November 6, 2009
Well, we can’t have that can we?
Their (Republican) plan, which relies on interstate competition, HSAs, and tort reform, would only cost $61 billion in the first ten years of the plan…
So, it would reduce future deficits by a minimum of $1,339,000,000,000 compared to the Neo-Marxist Democrat plan. What else would it do?
CBO anticipates that the combination of provisions in the amendment would reduce average private health insurance premiums per enrollee in the United States, relative to what they would be under current law-by 7 percent to 10 percent in the small group market, by 5 percent to 8 percent for individually purchased insurance, and by zero to 3 percent in the large group market.
So, it would reduce deficit spending by almost a trillion and a half, and it would make health care more affordable, without any abortion funding, death panels, or cuts to MediCare. To reject such a sensible, affordable plan, the Congress would have to be run by spendthrift idiots who don’t care about the debt as long as they expand government power. Unfortunately….
"But I don't want a lifetime of crushing debt!"
November 5, 2009
The same day his party got shellacked in Virginia and New Jersey, and the two candidates he campaigned heavily for lost big-time, the Obama White House was hosting contestants from an NBC program called The Biggest Loser. Oh, the Ironing!
The White House is trying to spin the NY-23 race as having national significance, but the NJ and VA races as being “just local.” Which is what you would expect.
Given that two of my three predictions were wrong, it’s safe to say I suck at analysis. Which is actually good news because I don’t see the Republicans taking the House next year, and I can see Chairman Zero handily winning re-election. I’d only say all three races – NJ, VA, and NY-23 – have lessons in them for Republicans. 1. Connect conservative positions to practical policies that solve problems. 2. Choose candidates that appeal to the base.
And maybe there’s a lesson for Democrats, too. Campaigns based on scorched Earth and personal attacks don’t always work, even when you have the Washington Post to carry the water for you (Creigh Deeds) or spend tens of millions of dollars on ads that attack your opponent for being fat (Jon Corzine). I note that a scorched Earth campaign based on spending millions on attack ads is precisely what Harry Reid is promising next year.
Do you see the irony? Do you see it?
November 4, 2009
Really. By using the precise methodology used by the Obama Administration to determine the impact of the Stimulus, I can demonstrate that I created or saved 11 jobs this morning.
I got out of bed, turned on the lights, evacuated, and showered. (+3 jobs saved, 1 at the power company, 1 at the water works, 1 guy at the toilet paper factory.)
I signed on and posted to this blog, saving another job at my ISP. I checked my Facebook, too, saving another job there. I put my trash out, saving 2 more jobs at Waste Management. (+4 jobs)
On the way to work, I stopped to pick up Vitamin Water: 2 jobs saved, for the stocker and the cashier. (If I had used the self checkout, I would have only saved 1 job.) Before going into my office, I dropped of my Neflix movies, saving a job at USPS and a job at Netflix. (+4)
At this rate, I’ll have saved 35 jobs by the time I get home tonight. Yea, me!
If I didn’t have to work, I could save even more jobs.
"I terkerjerbs!"
November 3, 2009
Jesse Walker at Reason has written one of those articles that explains and provides a context for a phenomenon we are already well-aware of: The way the progressive left uses isolated incidents of violence to indict and discredit the right.
The (Holocaust Museum) killer was soon identified as James Wenneker von Brunn, an 88-year-old neo-Nazi. Von Brunn acted alone, but there was no shortage of voices eager to spread the blame for his crime. The murder was quickly linked, in a free-associative way, to the assassination 10 days earlier of the Kansas abortionist George Tiller. This, we were told, was a “pattern” of “rising right-wing violence.”
More imaginative pundits tried to tie the two slayings to a smattering of other crimes, from an April shootout in Pittsburgh that killed three cops to a year-old double murder at a Knoxville Unitarian church. The longest such list, assembled by the liberal blogger Sara Robinson, included nine diverse incidents linked only by the fact that the criminals all hailed from one corner or another of the paranoid right. One of the episodes involved a mentally disturbed anti-Semite who had stalked a former classmate for two years before killing her in May. “This is how terrorism begins,” Robinson warned.
The left refuses to let a shooting at the Holocaust museum, or the murder of an abortionist be the work of an isolated nutjob. Even though the shooting of the abortionist was condemned universally among pro-life organizations, the left still smelled a conspiracy in which Bill O’Reilly inflamed the rhetoric and Sarah Palin handed the gun to the shooter.
The goal is, of course, to stifle debate. The left can’t defend ObamaCare on the merits (it has none), so they accuse opponents of being “brownshirts” or “Un-American.” The left would rather accuse the right of wanting to assassinate Obama than actually try to defend his policies.
Does the right do this, too? Yeah, sort of and sometimes. But the big differences are 1.) we don’t have a media apparatus to propagandize on our behalf. And, 2.) on the whole, we are more eager to engage in substantive debate. The right is more likely to say, “Obama’s policies are Marxist because they enhance state power in the following ways…” The left is more likely to shout, “Racist! Dick Cheney eats babies!”
This is why the dominant right-wing media format is talk radio, where callers can challenge the host. The left prefers the MSM format where an anointed elite reads the talking points and the audience is expected to sit and listen.
You may now discuss your views on health care
November 2, 2009
William Voegeli has analyzed why California is crashing and burning while Texas is doing all right and has concluded that given a choice between high taxes and lousy services and low taxes and lousy services, people will choose the latter.
California is one of the most highly taxed states. In theory, people are willing to pay high taxes if they receive a high level of public services in return. In reality, special interest groups — especially public employee unions — have gamed the system to benefit themselves. California’s public employees are the highest paid in the country, and have gold-plated pensions that are the envy of everybody but executives at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. The actual quality of services received by the public is rather poor. California’s schools, for example, have the highest paid teachers, but rank 45th in the country. As Voegeli puts it so well, “The “dues” paid by taxpayers in order to belong to Club California purchase benefits that, increasingly, are enjoyed by the staff instead of the members.“
Texas, on the other hand, has no personal income tax. It’s schools aren’t that great, but they cost a lot less than California’s. Texas also spends its tax dollars more on taxpayer priorities than does California:
Texas students “are, on average, one to two years of learning ahead of California students of the same age,” even though per-pupil expenditures on public school students are 12% higher in California. The details of the Census Bureau data show that Texas not only spends its citizens’ dollars more effectively than California but emphasizes priorities that are more broadly beneficial. Per capita spending on transportation was 5.9% lower in California, and highway expenditures in particular were 9.5% lower, a discovery both plausible and infuriating to any Los Angeles commuter losing the will to live while sitting in yet another freeway traffic jam.
Right now, the only thing keeping California afloat is a Federal bailout. In other words, taxpayers in the other 49 states are paying to support California’s bloated state budget and lavish public employee benefits. And in an age of trillion dollar deficits, a lot of that money is coming from abroad.
The USA’s ability to borrow debt is based on our stature and indispensability to the global community. The Obama administration is hell-bent on reducing both; making our country more humble, less sovereign, and militarily weaker. They are racking up record deficits while simultaneously reducing the incentives for other countries to lend us money. This is idiocy.
"Do you know what I am saying?"
November 2, 2009
People who can do math are really grinding Chairman Zero’s gears lately. Last week, the White House was angered when peons began questioning the 640,000 jobs the White House claimed “created or saved” by the Spendulus. Even CBS and AP have noted the gross over-inflation of jobs numbers; and have uncovered shenanigans like the school that spent $200,000 to buy trucks and a portable classroom, and reported 280 jobs created or saved.
Even though the 640,000 figure was ridiculed, the White House upped the ante by claiming that it was actually 1,000,000 jobs created or saved. People who can do math noted that even if the $160 Billion of the Spendulus spent in the first nine months were divided by the grossly exaggerated White House figure of 1,000,000 jobs “created or saved” it worked out to $160,000 per job. The White House has responded by accusing those who can perform long division of “calculator abuse.” Funny, when I was a kid, “calculator abuse” consisted of typing out 58008 and turning it over so it spelled “BOOBS.” “Boobs” is also a pretty accurate description of the Obama Economic Team.
These are the same guys who laughably claim that ObamaCare will be “deficit neutral.”
Being a Democrat means never having to learn math.
October 30, 2009
Democrat Congressman Alan “Dick” Grayson has rapidly established a reputation as a loose-cannon nutjob, what with accusing Republicans of wanting people to die, claiming Dick Cheney’s fangs drip blood, and calling women who work for the Treasury Department “whores.” But beneath the brash, in your face exterior lurks an opportunistic, self-centered publicity hound, which brings us to the case of the gay couple that learned too late about the real Dick Grayson.
But mainly, I’m posting this story only so I can use that threadline.
Today comes word of an even more damning story. A gay couple down in Florida was facing foreclosure. ACORN and Alan Grayson rallied to their cause.
Cheyenne Bowers and his partner David Paxton thought they had gained a valuable ally.
They were in a fight to save their home. He thought a pledge from an eager incoming freshman congressman to help them out through numerous programs might do the trick.
The non-profit ACORN along with Grayson invited the media into Bowers and Paxton’s home to talk about fighting the foreclosure crisis, particularly fighting Bowers and Paxton’s foreclosure nightmare.
When the cameras went away, so did Alan Grayson. The foreclosure went through. The couple, in seriously bad health, were put out on the street.
There’s a moral here, and I think the moral is “BUTTSECKS: DO NOT WANT.” No, wait, actually, it’s, “Rely on yourself, not on liberal politicians.”
The Mortgage Crisis has left millions homoless.
October 30, 2009
I noted yesterday on Moonbattery an article about a Swiss company that’s releasing a skin cream enriched with cells developed from an aborted baby boy. I find this sickening. I find unconvincing the argument that the contents of the cream aren’t actually obtained from aborted babies but from cells made from the cells of an aborted baby to be unpersuasive. Just I find the claim that fetal cells are being used to help burn victims unpersuasive. Josef Mengele froze Jews to death to find better treatments for hypothermia. Does the end justify the means there?
One troll, in defending the Swiss company, wrote: “Do you really believe they would have fetus farms in Switzerland?”
Which led me to wonder, what would be the leftist objection to “Fetus Farms” if someone decided to build one? Unborn babies are not considered human, which is what justifies abortion. You can kill an unborn baby at any stage in pregnancy. So, it follows, you can do whatever you want to an unborn baby. (And we have a Science Czar who argues that even young children don’t count as people until they have been “socialized.”)
So, can anyone explain to me why if abortion at any stage in pregnancy is all right; if partial birth abortion is all right; if harvesting fetal tissues for commercial medical benefit is all right, it would be wrong to raise fetuses as organ banks?
I wonder if the fetal-cell skin cream has one of those "Not tested on animals" labels.
October 29, 2009
Who knew South Carolina was so… naughty?
A deputy assistant attorney general who said he was on his lunch break when an officer found him with a stripper and sex toys in his sport utility vehicle has been fired, his boss said Wednesday.
Ooh, that’s naughty.
Roland Corning, 66, a former state legislator, was in a secluded part of a downtown cemetery when an officer spotted him Monday. As the officer approached, Corning sped off, then pulled over a few blocks away. He and the 18-year-old woman with him an employee of the Platinum Plus Gentleman’s Club, gave conflicting stories about what they were doing in the cemetery.
66 and 18. Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!
Platinum Plus? I used to… um… drive by that place on my way to… um… other places. (It’s actually a chain.)
Conflicting stories? Let me guess, the old guy was shopping for a gravesite, and she was trying to help him with a nasty and inconvenient snakebite.
I’m glad he was fired, but he could always just move to New York and work for Elliot Spitzer.
"Hey, baby. Wanna take a walk on the Appalachian Trail?"
October 29, 2009
A study on the effects of ObamaCare on Health Insurance Premiums in Ohio has determined that all the extra mandates will cause the price to double.
Take Ohio, where a young, healthy 25-year-old living in Columbus can purchase insurance from WellPoint today for about $52 per month in the individual market. WellPoint’s actuaries calculate the bill will rise to $79 because Democrats are going to require it to issue policies to anyone who applies, even if they’ve waited until they’re sick to buy insurance. Then they’ll also require the company to charge everyone nearly the same rate, bringing the premium to $134. Add in an extra $17, since Democrats will require higher benefit levels, and a share of the new health industry taxes ($6), and monthly premiums have risen to $157, a 199% boost.
Meanwhile, a 40-year-old husband and wife with two kids would see their premiums jump by 122%—to $737 from $332—while a small business with eight employees in Franklin County would see premiums climb by 86%.
The reason is simple, the silly mandates in the Baucus bill that require insurance to be equalized for everybody. As a man, you’ll be required to by a policy that covers pap smears and obstetrics. As a woman, you’ll be forced to buy a coverage that covers prostate exams. As a teetotaler, you’ll pay for substance abuse coverage. And so on. Also, everybody will have to pay the same rate. Imagine what would happen to your car insurance rates if you had to pay the same rate as a drunk driver with 19 DUI’s; because it was “fair.”
Also, insurance companies can no longer deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. Imagine what your car insurance rates would be if someone could wreck a car and then buy insurance to pay to fix it.
Gay Patriot makes the comprehensive point:
We’re going to pass a health care plan written by a committee whose head says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn’t read it but exempts themselves from it, signed by a president that also hasn’t read it, and who smokes, with funding administered by a Treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s nearly broke.
Sounds about right.
Your wait for treatment will be 16 weeks. Please be patient.
