We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
When I was a lad, a tiny wee lad, my mother said to me, "Come see the Northern Lights my boy, they're bright as they can be." She called them the heavenly dancers, merry dancers in the sky, I'll never forget that wonderful sight, they made the heavens bright. The Northern Lights of Aberdeen are what I long to see I've been a wand'rer all of my life and many a sight I've seen. God speed the day when I'm on my way to my home in Aberdeen.
I've wandered in many far-off lands, and travelled many a mile, I've missed the folk I've cherished most, the joy of a friendly smile. It warms up the heart of the wand'rer the clasp of a welcoming hand. To greet me when I return, home to my native land.
Many Republicans are falling into a false dichotomy, between social and other issues, instead of focusing on the common thread that unites these issues, the gross overstepping and inadequacies of the Obama administration.
Astute commentators are pointing out that President Obama is strategically steering the national conversation toward social issues – inequality or contraception, as examples -- in order to neutralize his weaknesses in other areas. Republicans, it is said, are either playing into Obama’s re-election playbook or allowing themselves to be neutralized in stressing Obama’s failed economic and foreign policies, which are part and parcel with his social policies in undermining American and global freedoms.
The serial rallying of many conservatives to the non-Romney contender of the month is central to proving this point. Deep anger at the Obama administration fuels the desire for a more “red meat” candidate. This is largely unfair to Romney and fails to stress the commonality among Republicans on the core issues. Instead, it falls into the Obama trap of a false dichotomy between social and other issues.
Romney's campaign had tried to calmly sound the theme of competence in facing the common thread of the Obama administration’s failures: incompetence and ideology. Romney tried to remain the gentleman he is but, defensively, instead has had to fiercely attack his opponents who fiercely attack him. This has consumed resources and credibility, and detracted from the attractiveness of the core Republican issues: the gross overstepping of the Obama administration into personal lives, crony mismanagement of the economy, and alienation of allies left adrift by Obama fecklessness in facing anti-Western foes. The social policies of the Obama administration should not be faced in isolation, allowing Democrats to draw in social liberals, but be placed in their proper context of more indicators of class warfare that undermines the freedoms of all to succeed or to have private moralities untrammeled by Washington.
Democrats are smiling, as well they should. The Republican primaries are shielding them from the main thrust of the Republican message while Republican contenders for the nomination savage each other, weakening unity, and fall into the Obama traps on stressing social issues.
Newt Gingritch was a false vessel for conservative hopes. Rick Santorum, a more consistent and saner conservative, lacks the attractiveness to a wider audience of those on the cusp. Mitt Romney, however, while not a red-meat orator has the unique ability to present the Republican theme in a manner, with conviction and deep understanding of the intricacies, that doesn’t antagonize moderates. Romney is not charismatic but he is competent, and has the abilities to deracinate Obama’s pretensions and unify a majority around stopping the Obama administrations’ transgressions that weaken us in all ways. Romney may not be red-meat but he is meaty. It’s about electability, and that with adequate confidence that together with a Republican Congress a new administration in Washington will accomplish more Republican and American priorities.
Moreso than his opponents, Romney is what Republicans need to win, and what America needs to unseat Obama. I’ll vote for whoever gets the Republican nomination. But, I’m not happy at being part of many of my compatriots playing out a self-destructive temper tantrum that could lose the election.
Get over it: there is no Reagan available, nor was Reagan all that fond memories say he was.
The issue is not whether birth control and abortion are available. They are. The issue is whether the government should have the power to force your neighbor to pay for these things, and/or to require all insurance policies to cover them. Also, neither of these things are particularly expensive.
The insidious premise of the discussion is this: If it isn't covered, it's not available. But don't people buy their own Nyquil, Tylenol, heat pads, Viagra, divorce counseling, cosmetic surgery, toe fungus medicine, toothpaste, Botox, morning-after pills and Dr. Scholl's foot products?
Have people become so trained to expect somebody else to buy what they want that the premise has become distorted? I am a happy product of an unexpected pregnancy, and refuse to regard pregnancy as a disease. Pregnancy is health. If an unexpected pregnancy is a disease, then I am a disease. A tumor, or something.
In fact, I cannot understand why some medical insurances cover pregnancy at all, much less abortions. In my view, we all ought to be free to buy, or not buy, medical insurance of any sort with any sorts of coverage, depending on what makes sense for us. We ought to be able to bring a check list of what we want to the table, and see some nation-wide competition for our business. Get bids, like anything else.
Here at Maggie's, we tend to prefer high-deductible Major Medical coverages with our own choices of docs. Cheap protection from financial catastrophe.
Liberals are the aggressors in the culture war (and not always for the worse, as the civil-rights movement demonstrates). What they object to isn’t so much the government imposing its values on people — heck, they love that. They see nothing wrong with imposing their views about diet, exercise, sex, race, and the environment on Americans. What outrages them is resistance or even non-compliance with their agenda. “Why are you making such a scene?” progressives complain. “Just do what we want, and there will be no fuss.”
In the past week, we have had links about government (and doctors) advocating against salt and sugar. I don't mind my doctor giving me advice (I pay him for it), but when docs try to get governments to control what to do, I get annoyed. As I understand it, it is the job of doctors to offer advice, not to provide control.
From the same sort of academic busybodies who gave us the ever-popular global warming panic comes a new prediction of catastrophe. This newest ginned up rationale for enabling Liberal-Progressive-Democrats (L-P-Ds) to have more control over the behavior of ordinary citizens hasn't been given catchy name yet, so rather than wait for the mainstream media to compare notes on JournoList, let's all agree to call it...global sweetening!
Yes, my friends, President Obama's fellow travelers within the progressive movement have decided that they have to find a new excuse for imposing government controls since climate change (née global warming) failed to achieve their overarching goal of controlling the car you drive; the fuel you're allowed to use; the type of light bulb you are allowed to use; and, after they get the "smart grid" in place, how warm you'll be allowed to keep your home.
Mayor Bloomberg, of course, is the poster child for obnoxious Nannyism. Here's the ultimate governmental rationale for these sorts of controls: Ideology, not science. A quote from Dr. Keane's piece (from Australia):
It is extremely frustrating when reports of harm are used to justify forcibly overriding autonomy, completely ignoring the other side to the equation. In this regard, ‘promoting healthy lifestyles' is no longer enough; they are now being enforced whether you like it or not.
Internationally, the public health debate is somewhat more balanced than in Australia, as represented by Eli Feiring, an academic from the University of Oslo, Norway: ‘Given that respect for the autonomous choices of patients runs deep in modern healthcare, there are strong reasons to value the claim that competent and well-informed individuals are the best interpreters of their own interest and that they should be free to make choices others would regard as non-beneficial to them.'
Many academics demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the importance of autonomy.
Indeed. Experts tend towards arrogance, not towards autonomy (freedom). And, in the long run, academic experts usually turn out to have been wrong anyway.
What would this cost your kid in college? Or would they even offer it? This is an example of the New Education. How many Americans really know this stuff? Not many, I suspect.
If you can get through an American high school, much less an American college, without understanding our Constitution and its history, you cannot know enough to vote. Just my opinion, of course.
A few items from the Duncan Phyfe show at the Met. His workshop/factory in Manhattan copied, but simplified, the popular styles of the time. Not exactly my taste, but much in demand at the time:
Obama helped train NPA's leaders in Alinsky's bank shakedown tactics. Now, outrageously, he and the thugs he coached are demanding massive reparations for the damages that resulted from the lower underwriting standards that they demanded. Banks had better build up more reserves. This gang is not finished.
The American financial crisis was no more a failure of free markets than the European crisis was. Just as investors tried to signal that something was wrong with the euro, they tried for decades to show that something was rotten in American finance. The rot remains, but Washington has spent the past two years demonstrating that it would rather distort or block market signals than rely on them. This strategy thwarts economic recovery.
The financial system crashed in 2008 because vital checks on the financial industry had eroded long before. One of these checks was that the bondholders who lent money to banks had known that they would lose money if those banks failed and didn’t leave behind sufficient assets to pay their debt; only small depositors enjoyed government protection. But in 1984, the U.S. government saved a failing bank, Continental Illinois, from the normal bankruptcy process because its failure would have posed a threat to the global financial system. Thus was born the phenomenon popularly called “too big to fail.” Bondholders and other lenders to banks began to realize that in a crisis, they could count on intervention from the U.S. government, and they started lending to banks more and more carelessly—so banks grew still bigger and still more threatening to worldwide finance. Immunized by the government against losses, investors could no longer provide important market discipline for big banks.
"The core of Murray's book is that if you want to be happy, in the full sense of "eudaimonia" in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics --that is, full human flourishing over a lifetime doing the right things in the right way at the right time -- you need to check in on four basic qualities. You need satisfying work, you need to be married, you need to engage in civil society, and you need to attend church once a week. Look at a community without the Big Four, and you will likely find only 10 percent of people "very happy." Look at folks with all four, and you will find almost 80 percent of people reporting themselves "very happy." Call it the American project: family, vocation, faith, and community. Rush Limbaugh talks about it every day: American exceptionalism. Here is Murray's line on it, from page 305 of Coming Apart.
Upper-class Americans live that way. They work, they get married, they are involved in their communities. They just don't seem to think it matters if other people don't, so they have legislated this monster welfare state that pays people not to work and not to marry, and that harasses them if they join a club or run a church. Our elitists insist on lives with meaning for themselves, but for everyone else, they think life begins and ends with a check: a welfare check, an unemployment check, a severance check, or a Social Security check. And they call that compassion.
Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I am thinking of qualities such as American industriousness and neighborliness discussed in earlier chapters, but also American optimism... our striking lack of class envy, and the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies."
Six square miles of this crap in the Mohave Desert, and not a sound from the Greenies. A landfill would be a more practical use, if you assume that desert is not a worthy ecosystem.
One in five Americans — or slightly more than 67 million — now relies on federal assistance, at a cost of $2.5 billion annually. That’s the highest in the country’s history, the authors wrote. The index also found that Americans who depend on federal assistance receive an average of $32,748 in benefits, about $300 more than the nation’s average disposable personal income.
According to our hypotheses, the tax code is equally open to all. Does the average citizen have the time and expertise to plow through 70,000 pages of tax codes? Clearly, the answer is no, so it's simply not true that the tax code is equally available to all.
Let's imagine a different set of values and governance. Let's suppose the tax law stated that the entire tax code must meet two requirements: it must be able to be read and understood by the overwhelming majority of citizens with a high school education in one hour or less.
The national labs (or equivalent impartial bodies) would be tasked with conducting a randomized sampling of 100,000 citizens to test each year's tax code. If 80% of the adult citizenry with a high school education (or GED) were unable to put the tax code into practice after an hour of study, then the code would be rejected and sent back to Congress for revision until it passed this simple, transparent standard for equality before the law.
Clearly, the tax code is both legal and completely skewed to the very wealthy and politically powerful. $100,000 is still a fairly significant contribution in politics, and if that contribution ends up yielding a tax break that gains the donor $1 million in lower taxes, then that donation earned a 10-fold "return on investment."
Only the wealthy can afford to hire Panzer divisions of tax attorneys to pore over the 70,00 pages and game the system to pay less than self-employed citizens pay in Social Security and Medicare tax, never mind income tax.
The first hypothesis is still vaild--the tax code is legal--but the second--that fundamental opportunities are open to all--is demonstrably false. Equal opportunity is revealed as a social control myth promoted by those benefitting from opportunities that are not available to the citizenry at large.
This is the definition of an oligarchy.
All that the regular person can do is to declare all of their income (unless you are somebody like Tim Geithner or Charlie Rangel - hey, nobody is perfect). After that, it's a crap shoot.
Some have compared the impact on agents of ObamaCare’s medical loss ratio (MLR) to the impact of online technology on travel agents.
Yesterday, I spent hours studying many web sites to decide on a hotel to take my family during spring break. Although the web sites were very informative, most offering standard categories as to number and type of beds, whether there is a pool, etc., the information was not complete or didn’t cover all my requirements. I still had important questions to meet my family’s particular needs. I, also, noted many Commenters at these sites who’d had bad experiences due to lack of adequate information. I phoned several sites and directly to several hotels’ reservation lines, but those who answered had no more information than at their sites. Finally, I reached an agent who spent a half-hour giving me complete answers to my questions, and I made the reservation.
MLR requires medical plans to commit 80% of premiums of small group and individual plans to claims, and 85% for large plans. Agent commissions, though a pass-through charge from buyers, are treated in ObamaCare as administrative costs, thus making it harder for insurers to meet the 15% or 20% allowance for non-claim costs. The argument goes that as the Internet makes it easier to make reservations directly, the need for travel agents has declined. So, too, will the need for insurance agents decline as medical plan purchasers can buy directly from insurers or government-directed exchanges. Lastly, standardized medical plans dictated by ObamaCare are supposed to make choices easier. Therefore, we needn’t be concerned that to meet MLR restrictions that agents’ commissions have been as much as halved, leading many to reduce services to buyers or to leave the field.
This leaves medical plan buyers – as it does travel buyers -- largely at the mercy of 1-800 ignorance or inadequacy, as well as self-interest or lack of independence in not providing useful comparative information. Further, a buyer is not given additional information important to the decision, say about nearby facilities or services involved in the trip, or the efficiency of claims-processing or how certain treatments might be actually covered by the medical plan. Then, unlike the range of accommodations available at hotels at varying prices, standardized medical plan buyers will be forced under ObamaCare to buy services they either don’t need or, even, religiously or ethically object to, and pay the cost of these services, in effect, for those who want them. Premiums have already increased to cover provisions mandated by ObamaCare, and will increase further.
There’s another aspect to the MLR regulations that will further reduce the choices available and increase the costs to many medical plan buyers. If an insurer does not meet the MLR percentage limitations, beginning by August 1, 2012 the insurer will have to pay rebates to buyers. Insurers are each setting aside tens of millions of dollars for these rebates, costs that will be recovered through higher premiums. According to healthcare consultancy The Segal Co., “Until now, insurers have been able to subsidize less-profitable product lines and types of groups (usually small ones), and do it across state lines, with the profits of the more-lucrative ones. Now, with insurers under the threat of paying out rebates on the latter, they may give small-group policyholders fewer subsidies and charge higher premiums.”
There’s bipartisan legislation pending in the House and Senate to relieve this impact on agents but, even if it might pass, it is unlikely to be signed by President Obama, or regardless of the President may not muster 60-votes in a future Senate if blocked by ObamaCare supporters there.
For disclosure, I’ve been a health plan consultant and broker for 25-years. I’m at the age and resources where I’m nearing retirement. That decision is speeded by Obamacare. It’s not worth it to provide the services I did, so I reject most of those who now approach me for help. Tens of thousands of other agents are making the same choice, even if not able to retire. Tens of millions of medical plan buyers are being left adrift, at higher costs and less needed information, not able or allowed to buy a medical plan that best and most affordably fits their individual needs.
Who’s Afraid of Dirty Harry? Well, this didn’t take long. Clint Eastwood is going to regret doing that “halftime” ad after all the parodists get done with it. (link fixed)
There's a long-distance train rolling through the rain, tears on the letter I write. There's a woman I long to touch and I'm missing her so much, but she's drifting like a satellite. There's a neon light ablaze in a green smoky haze, and laughter down on Elizabeth Street And a lonesome bell tone in that valley of stone where she bathed in a stream of pure heat. Her father would emphasize you got to be more than street-wise but he practiced what he preached from the heart. A full-blooded Cherokee, he predicted to me the time and the place that we'd part.
There's a babe in the arms of a woman in a rage And a longtime golden-haired stripper onstage As she winds back the clock and she turns back the page Of a book that nobody can write. Oh, where are you tonight?
The rest of the astonishing lyrics are below the fold -
After College, What?
Many Republicans are falling into a false dichotomy, between social and other issues, instead of focusing on the common thread that unites these issues, the gross overstepping and inadequacies of the Obama administration.
