Why do we believe the individual mandate is necessary to pay for “universal” health care? The Administration has told us repeatedly that the mandate is necessary to help hold down the cost of health insurance. Nobody has objected yet; we should have. The mandate is supposed to hold down costs by forcing everybody to buy health insurance whether they want to or not. Supposedly, fifty | Read More »
‘Oyez, oyez, oyez, Decision Day on the Supreme Court of the United States Live! will come to order. I’m your host, Chuck Flannely. The Court is sitting en banc today, to announce its decision in the Affordable Health Care Act dispute; Chief Justice John (WhiteBread) Roberts presiding. He’s a Harvard man, a Californian, the only Justice with extensive experience arguing cases before the Court himself; | Read More »
No matter how much we spend, it doesn’t help if we spend it on the wrong things, and we don’t know which things are right. Ground rules: This isn’t about President Obama. Nothing he or his Energy Secretary has said or done is really about finding an alternative to Middle East oil. This is about concepts, not details, so there may be some generalities that | Read More »
President Obama seemed to have stepped in something earlier this week. The news hit the street that the Department of Health and Human Services (whose very existence is supposedly validated by the goal in the preamble of the Constitution to “promote the general welfare”) had decided that the Obama/Reid/Pelosi Affordable Health Care Act, aka ObamaCare, empowered them to rule that Catholic (and all other) hospitals | Read More »
Bret Baier on Fox News Channel’s Special Report reported today that ”Congressional Budget Office figures indicate the deficit is increasing at a slower pace. The CBO says the federal government accumulated a budget deficit of 349 billion dollars in the first four months of the fiscal year 2012. That is 70 billion less than the shortfall reported for the same period last year. The deficit | Read More »
Or perhaps their timidity, or their stupidity. I’m not a big fan of Greta van Susteren of Fox News Channel, but Thursday night she was right on target. She interviewed Iowa’s Representative Steve King, the only Congressional questioner who was prepared to ask Attorney General Eric Holder the key question, “Who was the DOJ official who authorized Fast and Furious?” vS: “…no one will tell | Read More »
This is truly a time to prepare for the future, to set the stage. Maybe not this month or even this year, but this election at this point in history. Special people come along only occasionally, yet they seem to be created by fate just when they can make the necessary difference. Think of our founding fathers, of Lincoln, of Churchill, of Truman, and of | Read More »
Today’s events have created a huge opening for the Republican Presidential candidate who is ready to show his leadership mettle. President Obama has the “bully pulpit,” but the first candidate to come out in direct contradiction to his latest polemics with a logical, complete, and detailed response, pointing out the errors of the President’s statements and positions, whether after consulting with John Boehner or not, | Read More »
The “Pulitzer prize-winning” website PolitiFact made news this weekend by being quoted on several Sunday game quiz news interview shows as the hosts talked with Michelle Bachmann. The gist of all of these segments was that TPPWWPF had scrutinized for truthfulness statements Bachmann had recently made, and they found she came up wanting more often than not, most of her statements being rated either “Barely | Read More »
The conundrum is that the potential candidates whom we would have the most confidence in in office, the “true conservatives,” are perhaps generally conceded to be the least experienced (not least qualified) and furthest right in the group, making them perhaps the least “electable,” because experience is what the independent swing vote is likely to deem most important, more important than consistent ideology or philosophy | Read More »
Replying to Erick Erickson’s column, Barack Obama Is Directly To Blame For the S&P Downgrade, I found myself thinking about just what Republicans, in control of only “one-half of one-third of the government,” can really do to stave off the ugly future that S&P says has a 33% chance of coming to pass. Don’t expect the Democrats to be any help in solving this truly | Read More »
Hah! Only kidding. Of course NPR should not. Still, today’s edition of NPR’s On the Media provides a simple example of why I think not. As they say on one non-government-subsidized media channel, you decide. In a segment titled “Labor’s Image Problem,” Brooke Gladstone played an RNC ad which criticized both President Obama and “union bosses” for interfering with Wisconsin’s attempt to right its own | Read More »
There are no caps in that title. No exclamation point. None was present in the president’s State of the Union speech as he delivered those lines last week. President Obama is supposed to be The Great Orator, but lately he seems to be missing the mark. Why in the name of William Jennings Bryan did he wind up his address with a reference to the | Read More »
Whether the stimulus package didn’t work, or worked, is still working, worked but then quit working, was too little, too big, needs a second phase, or was juuuust right, is again becoming a matter of discussion among the ruling class. No, I must amend that. They are sure that at some level it worked. For them the only question is how much to expand it | Read More »
Inexplicable prior decisions by AG Eric Holder have destroyed trust in his judgment and motives. As a result, the motives behind every new decision will be reasonably doubted. Breaking News: “…the Russian Federation has agreed to release four individuals who are incarcerated in Russia for alleged contact with Western intelligence agencies” in return for the release of 10 Russian spies arrested in America. ____ “Through | Read More »
Pilgrim recently sharpened his quill and delivered a very interesting diary titled, No Country for Old Men. Extra interesting because it didn’t mention immigration, Al Gore’s body, or Deepwater Horizon and BP. His thesis was that we should have age-based term limits, and the country would benefit because it would spare us the agony of listening to the final few years of quavering voices as | Read More »
Attention Mike Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, CEO’s of Disney, Marriott, and Boeing, and US Senators including McCain, Kyl, McConnell, Brown, and Graham: COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM IS A NON-STARTER. We, the great unwashed, may be dumb ourselves, but we aren’t “Stuck on Stupid.” We observe. We experience. We learn. We know that any bill that passes the President’s desk that includes elements of what you call “comprehensive | Read More »
One thing we might all agree on: He’s doing the best he can. Now that we’ve dispensed with that–why are we in the mess we’re in today? Doing the best he can at what? I think the answer lies somewhere along a continuum. A. He’s incompetent and clueless. That is, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and even if he did, he wouldn’t know | Read More »
We have been studying petroleum, intensely, for over 100 years. We know what it is, how it behaves, and what it can do. We have many years of experience with it. There are thousands of people with BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Petroleum Engineering. Therefore, when a deep-sea well failed in a way that left a gaping hole in a pressurized oil deposit, it | Read More »
The news readers and pundits keep trying to draw parallels between the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher and Hurricane Katrina. The way they look at it, they both have to do with water and Louisiana, and with the federal government’s ability to solve a problem or at least ameliorate a bad situation. They’re looking at the politics of Presidential action, not the physics of the two | Read More »
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