Thursday, July 16. 2009
From Front Page:
There are no resolutions currently before this year's Episcopal General Convention directly criticizing any government in the world, except two: Israel and the United States. Resolutions mention human rights abuses in the Philippines and strife in southern Sudan but decline to criticize governments there, though surely Sudan's Islamist regime, dripping with blood of millions of victims, might merit some disapproval. There is no criticism of any Muslim or communist dictatorship around the world, though Cuba's Marxist regime is portrayed by one resolution as the victim of U.S. sanctions. In contrast, about a half dozen statements for consideration before the General Convention are aimed at Israel.
No wonder nobody goes to Epsicopalian churches anymore. They aren't about God. They are about politics.
 From Big Pharma gets Played in the WSJ:
Democrats remember the failure of HillaryCare, and they blame industry ads that alerted the public to the rationing and loss of choice that will accompany government health care. Their negotiations this time around are intended to buy business silence, at least long enough for Democrats to spring legislation into law before the companies have enough time to educate the public and defeat it.
Big Pharma and others have been played for suckers. We'd say these companies deserve what they get, except that the real victims of government health care will be American patients.
Related at IBD: Reading the fine print:
It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
That is what it is all about: everybody on the plantation. That makes it illegal for me to go out and buy my own medical insurance. How come nobody is mentioning that?
 Taxes: You're next. But first, drowning the rich
NYT: Why we must ration medical care
Related, remind me: What problem is a health care bill supposed to be solving?
Why the Dems are in a hurry: dropping poll numbers. Some Dems feel the O could be a handicap
Thinking about consciousness. Rick Moran
Moonbat Czar du jour. Says he's a Communist.
In Tennessee, you can now bring your gun to the pub. You can still smoke in some of them, too.
Where taxes will have to go without entitlement reform (details at Willisms):
Wednesday, July 15. 2009
California’s wise governors have discovered another way to put teenage entrepreneurs out of work. The AP reports that according to a study by tax officials:
The State Board of Equalization report estimates marijuana retail sales [in California] would bring $990 million from a $50-per-ounce fee and $392 million in sales taxes.
The bill introduced by San Francisco Democratic Assemblyman Tom Ammiano in February would allow adults 21 and older to legally possess, grow and sell marijuana.
California faces ongoing structural deficits in its state budget of over $25-billion a year, about 25% of its spending levels. So, let’s have more “sin taxes.” "We can no longer afford to keep our heads in the sand when it comes to marijuana," Ammiano said in a statement.
Nor can we afford to have more political sand thrown in our eyes. We were told that the state lottery would ensure education funding, but it hasn’t. We were told that Indian gaming would boost state revenues, but the Indians have learned since they sold Manhattan for some beads to largely avoid paying back our new Peter Stuyvesants. We were told that increased tobacco and alcohol taxes would pay for targeted treatment programs, but most has been siphoned to other uses.
The odds of winning the lottery are far worse than in any form of gambling, as the poor line up with false hope in their eyes to buy tickets. Ever walk through an Indian casino, particularly in the daytime, and see the seniors looking like tamed zombies from Night Of The Living Dead feed their retirement checks and savings into the slots. And, about all we get is some public service commercials, usually in the middle of the night, telling us not to smoke or to drink responsibly.
Just because there are many who do smoke marijuana, there is no justification that I can accept for making it easier for more to do so. The AP story says, “Marijuana use would likely increase by about 30 percent once the law took effect because legalization would lead to falling prices, the board said.” I’ll bet, taxed or untaxed, the increase in use would be higher.
Marijuana can lead to similar, and worse, unhealthy effects as tobacco. Particularly among teens, in their mentally formative and impressionable years, marijuana has been shown to impede maturing and dealing constructively with everyday life. But, don’t take my word for it. Below the fold are excerpts from the National Institutes for Health’s fact sheet, just updated this month.
California is about 12% of the US’ population. Similar proposals have been made in other states. And, federally, there may be potential for $8.25-billion in similar annual revenues for Washington, D.C. California and Washington, however, have shown no appetite for more careful governance of the many billions of tax dollars they have now, preferring more taxes to eliminating wasteful programs, disappointing their union bosses, or having to actually professionally manage.
Yes, I know many of us have smoked marijuana, and most have gone on to reasonably productive lives. But, think back and remember the many of fellow pot smokers we knew who didn’t. Think deep and honestly about your own experiences, and whether you may have made some better choices if not smoking marijuana. Think about why enlarging harmful behaviors is not justified by their smaller incidence already.
Then, think about our legislators, and I’ll take the bet that a larger proportion are still living in smoke dreams, avoiding the necessity to govern they were elected to do. Indeed, they probably hope that more of us will be so smoked.
Instead, we get such nonsense as this proposal, the “Governing? Don’t Bother Me, Man, I’m High” bill. Don’t give me any libertarian crap on this one, at least until we get legislators who stop being high on our excess taxes.
Continue reading "Governing? Don’t Bother Me, Man, I’m High"
Today, your medical care is between you and your Doc, and sometimes with an insurance company. Either a straight line, or a simple triangle.
Mr. Brady at New Majority plots the organizational chart of the Dem plan. The extent of the proposed bureaucracy is indeed baffling, if not insane. Who is in charge? Certainly not you, the paying patient (because you won't be paying: your Doc will be working for the government), and definitely not your Doctor:
Insty reports that the bill essentially eliminates Medicare:
ENDING MEDICARE? “Obama’s health care proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it. The elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access.” So why aren’t we hearing more about this? “The interest groups that usually speak up for the elderly, particularly AARP, are in Obama’s pocket, hoping to profit from his program by becoming one of its vendors. Just as they backed Bush’s prescription drug plan because they anticipating profiting from it, so they are now helping Obama gut the medical care of their constituents.”
Who can understand all this crap?
Photo above from Gateway's Dems want to pass socialized medical care in weeks
After 20 years in jail, lying kids offer Dad a hug. During those years, real witch hunts were going on. h/t, Overlawyered
Did you know they have tiger farms?
Is your thinking "impure"?
This John Holdren is a real nutjob. Where do they find these people? RCP calls him The Science Fiction Czar
The Car Czar turns out to have been a possible crook
Obamacare and other disasters. Surber. Related, Pethokoukis on why the health surtax is a disaster
Shocking. CIA had plans to kill Al Qaida leaders
Soto: lying or stupid? I'll go with lying. One lib law prof says:
I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate-that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments. To claim otherwise-to claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results-is to claim that whenever Justices disagree among themselves, someone is either a fool or acting in bad faith. What does it say about our legal system that in order to get confirmed Judge Sotomayor must tell the lies that she told today? That judges and justices must live these lies throughout their professional careers?
Tiger's news that will not make headlines:
In the category of news that will make no headlines, "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."
Via Icecap, an attempted exchange of information with Sen Lieberman re AGW.
At No Pasaran:
Think about it – the French and the British – two of the societies with a past history of the proponency of freedom of expression, and both with no shortage of understanding of the burden and suspicion that a state-run media can burden a society with STILL have state run media establishments, but Poland is simply disposing of theirs for precisely the right reasons.
At American Spectator, re 2010:
Next year's elections are going to produce a political earthquake. That is because we currently suffer the most left-wing government in our nation's history. After just 6 months in office, the flower children that rule Washington in overwhelming numbers are already smashing through all records regarding federal taxes, spending, deficits, and debt. Obama and his ultra-left Democrats adopted a so-called stimulus bill raising spending a trillion dollars that never had a prayer of actually creating jobs and promoting long-term economic growth, because it was based entirely on old-fashioned, brain dead, proven to fail, Keynesian economics. Though we would have to double federal taxes to finance the entitlement promises we have already made, the ruling Washington Democrats completely ignore that and focus instead on adopting yet another entitlement -- national health insurance -- that would be the biggest of all.
 Mrs. BD loves her Little Lambs. It is a very special paniculata hydrangea.
I have never known anyone who did not enjoy hydrangeas.
Before you mess with hydrangeas, you need to know whether a plant is a macrophylla, oakleaf, arborescens, or a paniculata-type. The handling of each type is different - especially the pruning - and they vary in spring frost hardiness.
A good hydrangea site.
These Dems in Congress are insane. They have no idea what they are doing. They are bargaining away America's medical freedom, doing any deal they can do, with zero consideration of unintended consequences or the costs, and trying for a government takeover of 1/5 of the economy. As if they could run anything successfully.
This is serious business to people, and not ordinary politics. They are trying to patch and rush this through before citizens have any idea of what they are doing. It is totally nuts and furthermore, I am not convinced that it is anything anybody really wants.
Dick Morris thinks so too.
We have posted in the past about that bumper sticker which Bill Buckley used when he ran for Mayor of NYC.
Nyquist takes on the theme re foreign policy. One quote:
Men who are not sufficiently cynical, who are soft-hearted, who do not have the stomach for what they propose, cannot do anything good.
The medical care bill. From Steele:
“The Democrats’ priorities for health-care reform are now clear: a government-run system financed on the backs of Americans and small businesses with higher taxes,” said Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee.
From the AP, which begins:
House Democratic leaders, pledging to meet the president's goal of health care legislation before their August break, are offering a $1.5 trillion plan that for the first time would make health care a right and a responsibility for all Americans. Left to pick up most of the tab were medical providers, employers and the wealthy.
No, it doesn't make health care a right. It makes insurance a right - if you can call something a "right" which is enforced and required by the government and paid for by us, whether we want to or not.
What do I want? I want free housing in Manhattan, free food and beer, a free car with free car insurance, a free boat with free dockage, and free legal coverage if I get in a scrape.
And I do not want my doc subject to "best practices" as determined by Washington wonks. I want him to work with me and for me, and I want to pay him to do so. Cooky-cutter medicine is crazy.
"Universal health care isn't worth our freedom." From Dr. Tom Szasz in the WSJ this morning:
Henry David Thoreau famously remarked, "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." Thoreau feared a single, unarmed man approaching him with such a passion in his heart. Too many people now embrace the coercive apparatus of the modern state professing the same design.
and
Our national conversation about curbing the cost of health care is crippled by the vocabulary in which we conduct it. We must stop talking about "health care" as if it were some kind of collective public service, like fire protection, provided equally to everyone who needs it. No government can provide the same high quality body repair services to everyone. Not all doctors are equally good physicians, and not all sick persons are equally good patients.
If we persevere in our quixotic quest for a fetishized medical equality we will sacrifice personal freedom as its price. We will become the voluntary slaves of a "compassionate" government that will provide the same low quality health care to everyone.
Our post yesterday morning moved me to look up some Bedford real estate. Since Bedford pretty much abuts CT, and used to be part of it, one might consider it part of New England Yankeeland.
Here's a pleasant 33-acre horse property on Guard Hill Road, Shannon Stables. It comes with a 2-BR cottage built in 1850. Asking $14.5 million. More photos here.
This following spreadsheet debacle tote board has earned a lot of Internet ink today. From BizzyBlog:
There's a lot of John Galt talk associated with it, including the title of the BizzyBlog blog entry. I don't care for it. What is understandable is not always commendable. What is predictable is not always to be aquiesced to.
It's crappy to talk with glee about other people's misery. It's all I see, everywhere, among the pundit class. People with sinecures, full of 20/20 hindsight advice for people who did their best to participate in American public life and got creamed. Can we have a care for those under the wheels of this bus, please?
Going John Galt deliberately is such a petty thing to claim. It's the battle cry of the effete, the sheltered, the shiftless. Poor people don't have the luxury of going Galt; they go hungry. It's an inapt title, anyway, for the undesired effect of strangling investment in the cradle. But instead of pointing out that the malefactors that have prima facie contempt for all commerce that doesn't involve the government are dismantling the entire edifice of honest pay for honest work in the private sector, you're claiming you're deliberately trying to hurt your fellow citizens -- to use their misery as a club to beat your political foes. That marks yourself for contempt. Would you deliberately hurt your fellow citizens to prove a point? I doubt it, really I do; why would you say you'd welcome a chance to do it? It is pure ego that makes you claim you're doing it on purpose. "I meant to do that" belongs in a comedy sketch.
Sensible people who are well-off are very cautious right now, and have been since that day John McCain, already the last turkey in the shop, announced he was suspending his campaign and going back to Washington to look for another camera to get in front of. That was the day everyone knew you were going to get Studs Urkel, San Fran Nan, and Dingy Harry running your affairs for four years. A three horned anti-capitalist bull was born that day, no later. But I'm not talking about being sensible here.
People not so well-off were sensible, too, and borrowed money to purchase a house whose value was determined by credible third parties, and got creamed. They purchased items on credit lent at 9 percent and suddenly collected at 29 percent. They worked hard at jobs that ceased to exist overnight. They navigated the shoals of everyday life using the only buoys of information at hand to determine how to proceed. Now I watch wealthy people mocking them by saying they got what they always deserved. Working people shouldn't have a decent standard of living just by bumping along and cooperating and trying, should they? Let's call their house sprawl and their children dullards and their food junk and their autos hogs and tell them to get back to the trailer park where they belong.
Continue reading "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"
Tuesday, July 14. 2009
In the Summer of ’68, I stayed with a hot French girl in an apartment in Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem. My Spanish was fluent enough then that I’d managed a store in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant, where many poor Puerto Ricans lived, Puerto Rican Spanish being something like playing a 45-record at 78-speed.
My second-most delight after things French that Summer was eating Puerto Rican stews at local, cheap eateries, the great Eddie Palmieri often playing in the background. I prefer the meat-based ones to the seafood-based ones, but it’s the use of tropical vegetables and spices that make Puerto Rican stews so memorable that my mouth still waters. (Bird Dog, please don’t look for a photo of Puerto Rican stew to add to the post; none look anything like what I’m talking about, appearing Americanized, and the recipes on the Internet don’t resonate. I don’t want to mis-steer our readers.)
Years later, after a barefoot cruise deeper in the Caribbean I stopped off in Puerto Rico for a week, and was gratefully steered to a very busy neighborhood restaurant near Old San Juan reputed to have the best Puerto Rican stew. Sitting at a long lunch counter along the right wall, the elderly lady on the next stool turned out to be the aunt of the fantastic Puerto Rican actor Raul Julia, politically active on the Left but an authentic superb professional. She helped guide me to an afternoon of additional delectable tastings.
I’ve eaten at several Puerto Rican restaurants in the US outside NYC, and never have found those unique flavors. I guess the ingredients don’t travel too well and the recipes are adjusted to Americans’ tastes (don’t even start me on how I’ve never found a pizza elsewhere to equal New York’s).
So, what does this have to do with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, of Puerto Rican heritage? My fondness for Puerto Rican food and music are far more authentic – indeed may I say honest -- than hers about her legal positions and speeches at her confirmation hearing. Although the overwhelming Democrat majority in the Senate guarantees her a yea vote, and there’s no evidence of her “hiking” the Appalachian trail, Sotomayor is making a bad hash of the truth before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Even the Associated Press leads its coverage with, “It’s a good thing Sonia Sotomayor speaks Sotomayoran,” as she baldly stirs false ingredients into her resume.
Sotomayor expects us to believe she didn’t really mean it when she repeatedly over the years said her “wise Latina” view of Justice should prevail over the clear law. Sotomayor expects us to believe that although she headed the Litigation Committee of the Board of the Puerto Rican Legal and Education Defense Fund (PRLEDF), she “never reviewed those briefs” from the PRLEDF that argued radical positions before courts.
I can accept that Sotomayor is a liberal replacement for a liberal retiring Supreme Court Justice. I can accept trying to defer to the selection of the sitting President. I cannot accept that she is publicly making a hash of the truth knowing, as with her overturned Ricci decision, she is making a legal mockery of the facts. Reasonably explaining yourself is one thing. Putting rotten ersatz ingredients in the public’s stomach is another. Puerto Rican stew is to be savored. Her hash should to be spit out.
Also, check out PowerLine’s “Sotomayor’s Nose Grows Longer” , and the other posts at PowerLine on Sotomayor, and at the Washington Post Eva Rodriguez writes “I'm surprised and disturbed by how many times today Sonia Sotomayor has backed off of or provided less-than-convincing explanations for some of her more controversial speeches about the role of gender and ethnicity in judicial decision-making.”
 The weather is finally (just barely) warm enough for smokin' season.
I have had a gigantic, fat-covered pork shoulder in this thing for a few hours, covered with my good tasty stuff pork smoking rub.
With the cool breezes today - still waiting for real summer - it will take quite a few hours more until it is fork-tender.
This cheapo electric smoker never quite gets hot enough. My big smoker-grill is great, but I only have time to tend it on weekends.
The smell of the meaty, peppery, fatty smoke from the fresh pear tree chunks is at least half of the pleasure.
Policy wonks, and I guess I am one, love to discover or create statistics to guide our judgments. Statistics seem to provide authority and greater certainty. The problems with this reliance upon statistics, among others, is that they’re by nature retrospective, easily manipulated or faulty – even moreso when used to forecast or to bolster a partisan argument, and can be so complex and confusing even when exhaustively and correctly collected that even extremely sophisticated multi-correlation computer-statistical techniques like factor analysis are beyond the ken or budget of even the most skilled users.
An excellent example is the post at the American Enterprise Institute blog with a seemingly startling graph about the parallel rise in spending upon human and veterinary medicine.
This stimulated many of my factual and prejudicial beliefs. Luckily, before I went too far in ruminations, Maggies News Junkie (below) reminded me to check in with another prominent blogger, of similar factual and prejudicial beliefs on many subjects. You have to read all the many comments at her post to get some understanding of how there are too often “lies, damn lies and statistics.” The last comment up at the time I’m writing this gives the flavor:
In five years we went from 147,580,000 to 172,329,000 pets, a 16% increase
Pet care went from 8b in 2001 to what looks like will be 10.5b in 2007. So, per pet, care costs were $54.21 per pet in '01 and $60.93 in '07, a 12% increase
Meanwhile, human population in 2001 was 278,058,881 and in '07 it was 301,621,157 which is only a 8.5% increase
Meanwhile costs went from 1600b to 2400b based on my poor reading of the graph.
So, per person costs were $5,754 per person in '01 and $7,957 in '07 a 38% increase.
So, 12% more spending per pet, vs 38% per human in the same time frame, so much for cost control.
I hate to say this, Megan, but you might have been duped by a pretty graphic.
This does undermine the reliance upon the graphic's statistics. But, a bigger point is made, I think, the one in my opening paragraph about the limitations of relying upon complex or inadequately analyzed statistics.
There’s another important point to be made. Just as rising societal wealth and its distribution correlates with reduced child bearing, as most choose and have powers of choice to spend time and funds on other priorities, it also correlates with increased numbers and households with pets, another way to have companionship and express caring. Aside from any value judgments about this or its economic portents, the point is that it’s primarily a cumulation of free individual choices.
Similarly, our increased national and per capita spending on health care is the cumulation of free individual choices. Polling shows the tilt against ObamaCare, regardless of all the underlying opposing and supporting statistics, actually not regardless but because they've been considered and synthsized by sane individual calculations. The core understanding of free people is increasing that the essence of Obamacare is neither cost reductions nor improved health care. Its essence is transferring our individual choices to the imperfect, impersonal, and – even with the best of intentions and efforts, though required rationing is always life endangering to at least some – naturally politicized and prejudiced hands of Washington bureaucrats and their NGO hanger-ons who gain power and profit from controlling our lives. There's some nuggets within ObamaCare that may be worth further exploring or experimenting with, but ObamaCare buries them within a wholesale, rapid, complete takeover of America's health care and rejection of other worthy but non-liberal nuggets.
ObamaCare's polling rejection is a reliable statistic that cuts through all the other murkier ones. If we allow Washington politics to override that, there’s no going back, except maybe in a retrospective statistic of what we’ve irretrievably lost as life-saving and quality of life medical innovation and our rapid access to quality diminishes.
 Palin strikes back. Photo: Sarah Palin in youth. The ingenue, the gal next door. Cute.
Sen. Pat Leahy: Liar. But he seems so grandfatherly.
The greatest American preachers
The public has cold feet about government-run medical care
6% of Americans are paranoid nuts
Guns: what are they for?
Bill O'Reilly knows no science, drinks the Kool Aid
Lots of discussion of academic tenure at Phi Beta Cons. I think the concept is obsolete.
Israel needs "serious self-reflection," but Iran doesn't?
Why Goldman loves Cap&Trade. They ain't stupid.
I think this graph from Synth makes the same point as The B's post last night:
Related - something fascinating: Vet costs have been rising in synch with human medical costs! Also related: Hugs as healthcare.
Why Maggie Matters. A quote from a Claremont review of a new book on Maggie Thatcher:
In Britain at that time, the more enterprising people despaired of its future. Britain was retreating from empire, and industrial managers no longer had the power to manage. This feebleness was not just a British disease. It was widespread throughout the Western world. John Hoskyns, one of Thatcher's advisers, observes that Thatcher was in part a trail blazer for Ronald Reagan, because under President Jimmy Carter, "America was suffering, in a less extreme form, from the same fashionable left-of-center waffle that we [in Britain] had been doing in spades, for years." One can only say (and as Berlinski recognizes) that the "waffle" still hasn't gone away. It survives in universities, bureaucracies, and large areas of the judiciary. In Britain it may currently be identified with the causes favored by the late Princess Diana.
It was Thatcher who rejected this feebleness, and her triumphant government from 1979 to 1990 was a succession of battles against what often seemed at the time like a classical hydra. Along with her Conservative colleague Keith Joseph, Thatcher espoused a Hayekian version of the free market. The result was not merely a changed policy but something like a moral revolution. She denounced socialism as an immoral system that enfeebled those who lived under it (much as Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet Union an evil empire), leading to the same sniffy disapproval in Britain that Reagan inspired in American liberals.
In The Consequences of Big Government, Samuelson begins:
The question that President Obama ought to be asking -- that we all should be asking -- is this: How big a government do we want? Without anyone much noticing, our national government is on the verge of a permanent expansion that would endure long after the present economic crisis has (presumably) passed and that would exceed anything ever experienced in peacetime. This expansion may not be good for us, but we are not contemplating the adverse consequences or how we might minimize them.
Conservatives fear the monopolistic power of the State and view expanding businesses as a blessing; Libs fear the power of private enterprise and big industries, and view expanding government as a blessing. I view the former as more in the American vein. We too often forget that it was the Brit Parliament that we warred with in 1776 - not the King. And all they wanted to do was to collect more taxes...
Nice pub to stop by after a morning riding over hill and dale. h/t, Theo. I wish we had their like here. Nice trimming of the thatch on top.
The only place I know of around here where you can tie your horse up and go in for breakfast or lunch is The Bedford Post in the prosperous horsey village of Bedford, NY. The area has linking riding trails everywhere. You can ride for many hours because the trail system has rights of way through both public and private lands.
Bedford was originally part of CT. Somehow, it got away. Given their property taxes, their Westchester County taxes, and their NYS taxes, I'll bet they regret it now. Here's the Bedford Post Inn and restaurants (good for breakfast, too expensive for dinner):
In the USA, Bedford passes as fairly antique -
Monday, July 13. 2009
 A lightbulb just went off in my head.
Instead of paying doctors to treat patients, have the government pay doctors not to treat patients. For every patient who needs tests or treatments, pay the doc half of what those would have cost if he promises not to have them done.
It's so simple, really. All you have to do is to modernize that old-fashioned, no longer applicable Hippocratic Oath to bring it up to date (just like the Constitution). All waste and unnecessary costs will be eliminated, with the potential to cut medical costs almost in half.
But would the trial lawyers go for my plan?
I had no idea this sort of thing was going on. h/t, NRO
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A friend recommends a book about the Kelo case -