decades after it lost its empire, Britain strode the world like a pocket superpower. Its economic strength and cultural heft, its nuclear-backed military might, its extraordinary relationship with America—all these things helped this small island nation to punch well above its weight class. Now all that is changing ...
Middle class tax hikes planned
I notice that AVI has listed us as "very smart people." Wrong. We are mostly distinctly middlebrow and intellectually lazy. Sippican is "very smart people."
Althouse on the weather:
I love that we are "warned" not to feel optimistic. How twisted we've become! It's like people are rooting for disaster.
In which the O admits plan to eliminate private insurance. Nothing but a power grab. It's the old story: Invent crisis, grab power from the people. As Tiger says:
If you do not believe conservatives who say that the "public option" is a trojan horse for a single-payer health care system, you're always free to believe the liberals. Obviously that's the reason for it. There is no other even theoretical justification that makes sense.
Related, a reader sends an op-ed from the Greenwich (CT) Time. A quote from it:
(iii) Overall Limitation For Unintentional Failures.--In the case of failures which are due to reasonable cause and not to willful neglect, the penalty assessed under subparagraph (A) for failures during any 1-year period shall not exceed the amount equal to the lesser of--
''(I) 10 percent of the aggregate amount paid or incurred by the employer (or predecessor employer) during the preceding 1-year period for group health plans, or
''(II) $500,000."
If you skimmed, shame on you. You're much like many lawmakers, for whom I, as a money manager and business owner, have a few questions:
- What is that $500,000 penalty all about?
- What problems are you trying to solve with this legislation? I was under the impression that we needed to A) insure the uninsured (it would help if we educate everyone who qualifies for Medicaid to sign up and include illegal aliens); B) get coverage for pre-existing conditions (we could negotiate with insurance companies); C) build a safety net for people who suffer financial ruin as a result of a catastrophic illness (buy everyone an excess major medical insurance policy).
- What's your rush, and what's your objective? To solve problems or to pass legislation before people ask questions?
- Are you seriously going to vote for this 1,000 page bill before you've read it? It is massive, the changes are monumental, the impact is surreal, and there is no way you can honestly tell your constituents that you have formulated a reasoned belief that this legislation is in the best interests of the people that you were elected to serve.
Basic assumptions: Are terrorists warriors or criminals? Moving Gitmo prisoners to Kansas.
How the White House is strong-arming the press
Anti-trust is obsolete. Indeed it is. One quote:
...by the time regulators can assess a technology market, the market has often moved on. Not long ago, Google was the upstart and the search leaders included names like AltaVista and Excite. “Regulatory intervention in the high-tech sector thwarts the natural evolution of the market,” argues Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Worse, it distorts the response of competitors. Antitrust investigations steer the market in unnatural directions, creating instabilities in entire industry sectors.”
The antitrust laws are anachronisms when applied to industries of constant innovation. Even theories about the role of antitrust were designed for the industrial era.
Health care town halls received with hostility
Cars, Bread, and now circuses too. Have we become sheep?
Infantile delusions. Samuelson on California, quoted at Betsy:
National parallels again seem apparent. Federal budget deficits -- reflecting the urge to spend and not tax -- predate the recession and, as baby boomers retire, will survive any recovery. Amazingly, the Obama administration would worsen the long-term outlook by expanding federal health insurance coverage. There's much mushy thinking about how we'll muddle through.
California has pioneered this sort of delusion. The presumption was that a dynamic economy would pay for expansive government. But California's relative economic performance has actually deteriorated. In the 1980s, the state's economy grew much faster than the national economy; annual growth averaged 5.1 percent vs. 3.1 percent nationally. In the present decade, the gap is smaller -- 2.9 percent versus 2.3 percent -- and much of the state's advantage reflects the unsustainable housing boom, of which California was the epicenter.
While I disagree with 96% of Obama's agenda, I think this whole birther thing is nonsense. Critique peoples' policies and their assumptions. Ad hominems and smears are disgusting, even though the Left has no problem with using them, for example, with the latest Palin smears (Gosh, they must be terrified of her). As Surber comments:
The Kenya certificate is a fake. The Hawai’i certificate is suspicious.
There is only one Vulcan-clad logical conclusion: Barack Obama was never born.
Photos: These are popping up all over LA. LA?
