Thursday, July 16. 2009
 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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...
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?
 "Former Vice President Al Gore declared that the Congressional climate bill will help bring about “global governance.”" Good Lord! Is he taking his medications? Says Tiger:
Anybody who thinks that "global governance" is anything other than a profound evil is a woefully misguided dreamer, a nut, or an authoritarian.
Steyn notes that some believe that fears of Eurabia are greatly exaggerated.
NY to London in 1 hr 54 minutes.
The new new European anti-Americanism. Powerline
Dems going after Frank Ricci
James Schlesinger on why we need nuke weapons
The Massachusetts health care mess.
Betsy: That's your Congress for you: a hearing in search of a problem that doesn't exist.
Kudlow: The road to economic demoralization
Kristol begins:
The air is seeping out of the Great Liberal Hot Air Balloon. American liberals have been hoping, wishing, and praying--okay, maybe not praying--for over a quarter-century for an end to the ghastly interlude of conservative dominance ushered in by Ronald Reagan. Surely it was all a bad dream, a waking nightmare, a bizarre deviation from the preordained path of history.
With the Democratic congressional victories in November 2006, the nightmare seemed to be ending. And in November 2008, with the election of Barack Obama and increased congressional majorities, it seemed to be over. A new era had dawned.
But did it? Maybe we're now experiencing a liberal interlude, not a liberal inflection point. After all, only six months into the new administration, even a talented hot air blower like President Obama, assisted by friendly gusts of wind from the media, is having trouble keeping the liberal blimp afloat.
Taxes. They are going to ask? But will they ask nicely? Related, from Kaus: Tremors of doom for health care. I see no groundswell of support for anything other than "leave us alone."
Liberal Fascism Department: The O's Science Czar considered putting sterilants in the drinking water.
Has the potato blight hit your garden yet? Global cooling causes it. Meanwhile, global warming wreaks havoc on ferris wheels. But maybe that's a good thing: The Prince of Wales says we should stop having a fun easy life like his.
What's with tenure? Why should Profs be in any different position than everybody else? I don't get it. Related: Is the price of higher ed worth it?
Housing prices, going nowhere. I agree. Not a bad thing, either.
Who is responsible for this Age of Foolishness that grips America?
Ugly data on single motherhood. Pajamas
When they laugh at Sarah Palin, we feel them laughing at us.
What the hell is this? Surber
What about Rubio? Dr. Clouthier. Seems like Rubio is a potential star, and Crist the safe bet.
From Viking:
Payroll tax rates by decade:
1940: 2%
1950: 3%
1960: 6%
1970: 9.6%
1980: 12.3%
1990: 15.3%
The geniuses in government think you aren't fit to figure out how to spend your own money.
Jules begins The Nanny State Goes to War:
“War is redneck as hell,” as Sgt. Howison observed one hot morning in Baghdad. Lots of big vehicles, lots of blowing shit up, and with all that lead and high explosive flying around the place, lots of smoking and dipping. Yeah, smoking’s really bad for you, but …
The Big Crisis (h/t, Insty):
Photo on top is something I want but do not really need: A Kobuta with loader and bushhog
Saturday, July 11. 2009
 Now they're leaning towards a surtax - aka a tax on a tax
Marginal Rev uses the E Word to describe the health care negotiations in DC
What's a bigger deal? Pols with romantic indiscretions or pols with $ corruption?
More good recent mil photos from Afghanistan
Neo on Walpin:
I have little doubt that, had the same allegations been made towards the Bush administration, the story would rate front page headlines every day. But somehow, the following news failed to make the cut at the NY Times, the Boston Globe, as well as the WaPo (although I must say that the WaPo, being among other things a DC paper, has been a great deal better about covering the Walpin case in general). Imagine, if you will, how the following would have been covered by the MSM if the administration in question had been a Republican one; I doubt that Byron York and the Washington Examiner would be the lonely voices letting us know that the Obama administration is stonewalling Congress by refusing to answer pertinent questions and figuring that they can probably get away with it.
And they are getting away with it—at least for now
Via Mankiw:
From Michael Kinsley:
Six hundred billion doesn't sound like all that much to achieve, or come close to achieving, an important and long-standing goal such as universal health care. But keep in mind that health-care reform is supposed to save money. Its premise is that the current path is unaffordable. In that sense, a "mere" $600 billion extra is total defeat.
China vs the US, just a quote from a piece at NRO;
Fortune magazine recently reported that the number of U.S. companies in the world’s top 500 fell to the lowest level ever, while more Chinese firms than ever before made the list. Thirty-seven Chinese companies now rank in the top 500, including nine new entries. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. firms has fallen to 140, the lowest total since Fortune began the list in 1995. This is not good.
China also surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest automaker in the first half of 2009, with June sales soaring 36.5 percent from a year earlier. The Chinese registered 6.1 million car sales for the first half of the year. That way outpaced American sales, which were only 4.8 million.
And China has no capital-gains tax. It only has a 15-to-20 percent corporate tax. The U.S., on the other hand, is raising its cap-gains tax rate to 20 percent. It’s also increasing its top personal tax rates.
Seems to me that the Chinese govt has been moving towards an Authoritarian Capitalism, like Singapore. It works. Sucks, but works.
Funny, it's the blue states that are in trouble.
Is it gonna be Romney? And what about Sarah's star appeal?
Did the O misread his mandate?
Is water a human right? Is this a meaningful use of the word "right"?
Why does the US get stuck with these Pali refugees?
Re the O Admin and the economy, The Audacity of Conceit at Am Thinker:
It is a common mistake of intellectuals to confuse IQ with common sense and verbal fluency with leadership qualities. They are simply unable to comprehend that academic success does not necessarily translate into a firm grasp on reality; the knack for endlessly bloviating on an abstruse subject does not automatically imply administrative ability; an academic degree is not a substitute for practical experience; and a professors' lounge is not a corporate boardroom.
Nobody would deny that the members of Obama's circle of economic advisors are indeed academically adept, well-spoken men and women. But have any of them ever run a lemonade stand, much less a bona fide business? Have they ever met a payroll? Do they know what it means to toss and turn in bed, worrying over the coming rise in vendor prices? They may have academic theories and marshal vast amounts of data, but have little practical knowledge of how things work in the real world.
So what do they bring to the administration other than long resumes and fearsome reputations as intellectual polemicists? All these brilliant academics have been brought on board for the sole purpose of lending an intellectual veneer to Obama's political schemes and validate his power grab. Hence the pitiful sight of these noted intellectuals being trotted out to the microphones to bleat pathetically in defense of the administration's agenda.
Friday, July 10. 2009
From a David Brooks interview, via Althouse:
BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.
The O was remarkably obsequious to Russia. Why? Powerline.
No reason to be. The O seems to have a relentlessly apologetic, if not masochistic, reflex towards competing or adversarial powers. (Unless they are fellow-American Evil Repubs, of course.)
"Not in my name," please. He is looking for love in all the wrong places, in the wrong way. He does not appear to understand that other nations have the serious and often grim job of advancing their own interests.
That's the tough job we hired him to do for us, too.
Wise up, kid, and work for the wonderful country which pays your wages instead of working out your personal issues on the world stage.
Ed: related, via Right Wing Prof:
Greetings great and mighty culture, I am the Obama leader of New America. I am a cultured, urbane, black man with a Muslim name and I carry no baggage.
Your culture is great and wonderful, your poets brilliant, I will now quote one I have never read. Your food wonderful, I will now mention a dish I have never eaten.
Our countries have had issues in the past and they were all the fault of the old America, run by old white men.
Your country has done no wrong and any history of atrocities or rapaciousness or repression was just a reaction to Western meddling
I apologize on behalf of the old white men who wronged you.
New America will not judge you, we will not pretend our free culture is better than your backward, tyranny.
We just want you to like me us.
The University of Texas mugs Western Civ. How advanced! How Progressive! How modern! How sophisticated!
Shmuck du jour: Gavin Newsom
Too many lawyers? Too many law schools? Prof B
In China, pols and their extramarital affairs
In the UK, sex-ed doubles teen pregnancy rate. Homework?
Why some people stay poor. Viking. I've seen plenty of folks like that. They just cannot make good decisions.
"It's no Trojan Horse - it's right there." NRO
Tiger:
...few people other than news junkies have noticed how extraordinary Barack Obama's agenda is. Perhaps a number will help: 35%. That is the aggregate percentage of United States GDP produced by the three industries that the Democrats hope to restructure from the top down: Health care (17% of GDP), energy (9.8% of GDP), and financial services (8% of GDP). Think about that. Without even considering the transformational impact of proposed anti-business laws of general application, such as the Orwellian "employee free choice act," the Obama administration wants to redesign 35% of gross domestic product from the center. And he proposes to do it all in a rush this summer, lest the decline in his popularity and that of the Congressional Democrats erodes his power to do so.
Thirty-five percent. Somebody needs to turn that into a bumper sticker.
Thursday, July 9. 2009
 I hate, hate, hate anybody who would sponsor or support federal criminal legislation with language like this in it:
Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
Just consider what that could entail: in effect, it could make bad internet manners a felony. Atlas has the story.
Glenn Reynolds interviews Joel Kotkin on politics, California, and Gentry Liberals.
The first power generating nuke reactor (it was Russian).
Jeb Bush talks politics. Interesting. Definitely a likeable fellow.
Gone sane: Dr. Sanity goes offline
G8 promises to control world temperature. Ya can't make this stuff up.
Your mammogram by the lowest bidder
The second time we agree with the O: time to get rid of farm subsidies. Including ethanol, please.
Carlyle, Dickens, Adam Smith, slavery, and related topics: The Secret History of the Dismal Science. Part II. Brotherhood, Trade, and the Negro Question
Autopsy of the Fannie and Freddie debacle: Michelle
The White House is spending millions of your $ for media manipulation. Bush (obviously) did not do that. Perhaps he should have, but I think it would have been beneath his dignity - and his Connecticut Dad would have disapproved. Yankees frown on self-promotion.
Weak on Russia? The O seems to want to be limp-wristed to everybody except to us fellow Americans. Hmmm.
Dems: We do not intend to read any health care bill. He says that, laughing. Naturally, it does exempt federal employees, suckers.
Healthcare bill is packed with pork.
Waxman asks: Are you against America?
Imagine the press if Bush had gotten his daughter's age wrong
Newt: How team Obama hijacked Change
Sen Tom Udall: Ignoring the facts to scare you
Politics: Americans just want prosperity
The O's apparent soft spot for Marxist dictators
Failing. Unite us, Obama. I guess that was code for Get rid of the Repubs.
The demise of campaign finance "reform"? That might be a good thing.
Via Powerline:
Wednesday, July 8. 2009
From a commenter on our abortion post yesterday:
That we live in a land in which one can go to prison for harming the egg of a piping plover yet enjoy a Constitutionally protected right to exterminate their unborn human child speaks only the unspeakable about our national legacy.
Plover eggs: Yum. (Kidding aside, I am all in favor of protecting the endangered Piping Plover.)
Via Protein:
Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as that from Hitler.
And via Tim Blair re Al Gore:
He’s getting rich from environmentalism, not just by being paid a whopping $US175,000 ($217,500) a speech but by using political pressure to force government policy in a direction that benefits his business interests.
Via Wilkinson:
I worry that today’s equivalent of Robert McNamara is Peter Orszag, who I fear is poised to do for our health care system what McNamara did for Vietnam.
Michael Jackson still dead, etc, at Outside the Beltway:
Ah . . . the public’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge. It never ceases to amaze.
Via Wiz re the Repubs:
It is looking more so everyday that the Republican congressional leadership (pardon the oxymoron) is going to stand by and watch the place burn down.
It's the Rope-a-Dope strategery.
Via Ace:
"I sure hope [Sarah Palin's] family recovers from what she has done to them."
- Andrew Sullivan, independent roving ad-hoc obstetrician-at-large to Sarah Palin, and unofficial "gonzo geneologist" of Trig Palin
Via Marginal Rev:
The economy of sub-Saharan Africa—including Nigeria and South Africa—is smaller than the economy of New York City.
Government medical care means the government has nationalized your body.
Mark Steyn, filling in for Rush today. Hate to say it, but I'd rather listen to Mark these days.
From a piece at Junk Science, The Vision of our Healthcare. These are the correct rates for docs as determined by the geniuses at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid:
 Emergency medicine is valued at $38.36/hour, while chiropractors are at $65.33/hour (even 31% higher than previously) and osteopathic manipulative therapy is valued at $53.93/hour. Endocrinology (think especially diabetes and obesity) was valued by the PPIS at nearly twice what the CMS had been using to determine physician payments, and is now at $84.39/hour. Family medicine saw a similar increase and is now valued at $90.15/hour. In contrast, for example, Cardiologists’ value was cut nearly in half to $88.04/hour. Allergy and Immunology care was increased to $162.68/hour and Dermatology was increased to $184.62/hour.
When you’re injured or have a real medical emergency, or actually develop a disease, which of the best doctors will you hope are available to care for you: emergency medical physician, cardiologist, family medicine doctor, chiropractor or dermatologist?
News to me that chiropractors are covered by government insurance but, for all I know, they may cover massage too. Anyway, are these numbers insane? No doc could pay his school debt and his malpractice insurance on those fees, plus office and staff overhead.
This is valuing ER docs lower than what I pay my part-time secretary. But my real comparisons are my excellent plumber ($125/hr) and the local electronics repairman ($175/hr).
Read the whole piece. Another interesting bit he has in there is about the quackery of "Lifestyle Medicine." He has it right:
The popular belief, rigorously spread by the growing lifestyle medicine movement, is that chronic diseases of aging; such as cancers, heart disease and diabetes; can be prevented and are to blame on unhealthy diets and lifestyles and failing to control health risk factors. The actual fact is that the best randomized controlled trials (the gold standards of medical evidence) continue to fail to support such premises behind lifestyle medicine, as we’ve seen time and again. The 64 percent drop in age-related deaths from heart disease over the past 50 years, for example, is largely attributed to our modern, advanced medical care and coupled with the survival advantage of a better fed, immunized and overall healthier population. Even mainstream medicine is finally realizing lifestyle medicine is more pseudoscience and ideology than sound, evidence-based science.
Fads and quackery have always abounded in Medicine. Who would expect government to be able to tell the difference?
Related, how they keep medical costs down in England
Iran executes 5 Kurd students for "political activities". (Video - not a postcard - of the group hanging)
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