Seriously, isn’t BRIBERY supposed to be illegal? Why isn’t Landrieu being clapped in chains along with Reid, who offered her the bribe?

X-posted at

Technorati Tags: Corruption, Louisiana, Senate, Landrieu, Bribery

We saw Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze’s tragically flawed adaptation of the Maurice Sendak classic. Perhaps you like watching depressing movies about relationship problems between people who refuse, idiotic, to change. Then you might like this movie. Perhaps you like watching a movie with the message that your friends are waiting until you slip up, at which time they will eat you up, cannibal-like. Then you might like this movie. Perhaps you like movies that speak the unselfconscious symbolic language of children while carrying a lesson that relationships cannot last, that marriage ends in divorce and mutual alienation, that only relationships between simpletons like Ira and Judith can last, and that on a more basic level relationships are just a bummer. Then you might like this movie. Or perhaps, like me, you recognize the seductive beauty of the movie, and hate it for the psychic poison it delivers to the defenseless minds of kids.

We will not be buying it on DVD.

Did I mention that while rushing to the bathroom to pee, our 4 year old Sugarlump vomited her popcorn all the way down the carpeted hallway behind the theater? And that after cleaning up and returning to our seats she curled up in her daddy’s lap and went to sleep? That made the rest of the movie more bearable.

We finished the evening at Five Guys with the best burgers and fries the kids ever ate. That’s what they said. Evening saved.

Other reviews: NYT, Tech Banyan, Entertainment Weekly, HuffPo, NRO

Xposted from

Technorati Tags: Spike Jonze, Where the Wild Things Are, Movie Review

I don’t have anything to add because this is so shattering there is nothing that can be added. If this extract scares you then you have to read the whole thing. And then we all shall have to do something.

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.

[laughter]

And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.

Read the treaty. Read the rest of Lord Moncton’s remarks. If this is signed and passed, it will be the greatest act of BETRAYAL that has ever been committed on the American people. We all must act, every one of us, doing whatever we can.

This must not stand!

Update: Lord Moncton’s powerpoint presentation and video are now available online.

Xposted from

Technorati Tags: Obama, Copenhagen, Climate Treaty, Environmentalism, Tyranny, Constitution

The question begs to be asked. Can fans embarrass the hell out of the NFL? Not by throwing ice-balls at opposing teams; Not by booing lustily at little kids; Not by wearing nothing but body paint on their torsos in midwinter; But can fans embarrass the hell out of the NFL by making a spectacle of rejecting the new NFL determination to goose-step to the drumbeat of the race hustlers and slanderers of the progressive left?

Some have proposed cutting up team jerseys and sending the pieces to Roger Goodell’s office. Some have proposed canceling your NFL Sunday Ticket. Those are good, and they hit at the wallets of these hypocritical leftist slimeballs, but they are not embarrassing enough. Embarrassing an organization as big and wealthy as the NFL with all its television time and bootlicking local sports reporters requires strategic planning.

Don’t just cut up your stuff. Don’t just cancel. Make a spectacle of it!

How to Make a Spectacle
Let’s say you have an NFL collectible. A coffee cup signed by Steve McNair. A jersey signed by OJ Simpson. A drink cozy or cooler that used to belong to Bret Favre. A framed limited edition photo of Joe Namath. You get the idea.

Choose one item that wouldn’t kill you to destroy it. Ready? Get out your video camera. Film yourself getting ready.

Start by expressing what you believe in your heart:

• in America’s freedoms.
• a man has the right to be treated as innocent until proven guilty.
• vile accusations need to be proved, and if unproved are nothing more than slander and libel.They should not be passed on by so-called journalists without any even minimal level of checking or vetting.
• people have the right to use their money in any legal way they like.
• we should judge a man, not by his political party, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.
• our own experiences are better guides than wild rumors spread on the internet.
• the NFL has crossed its fans with its pandering, slavish subservience to those who slandered and libeled a man who was making a good faith business offer to get into the NFL owners’ business. This is the same NFL, mind you, that happily welcomes dog-torturers, wife-beaters, rapists, and those convicted of homicide back to the players’ ranks.

Isn’t sports about truthful calls, fair play, and trust? Clearly this league has no respect for the truth. Clearly it has no respect for fair play. Clearly it cannot be trusted. And if it cannot be trusted, how can its games be trusted?

Film yourself saying those things in your own words. Film this whole process. That is how you multiply your protest and make a spectacle of it. Upload the whole package to Youtube. Send faxes, letters, emails to your local newspaper and TV station letting them know what you are doing.

Announce that for the reasons given you are going to destroy this valuable NFL artifact. But you are selling the right to save it or destroy it on Ebay in case there are other people who care about this. Make a long bidding period, 2 weeks or longer if you can. Sell the fate of the collectible to the highest bidder, who can either bid to have you destroy it (run it over with the biggest, meanest looking vehicle you can find, or have it torn to pieces by wild animals or by being torn in half by two big pickup trucks with trailer hitches), or buy it from you to save it from destruction. Start the bidding at $1 with a reserve of the cash value of the item and no buy-it-now price.

Did you send the announcement to your local newspapers and TV stations? Do it.

Film the plans and the destruction on video. Upload it to Youtube if the local news doesn’t pick it up. Blog about it.

Embarrass the hell out of Roger Goodell!

Xposted from

Technorati Tags: Activism, Libel, Slander, Rush Limbaugh, NFL

• Michael Spence gives an overview
• Peter G. Klein on Oliver Williamson
• Paul Romar on Elinor Ostrom
• Peter Boettke on Lin Ostrom

Barack Obama is George Soros’s marionette?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/what_soros_wanted_obama_delive.html

Liberal warnings of TEA party violence are pure psychological projection. Bitten off any fingers lately?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/liberals_violence_warning_come.html

The Nobel Peace Prize sucks. The world need a Reagan Peace Prize.
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/13/the-reagan-prize

Eliot Spitzer wants to crush the US Chamber of Commerce because it takes conservative positions and doesn’t buy into environmentalist wackjob hype. Herein he lays out his evil plan to James Bond. And you.
http://www.slate.com/id/2232441/?from=rss

Lieberman is ready to make some Democrat heads explode
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574473293212092518.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

How the Baucus healthcare bill will cause a health insurance market death spiral
http://healthcare.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODA4ZmI2YTI0Yzk2OTkyMzczYTRjYjViODgxODA1OGE=

Running the numbers that damn Baucuscare
http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/2009/10/senate-finance-health-bill-has-no.html

How to distort statistics to say a poll shows the opposite of what it says
phohttp://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/republican-party/poll-only-28-of-republicans-believe-american-health-care-best-in-world/

The statistics that are so brutally warped by the previous article
http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=825

Ron Paul vs. Lindsey Graham in a steel cage death match
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/10/14/ron-paul-vs-lindsey-graham-on-the-future-of-the-gop/

The vile and mendacious racialist calumnies of the Southern Poverty Law Center (Vadum too)
http://spectator.org/blog/2009/10/12/extreme-irony-alert-or-springt

How to nail Terry Krepel of Media Matters to the wall with his own vile smears
http://newsrealblog.com/2009/10/14/with-every-reply-krepel-just-keeps-digging-a-deeper-hole-to-defend-smear-of-beck/

How long will the Recession last? Forever!
http://mises.org/story/3764

When the Government and some Private Companies collude to drive other private companies out of the marketplace and give overwhelming financial benefits to the colluding companies for campaign contributions for colluding politicians, why is that the fault of the free market instead of the fault of government meddling with the free market?
http://mises.org/story/3761

Islam4UK demands full sharia law over the United Kingdom, replacing all other laws
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/10/uk-muslim-group-demands-full-sharia-law.html

Death Panels anyone? Robert Reich, Democrat and proponent of single-payer health-care, says that HEALTH CARE TO SENIOR CITIZENS AND VERY SICK PEOPLE WILL BE RATIONED UNDER ANY GOVERNMENT PLAN
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/10/obama-advisor-admits-senior-health-care.html

Another Clinton Scandal
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/15/another-clinton-scandal

Iowahawk’s $33 art stimulus has opened the floodgates of the underground art world
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/10/the-art-just-wont-stop.html

Technorati Tags: Roundup, Interesting Articles

1. Excellence;
2. One person can change the world.

There are those who do things excellently, as opposed to those who only partly do a thing if they bother to do it at all. The excellent can make huge changes. Those who do not seize excellence can barely do their job. The common wage-earning man of 1899 was useless when given any task requiring judgement and initiative.

make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio”.

Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task?

On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions:

Who was he?

Which encyclopedia?

Where is the encyclopedia?

Was I hired for that?

Don’t you mean Bismarck?

What’s the matter with Charlie doing it?

Is he dead?

Is there any hurry?

Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself?

What do you want to know for?

Such a man is a waste of a position, and might as well be let go. He will never be a great success unless he changes something in himself. Such a man must transform himself to be more like Col. Rowan, who was asked by Pres. McKinley to carry a message to Col. Garcia, the leader of the Cuban rebels against Spain. Rowan had lived in Cuba and written a book about the island. Rowan traveled by himself in small boats to Cuba, then hiked by himself across an island occupied by the hostile Spanish, through jungle and over mountain to Garcia’s jungle encampment, where he made contact, delivered his message, developed a rapport, then left the island and returned with a command of American soldiers to assist Garcia in his successful rebellion.

Cuba was able to throw off the Spanish yoke because Rowan reached Garcia and delivered McKinley’s message. Without Rowan’s excellence in every task he had to complete in order to carry that message it would not have happened.

How relevant is this pamphlet?

Though nobody knows the story of Rowan and Garcia, the problem still exists. The article is more than a simple historical curiosity. There are still plenty of workers like the man who only works when he is being supervised, only does what he is told, fobs off his responsibilities on others, argues against every new assignment, complains, and makes excuses for his failures when he bothers to do his job at all. Unions and HR Departments exist to protect such people and keep them employed.

One man can change the world. He doesn’t have to be extraordinary, but he has to embrace excellence. We need to remember this in these days when the progressive march to eliminate individual freedom in these United States has been advancing, almost without interruption for 110 years.

Take heart, stay optimistic, and think strategically. We have nothing to fear but panic, nothing to lose but mediocrity, and our country’s freedom to win again.

Xposted from

Technorati Tags: Message to Garcia, Conservatism, Book Notes

I’m not going to worry about the exact duration of the applause lines. For instance, the most popular line measured by applause duration was the very last line in the speech. The audience wasn’t necessarily applauding for that line, but for the whole speech. On the other hand, no politician would conclude a speech to his own convention with a line that was not guaranteed to resonate with the listeners.

Paraphrased, here are what the popular applause lines in the speech were all about.

1. The government will not fix things; the people will fix things. Individual freedom.
2. We appreciate our military who fight for us. National self-defense.
3. Taxes don’t just hurt rich people; they hurt poor people too. Taxes are too high.
4. The failures of the bureaucracy must be blamed on the people who controlled the bureaucracy when they failed. That has always been the Left. Personal responsibility.
5. Our country’s freedom is endangered by the EU; our best leader in opposition to creeping EU dominance will be my foreign minister. Rule of law and a representative government.
6. A crippling national debt created to benefit unions destroys our country’s safety nets for the poorest among us. Prudence.
7. Too much so-called education money is spent on consultants and politically connected NGOs. Prudence.
8. We need to stop treating children like adults and adults like children. Individual freedom, rights and responsibilities.
9. Retired workers don’t want pity and government handouts, just to get the pensions they have earned. Rule of law.
10. Let us honor those who have suffered. Kindness.
11. Government surveillance and regulation has gone too far and we will sweep it out. Individual freedom. Rule of law.
12. My wife sustains me. Marriage and family.
13. Banks have been prevented by City government from making prudent financial decisions and we will stop this. Free market. Rule of law.
14. We will unleash the entrepreneurs and new businesses that have been kept down by the left. Free market. Individual freedom.
15. Police aren’t on the streets because they are complying with politically correct paperwork that prevents them from keeping the streets safe. This needs to change. Prudence.

And finally, the top line that wasn’t quite 15 seconds was, “This big government has reached the end of the road.” This is classic red meat, though not so much a statement of principle.

In my opinion, these lines express ideas that are popular in the US as well, not just among US conservatives but among independents and even Democrats. Conservatives in the US need to take these popular lines and use them, or lines like them.

In related news, a word cloud for Cameron’s speech can be found here.

Update 1: The whole speech.

Update 2: Comments on the speech from Melanie Phillips, Fraser Nelson, David Blackburn’s liveblog, Brian Wheeler, Matthew D’Ancona, Telegraph Editors, and Janet Daley.

Update 3: David Cameron’s responses to Telegraph readers’ questions.

Xposted from

Technorati Tags: Common Sense, Conservatism, Good Stuff, Government, David Cameron, UK

Tom Coburn proposes to dump Political Science research funding since it’s pure Marxist propaganda. I can live with that. Marxists not so much.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/08/coburn-political-science/

Cross-posted from Beaglescout.

The Pentagon is playing dirty pool on behalf of the already-dirtiest pool players from Boeing, with regard to the huge (179-plane, about $40 billion) air refueling tanker contract that Northrop Grumman Corp. and EADS won fair and square last year before it was stolen away from them.

As a reminder: The swiping occurred after Boeing launched an unprecedented and underhanded political-hardball campaign after Northrop won the contract with a bigger, more versatile, more efficient plane. Boeing’s bid also was some $3 billion more expensive (or $42 million more expensive per plane) than Northrop’s for just the first 64 planes. And Northrop’s offering would support, it believably claims, some 48,000 American jobs at 230 supplier companies in 49 states, compared to 44,000 new jobs that Boeing claimed it would create. The Northrop plane also could start coming off the production lines sooner than Boeing’s, by all accounts.

Yet after Boeing strong-armed politicians and the Pentagon, the Seattle- and Chicago-based company filed a formal protest, alleging more than 100 irregularities in what already had been the most open, public, analyzed contract award in Pentagon history. (The award actually itself was a re-do; at first the Air Force was to lease planes from Boeing, but Sen. John McCain led an investigation which found such serious shenanigans that several Boeing executives and Air Force personnel were convicted in a sort of kickback scheme.

The rebid was a pure partisan decision that favored Democrat Washington state over Republican Alabama and Mississippi, still recovering from Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina. And with the newly issued rules preventing the Northrop bid from being evaluated for its greater capability while giving Northrop’s pricing data to Boeing without reciprocating to Northrop with Boeing’s pricing data, it is clear that the bid is as dirty and unfair as the Air Force can make it. Will people go to jail again over Boeing’s shenanigans? Maybe, maybe not. Democrats seem to get away scot free with these things. Should they? I’m leaning to yes.

And yes, I still work for Northrop Grumman, though not for the tanker effort. I work in the same region that would supply the workers for this project, so no doubt some of my neighbors would work there. I’m blogging this on my own time. And yes, I’m bitter. I see another decision that was made on the basis of facts overturned because of dirty Democrat party politics. And it makes me sick for my country.

Xposted from

Technorati Tags: Tanker, Boeing, EADS, Northrop-Grumman, KC-45, Corruption

Before we get into the sleazy details let’s talk about science.

The scientific method that has produced such incredible progress over the last five hundred years depends on peer review, rigorously reproducible experiments, and transparent access to the original data as well as all operations performed on it. Factor analysis, time series analysis and other techniques lead to theories about cause and effect. Empirical data from experimental results indicates numerical relationships. Results are tested and vetted by many methods, including statistical analysis of the data for measurement bias. The result is that scientific theories are never proved. Two things can happen to them.

• Theories can be accepted as good enough for a while; until
• They get disproved.

In science, breakthroughs are made by disproving old theories that were good enough for a long time, and replacing them with new or refined theories. Where experiments are feasible, new experiments are performed to vet results. In order for the scientific method to work for theories in which experiments are not feasible (such as weather science), the original data must be kept. A reliable record of all mathematical transformations must also be kept. To depart from this method by inventing or manipulating data is usually enough to make a pariah of a scientist. But there are certain scientists who, because of the faddishness and political correctness of their results, get a pass when they violate every standard of scientific research.

But the fact of the matter is those so-called scientists are frauds, and so are their supporters.

Patrick J. Michaels of NRO has the story in all its deplorable, results-falsifying glory at Watts Up With That.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”

Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Guess what comes next? Every time a scientist wants to examine the data and make sure it is good, Phil Jones refuses. A few scientists who are properly deferential get bits of data. But the scientific method cannot operate without peer review from scientists who look for problems. How can the science be improved if it cannot be examined? After deflecting requests for data with all sorts of weak excuses (read the article for a number of good laughs), Jones eventually admitted that he and his partner never kept the original data. From the beginning of their work in 1979, they only kept data after they had adjusted it by unknown and inexplicable methods. They adjusted new data before including it in their existing, adjusted data. And then they threw the new original data away. Read what Jones wrote:

Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.

In other words, they threw away the original data and falsified the data they kept.

Though the story of the falsified global warming data does not prove that human activity has changed global climate, it is clear that the IPCC’s climate data shows signs of human activity. Unfortunately for the climate change hypothesis, it shows signs of human activity in falsifying the data.

Combine this with the 2007 discovery that NASA climate activist James Hansen’s computer models that showed increasing temperatures from 1998 to 2006 suffered from a Y2K bug and were completely wrong (see the graph at the right showing a sudden leap in measurements on midnight 12/31/1999) and things don’t look too peachy for claims that human activity, let alone cow farts and backyard barbequeues, are changing the world’s climate.

Tangentially, we have the fact that Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is one of the two most critical components of the cycle of life, along with its partner atmospheric Oxygen (O2). Plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out O2. Animals breathe in O2 and breathe out CO2. Water is also part of the cycle. But the respiration of the two great kingdoms of life, the animal and vegetable kingdoms, depends on CO2. Increasing amounts of CO2 are causing the greening of the Sahara desert. Is this one of the bad effects of CO2 that we should be worried about? Increased quantities of atmospheric CO2 make plants healthier and increase their numbers. Increasing numbers of healthier plants create more O2 for animals to breathe and more animal fodder for animals to eat. If increased quantities of CO2 will strengthen the cycle of life, decreased quantities will weaken the cycle. The cycle of life goes round and round, either growing or dying away, and the greenies who advocate CO2 restrictions claim to be on the side of animals and plants. Yet green goals will reduce the numbers of plants and animals and make them less healthy.

So here we have a climate scientist who admits that he does not follow the scientific method, the world’s most important computer model of climate suffering from an undetected Y2K error, and advocates of plant and animal life whose goals are to have less of both. I do not claim to know everything that is going on, but I know enough to ask one more question.

What is the real game?

Technorati Tags: Corruption, Environmentalism, Weather, Scientific Fraud

Corporations are employers, buyers of raw goods, producers of finished goods, convenient holding companies for capital goods, and when times are good also sources of returns for investors. If the cost of raw goods plus the cost of production and sales is less than the sales price then the corporation makes a gross profit. Out of this gross profit come the wages of the workers and managers, further capital investments to improve the productivity of workers, and returns for investors. What happens when government reaches into a corporation and takes out a tax? Specifically, who actually pays corporate taxes with his or her reduced take-home pay?

When taxes increase to a business several things happen.

• First, it cuts wages by reducing worker hours, giving pay cuts, or denying pay raises. This is almost always the first recourse, because variable costs like labor are the easiest expenses for any business concern to cut. The Washington Post reports that 70-92% of corporate taxes are paid by reducing employees’ pay.
• Second, the corporation hires tax accountants, lawyers, consultants, and even lobbyists to cut its tax load.
• Third, the corporation reduces maintenance and capital investment, which will slow down the corporation’s future growth and may cause it to fail at some future time if its competitors do business from places where their taxes are lower and they can increase their productivity faster.
• Fourth, it tries to charge customers more.
• Fifth, it tries to replace its raw materials with cheaper alternatives.
• Sixth, it may engage in cost cutting measures on peripheral activities to do things like save energy, replace computers over a longer cycle, or reduce paperwork costs. These typically only produce minor savings as competent businesses are already cheap about peripheral activities.
• Seventh, it may lower returns to investors, making its stock less valuable

Are any of these results of corporate taxes good things, or do they all damage workers, investors, and other businesses? Since corporate taxes mostly work by taking money out of the pockets of employees, with less impact on highly valued employees and greater impact on employees as their value to the company decreases, aren’t corporate taxes simply an extremely regressive tax that has disparate impact on entry level, unskilled, and disabled workers?

Let’s talk about this in a way that everyone can understand. The average employed married American worker makes about $50K and pays taxes at the 15% marginal rate. If he or she works for a for-profit corporation, then the impact of the corporate tax is to reduce his or her gross salary by 70% of 34%, or 23.8% (assuming a fairly successful small business). I’m choosing the lowest impacts I can find in the tax tables and I’m playing a little loose with adding and subtracting percentages, but the result is that I’m understating what happens, not overstating it. The average may be higher. That means the average worker would make 23.8% more money if there weren’t any corporate tax. It also at least doubles the federal tax that the average worker pays. For a worker making $50,000 that is a $12,000 raise that won’t happen because the government stole it away in the dark of night! Does the average worker making $50K receive more value from the government than he or she would get from that $12,000 that was cunningly taken out of his pocket? Or is it simply a sneaky way for the government to siphon money out of the economy with a “corporate tax” without workers realizing they are the ones who are being robbed?

Who pays corporate taxes? The answer is: if you work for a corporation, you do.

Technorati Tags: Common Sense, Fact Check, Economy, Corporate Taxes

Update: revivefederalism has an excellent piece on how Corporate Taxes and high Dividend Taxes tempted companies to become highly leveraged in order to reduce their tax load. This in turn destabilized the companies and led some of them into bankruptcy last year. The causal link from high corporate taxes to the financial collapse is clear.

Every once in a while we need to remind ourselves that progressive neo-Jacobins, syndicalists, anarchists, revolutionaries, communists and fascists have stolen the name “liberal” and invented the fabulist lie “progressive” for what they do. Nobody likes their real names. Storybook demons don’t like being summoned by their true names either. That is because using their true, or correct, name gives you power over them. For one thing, it does not allow you to be fooled by their deceptions. They, the neo-Jacobins, syndicalists, anarchists, revolutionaries, communists, socialists, progressives, and fascists believe that the state should take goods from one group and give goods to the other group. Yes, that is like a tribal society with eternal warfare between groups. They mistake the fact that some people have more money than others for a class structure, ignoring the truth that those who start poor and work hard end up rich. That is not a classist society. That is an economically and socially mobile society that rewards merit and effort. They are no more liberals than American conservatives are the same as traditional European Conservatives (monarchists who do not believe in free markets and transformational scientific innovation). American conservatives are the original liberals who believe in life, liberty and property, and all the other requirements for individual empowerment and the starvation of overweening state power. Neo-Jacobins et al believe in that overweening state power that crushes people underneath its hobnailed jackboots.

Hellraiser was just a movie. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was a bad one. But “Hell” names a place that Lucifer created for himself, where he lives consumed with envy and self-pity. And Hell on Earth is a fair description of what Lucifer’s most faithful recent disciple would have his followers create.

Saul Alinsky claimed to be a champion of the dispossessed against those who oppressed them. But he dedicated his masterwork to Lucifer, who created a Hell to live within. And so with everything that Alinsky and his disciples, such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, want to create in the world. They all want to create a Hell on Earth in which they and their Progressive buddies could lord it over the Have Nots while killing off the old Haves. They are at war with everything good, right, and true. And they want to replace everything good with their coercive state that will scourge us of our humanity and make us into perfect, communist robots. David Horowitz has written a number of posts on the neo-Jacobins and their ilk that covered much of what he said last week when he appeared on the Glenn Beck show.

Here they are:

• Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me: Part I
• Hell on Earth: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part II
• Boring From Within: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part III
• To Have And Have Not: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part IV
• Post-modern leftism: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part V
• Means and Ends One: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI
• Means and Ends Two: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI Continued
• The Nazi Option: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI (continued 2)

America opened the Lament Configuration last November 4. Now we are in for it. Go and read Horowitz’s warning.

h/t: derhoosier

Technorati Tags: David Horowitz, Alinsky, Socialism, Communism, Revolution, Destruction, Lies, Lucifer

A College Dream Ends Too Soon
I worked hard to get into Berkeley and I worked even harder when I got there. But when my funds ran out, I had to leave.

That headline says one thing: This undocumented alien is a victim. But this excerpt from the article says something completely different: This undocumented alien is a very hard worker and is incapable of acting like a victim.

I found a tiny room near the campus, enrolled in classes, and landed a job selling jewelry in a San Francisco mall. From Friday through Monday, I worked full-time, waking up at 6:30 a.m. to get to work by 9. I couldn’t spend the weekends like other students, lazing in the sun or exploring neighborhoods. Still, for two glorious days each week, Tuesday and Thursday, I had classes from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and was taught by some amazing professors. I would run from one class to the next, using my breaks to stop by the library. I slept odd hours, many days finishing homework at the crack of dawn. I was very well organized. Wednesday was the day I took care of business—everything from food shopping to laundry to paying bills.

Surprisingly, I found time to make friends and, perhaps more surprisingly, mostly with political conservatives. They proved to be remarkably open-minded, and I loved their outlandish conversations and unabashed candor. They never questioned my odd hours, nor did I offer to explain. They apparently believed that I was simply another workaholic. Perhaps not so “simply,” but I was a workaholic for sure. I had no choice.

In case it isn’t apparent, K. Gonzalez is still going to college, still working hard, still planning to go back to Berkeley, and still dreaming. The headline is misleading. Gonzalez is probably still making friends with conservatives, since they are so similar in principles and philosophy.

Analysis and Troubleshooting

There are two major problems here, neither one of which can be solved in time to ease K. Gonzalez’ way to Berkeley, and a minor problem, which might have a solution.

1. College costs, even at a state university such as Berkeley, have gone through the roof.  I suspect that student loans and federal grants have a lot to do with this. Another issue is that college degrees have become a filter that businesses, prevented by the Supreme Court from using reasonable employment skills tests to filter out unqualified job applicants, use as a first pass filter to qualify applicants for a second step. This is why jobs that should not really require a college degree, such as journalism, computer programming, or working as a chef, are reserved for college grads. This drives more people into college than should be going. If demand for college was lower, colleges would have to compete for students and costs would be lower. But I don’t really have a good answer, except that we encourage more community colleges and alternative learning solutions and let universities that are too expensive go out of business.
2. K. Gonzalez came to the US because the economy sucked so bad where Gonzalez came from that the job situation was worse there for its own citizens than it was for illegal aliens in the US. Gonzalez wanted to go to Berkeley because there is no such university in his or her own country. This is not a problem with the US but with Gonzalez’ native country, which lacks basic requirements for a free market including a respect for and rule of law, inviolable property rights, and real choice between different political parties at the ballot box. This problem needs to be fixed by a transformative leader in Gonzalez’ own country. Perhaps if Gonzalez is smart enough, and learns enough from his conservative friends and their role models among the American founders, he  could go back to that country and become such a leader.
3. When it comes to paying for Berkeley, this is a minor problem. All Gonzalez needs to do is find a sympathetic and highly successful legal immigrant who came to the US from his country, and convince that person to contribute the $5,000 per semester that Gonzalez needs. Maybe the owner of the jewelry shop could be just such a sponsor, or maybe they go to church with one. Stop looking for a solution from government. Look for a solution from the private sector.

UPDATE: Also please read Fred Maidment’s reaction to the same article.
On Immigration and Education by Fred Maidment

also posted at

Technorati Tags: Immigration, Education, Media Bias, Conservatism

This highjack of the healthcare market must be stopped. We will have to do it without much help. There is no cavalry to stop it for us. We do not have the moneybags behind our side that the government monopolists do. They had Soros bankrolling the propaganda, but now the $800 billion 2009 stimulus and other funds looted from the taxpayer bankroll their propaganda efforts. The media is in the pocket of the pro-highjack side. Academia is too. And big business, chastened by the sight of the President of the US firing the CEO of GM, is scared to do anything but support a healthcare highjack. Doctors, retirees, and pharmacists are overwhelmingly against the healthcare highjack, but the AMA, AARP, and big Pharma companies have betrayed their constituents and are backing it. Stimulus funded so-called community organizers, union thugs, and their allies in the communist allied antiwar movement, are all being paid to push the Democrat Party’s healthcare highjack.

We do not have their focused, organized resources. But we have numbers. We outnumber them. 85% of Americans are happy with their healthcare insurance and doctor. We outnumber them better than 5 to 1. All we need are the resources to allow us to get our voices out.

The healthcare highjack forces have made those resources available to the public. President Obama’s Agitators Organizers for America have resources for their partisans that will help them get their astroturf pro-highjack message to mostly Democrat congressmen and congresswomen. Use their resources. But don’t use the Democrats’ anti-freedom agenda. Make sure to take literature along that expresses the pro-freedom point of view.

First, click to sign up for an office visit at your congressional jellyfish’s offices. They will provide you with all the local office addresses, and with links to choose a time. This will not set up an appointment, but it is set up so that congressional offices get constant visits throughout the day. You will probably get a call from an Obama organizer. Humor them if you can.

Write a letter. Make it legible. Either use your best handwriting, or type and print it on the computer. There is a good list of 8 reality checks the healthcare highjack partisans have been falsely disputing about HR3200, the House bill, at Classical Ideals. You can print that out and add it to your letter, or print out any of hundreds of other wonderful online resources to attach to your letter. By the way, if you have any good resources, please mention them in comments so other people can use them. Make your letter itself short. Here is an example letter.

Dear <name>:I am opposed to HR3200 and all other plans to replace the Medical and Healthcare Insurance marketplaces with government-run monopolies.

Not only are the bills that have been released to public view full of wasteful spending, they do nothing to reduce the cost of medical care. The primary solution that might reduce the spiraling cost of medical care is tort reform, and that is not under consideration in any of the public bills. On the other hand, the bills are full of giveaways to community organizers and labor unions, giving the impression that this is a simple partisan scheme to take taxpayers’ money and give it to highly partisan organizations. Given that these bills do nothing to reduce the cost of medical care, that they enlarge government bureaucracy by no fewer than 45 new government agencies, that they vastly increase spending at a time when we are running unprecedented deficits, that they are giveaways to the same labor unions and community organizers that got so much stimulus money, and that they replace a functioning free market with a government monopoly, I believe it is your duty and obligation to vote against them, and in fact to do everything within your power to oppose them.

Sincerely, your constituent,
<name>

When you visit the offices, be friendly. Introduce yourself to the staff using your first and last name. Use their names as you speak to them. Most likely you will not be talking to the congress person. You’ll be talking to staff. You can talk to volunteers, but make sure that you work your way to the paid staff when it comes time to deliver your letter. Tell them you live in their district and the neighborhood or town you live in. Be friendly. Make small talk at first. Then get down to business. Have two copies of whatever you will give them. Hand them the original of your letter for the congressperson and any supporting literature and ask them to sign a copy of the letter so you have proof it was received. If you have a cellphone with camera, or a small camera, ask if you can take a picture of you and the worker shaking hands for the memories.

When you are done, you might want to visit more. If it is remotely possible, visit the offices of both your senators and your representative. You know the healthcare highjack partisans will be.

If you are still wondering whether it is worth your time to visit your congress person’s office, read this for motivation. Mitch Stewart writes for healthcare highjack partisans:

All throughout August, our members of Congress are back in town. Insurance companies and partisan attack groups are stirring up fear with false rumors about the President’s plan, and it’s extremely important that folks like you speak up now.

So we’ve cooked up an easy, powerful way for you to make a big impression: Office Visits for Health Reform.

All this week, OFA members like you will be stopping by local congressional offices to show our support for insurance reform. You can have a quick conversation with the local staff, tell your personal story, or even just drop off a customized flyer and say that reform matters to you.

We’ll provide everything you need: the address, phone number, and open hours for the office, information about how the health care crisis affects your state for you to drop off (with the option of adding your personal story), and a step-by-step guide for your visit.

Click here to find your representatives’ local offices.

As you’ve probably seen in the news, special interest attack groups are stirring up partisan mobs with lies about health reform, and it’s getting ugly. Across the country, members of Congress who support reform are being shouted down, physically assaulted, hung in effigy, and receiving death threats. We can’t let extremists hijack this debate, or confuse Congress about where the people stand.

Office Visits for Health Reform are our chance to show that the vast majority of American voters know that the cost of inaction is too high to bear, and strongly support passing health reform in 2009.

Don’t worry if you’ve never done anything like this before. The congressional staff is there to listen, and your opinion as a constituent matters a lot. And if you bring a friend, you’ll have more fun and make an even greater impact.

Click here to sign up for an Office Visit for Health Reform.

Wherever you live, these visits matter: Many representatives are pushing hard toward reform, and they are taking a lot of heat from special interests. They deserve our thanks and need our support to continue the fight. But those who are still putting insurance companies and partisan point-scoring ahead of their constituents must know that voters are watching — and that we expect better.

Earlier this week, the President wrote that “this is the moment our movement was built for” and asked us all to commit to join at least one event this month. This is the way to answer that call, and rise to the challenge of this moment together.

Technorati Tags: Healthcare Highjack, Obamacare, Health, Action Alert

And yet it has already happened!

A recap of the story.

• Barbara Wagner, age 64, was a lung cancer survivor whose case was in remission.
• She was a low-income divorcee on the Oregon Health Plan, which is a low income Oregon State government healthcare plan.
• Then the cancer came back.
• Her last hope was a $4K a month drug (Tarceva by Genentech) prescribed by her doctor.
• Oregon Health Plan wouldn’t cover it. Medicare doesn’t either.
• But after being denied by OHP, she got a letter in the mail informing her that she was eligible to receive a suicide cocktail on the state’s dime.

So did she get the cancer treatment before she died? Yes. Genentech, the fabled big pharma company, was more sympathetic than the government and gave her Tarceva free of charge. Tell those who claim the government is kinder than free market companies that they are dead wrong.

Video after the fold.

Note: As the ABC article noted, there is a proven “strong link between cost-cutting pressure on physicians and their willingness to prescribe lethal drugs to patients — were it legal to do so“. How would the pressure on doctors change if the government ran all insurance companies? Is there any chance that putting the government in charge of all health insurance would reduce pressure on doctors?

Does your stomach drop when you get a letter from the IRS? How’s that for low pressure?

h/t: Drudge.

Also at Beaglescout.

Technorati Tags: Fact Check, Obamacare, Healthcare, Health, Government, Video

So since Obamascare is so senseless, we need all the help we can get to make sense of it. Thus the round-up. I’ll put out my links. Readers add their links. I will keep up the updates with your updates for a while. Comment up a storm to make it better.

The Awful and Unbearable Bills Themselves

• Senate: HC09 (pdf only) as of July 29. Index here.
• House: HR3200 (and pdf) as of July 14. Index here.
• The Infamous Healthcare Flowchart

Reading the Bills

• HR3200: el_cid01, Dianna Cotter, Fleckman
• HC09: Betsy McCaughey, Deroy Murdock, 24/7

Blogs and Resources

• New Atlantic: Diagnosis Blog
• RedState: healthcare, health care, obamacare.
• Keith Hennessey
• Mike Shedlock
• Jeannieology: 66.6 Elder Deathscare Initiative
• nessa, Take the Pill and Go Quietly into the Night
• wellsy, Health care reform’s misconceptions and why it’s now delayed
• Betsey McCaughey at Defend Your Health Care
• Shikha Dalmia: Obama’s Top Five Health Care Lies, Myth of Free Market Health Care
• George Newman: Parsing the Health Reform Arguments
• American Economic Institute for Research: “Elder Inflation” and Health Costs, Lessons from Massachusetts
• American Enterprise Institute: Health Policy Studies
• Heritage Foundation: Health Care Reform

And I would be remiss if I did not mention my most recent thinking on the Health Care debate: Chicken Little is not a story to emulate.

UPDATE #1

• National Taxpayers Union: Analyzing Obama’s Health Care Rhetoric, House Democrats’ Health Plan Contains Words of Coercion — not Choice — Text Analysis Shows, Obamacare: Rhetoric vs. Reality, Visualized
• Gateway Pundit: President’s own Physician is Against Obamacare (and at NPR)
• Randy Streu, Obama, Ezekiel and the Rationed Health Care Lifeboat
• Hunter Baker: 5 Simple Arguments Against Government Healthcare

Technorati Tags: Obamacare, Obama, Health, Government, Common Sense

Foxy Loxy said “Hello Girls, don’t you look like a dainty dish today!”

This panicked rush to legislate a thousand-page, Obamacare “fix” for medical care that will get re-jiggered in reconciliation (that means the smokey back room where Congressional hacks hide their nasty surprises in the bills with even less transparency than usual) gives me the feeling that I’m caught in the cautionary tale Chicken Little.

The skinny pipsqueak Chicken Little screamed “the sky is falling!” with such convincing, bloodcurdling fright she infected all the other farm animals with panic. They fled the farm for the woods and met the smooth-talking Foxy Loxy, who led them all into his lair to be out of the open. “Never mind the bones and the smell of death in the corner, girls,” Foxy Loxy whispers. “The sky can’t fall on you in here.” Well, we all know what happened to Lucy Goosey, Henny Penny and Lucky Ducky. They ended up as Foxy Loxy’s lunch. Chicken Little escaped though.

Chicken Little is not a story to emulate. It is not one I intend to relive, if that is even the right word, with my wife and children. Perhaps “repeat,” as in “those who forget history are condemend to repeat it,” is the right word. I intend to scream “NO” from the rooftops at the Chicken Littles. Let their imaginary sky-chunks fall on my head. I know I’m safer under the sky than in Foxy Loxy’s lair, or in Congress’ hidden lair where they reconcile the Obamacare bill into its final, nightmarish form.

To the proponents of Obamacare I plead, if you want to live out a Kafka story in your doctor’s office, please, just move to Canada and have at it. Leave my doctor’s office alone!

We do, after all, know the history of what happens when countries replace a free market in health care with a government run insurer. Private insurers cannot afford to continue and drop out of the business. Employers throw employees on the public system. There is a two-tiered medical system. Rich people and government employees get top-notch care. Everybody else goes to the Kafka Clinic. Doctors quit the profession. They emigrate if they can. Doctors who stay in business cut their hours drastically. Pharmaceutical companies do not do any research on new drugs. Even if they did, it wouldn’t help because government bureaucrats do not approve payments for new drugs to treat anything. Government rations health care, and decides whether people are allowed to receive treatment or will just be given painkillers while they die, or perhaps are directed to an assisted suicide center. Death is cheaper than living, after all, to unaccountable government bureaucrats. At least, as long as it’s your death we’re talking about instead of theirs’. The cost of health insurance doubles when it is collected through the tax system, approximately, and government health insurance service in comparison makes the DMV look like the service desks at Wal-Mart, where you can return anything that any Wal-Mart sells even without a price tag on it, let alone a receipt. That is the height of luxury compared to the Kafkaesque nightmare suffered by those in the bowels of the government run health care system.

What are the problems with health care in the US? I’ve often wondered why the problems I see with health insurance don’t seem to be the problems that hard-left ideologues in the Democrat party see. From what I understand the debating points about Health Care are only found on the Obama post-campaign-campaign Organizing for America site (!). I have enclosed the entire debate as it exists.

The Current Situation

Making sure every American has access to high quality health care is one of the most important challenges of our time. The number of uninsured Americans is growing, premiums are skyrocketing, and more people are being denied coverage every day. A moral imperative by any measure, a better system is also essential to rebuilding our economy — we want to make health insurance work for people and businesses, not just insurance and drug companies.

The Solution

1. Reform the health care system:We will take steps to reform our system by expanding coverage, improving quality, lowering costs, honoring patient choice and holding insurance companies accountable.
2. Promote scientific and technological advancements:We are committed to putting responsible science and technological innovation ahead of ideology when it comes to medical research. We believe in the enormous capacity of American ingenuity to find cures for diseases that continue to extinguish too many lives and cause too much suffering every year.
3. Improve preventative care:In order to keep our people healthy and provide more efficient treatment we need to promote smart preventative care, like cancer screenings and better nutrition, and make critical investments in electronic health records, technology that can reduce errors while ensuring privacy and saving lives.

According to the evidence of the Debate, the main problems with Health Care are:

1. The number of uninsured Americans is growing,
2. Premiums are skyrocketing,
3. And more people are being denied coverage every day.
4. Changing it is a moral imperative
5. A better system is also essential to rebuilding our economy
6. We want to make health insurance work for people and businesses, not just insurance and drug companies.

Let’s go over these serious problems one at a time.

1. The number of uninsured Americans is growing

Yes, every time Obamanomics drives another person into unemployment the number of uninsured Americans rises. Unemployment has been rising ever since the far-left Democrats took over Congress in 2007, creating the same crisis the far-left Democrats are trying to use to panic us into giving them the 54% of health care the government doesn’t already control. It’s funny how that works, isnt’ it? The same gang of hacks that creates a problem wants to be given extraordinary powers to get rid of the same problem they have been so busy creating in the first place!

Fact is, the 45-47 million uninsured Americans so frequently ciited consist of 10 million non-Americans, 14 million people who are eligible for SCHIP or Medicaid but never enrolled, and 17.6 million of those who make over $50K but do not want to pay for insurance. The remainder includes people who are really uninsured for the entire year plus those who were temporarily uninsured between jobs. And Obamacare won’t insure all 47 million of those cited people anyway. It will insure 13 million of them, leaving 33 million still uninsured under Obamacare, which is going to cost a trillion or more over ten years. You know, if you just buy a group insurance policy for those 13 million you’d be spending more in the neighborhood of 26 billion per year to do it. That costs a lot less over ten years than a trillion dollars.

2. Premiums are skyrocketing

How about a story?

Imagine you are the CEO of an insurance company. Your company offers a Blue Cross/Blue Shield Insurance Plan to individuals and employers. You also offer Malpractice Insurance to doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers. OK? Now imagine that an ambulance-chasing lawyer like John “voice of the unborn” Edwards sues one of your doctors and wins 50 million dollars that you have to pay out. Tragic, right? Not really. The next year you increase the malpractice premiums to cover your $50 million loss. Doctors demand increased payments to reimburse them for their increased insurance bill and for all the trendy and expensive tests they have to run to cover themselves against more lawsuits. So you increase the BC/BS Insurance rates you charge individuals and employers. Every year you pay out less than $50 million in malpractice awards you collect the difference in profit. If you ever pay out more than $50 million in a year, you increase next year’s malpractice insurance to cover the difference.

The cycle repeats. Ambulance chasing lawyers extort money out of insurance companies. Insurance companies charge more to doctors. Doctors charge more to insurance companies. Insurance companies charge more to consumers and employers.

At the end of several years of this, the insurance company gets easy profit when lawsuits are below previous levels. But no matter what, they are collecting more in premiums from both consumer and provider than they used to, before the cycle of lawsuits and rate increases started. Their gross income is higher. If malpractice payouts are unpredictable, the difference between malpractice collections and payments will frequently result in large windfall profits. And if they aim at a 10% profit, 10% of a much higher gross is a much higher profit to report on their annual reports. That means big bonuses for executives.

There is one way to stop this cycle of lawsuit abuse. It’s called tort reform. Obviously ambulance chasing, flim-flamming lawyers like John Edwards don’t like this idea. He, after all, was netting $11 million a year with his 40% cut of lawsuit proceeds for many years in the 1990s, by claiming that toddlers with cerebral palsy got it because the ob/gyn that delivered them let them be born naturally instead of cutting them out with a c-section. There is no scientific evidence that natural childbirth is a credible cause of CP. Actually, c-sections increase the risk of CP in the infant. The incidence of CP is lower in less developed countries where few c-sections are performed. But because Edwards was a handsome, charming and homespun hornswoggler, and because he often and infamously channeled the voice of the unborn child during delivery, he was able to hoodwink juries into giving huge awards to his clients. And he took 40% of those huge fees home to his 28,000 square foot mansion.

Tort reform works. My home state of Mississippi, which had previously had no caps on damages or penalties and was a plaintiff’s dream state, passed tort reform in 2004. From the ATRA website:

The Medical Assurance Company of Mississippi (MACM), which provides medical malpractice insurance to about 70 percent of doctors in the state, announced a 5-percent decrease in premiums for 2006 (The Natchez Democrat, 10/19/05). MACM did not raise base premiums in 2004 or 2005, and previously had been raising rates annually up to 20 percent (Associated Press, 9/24/04).

Medical malpractice insurance premiums had been rising in Mississippi at 20% per year before tort reform. After tort reform they stopped the first year, then dropped by 5%. I can’t find what happened in even later years, but I know that the number of ob/gyns in my part of Mississippi has not dropped since like it was doing before the reform.

And tort reform doesn’t just lower the cost of going to the doctor. It lowers the cost of doing all kinds of business. Manufacturers came to Mississippi after the reforms of 2004. We needed those manufacturers and the jobs they brought with them when Hurricane Katrina devastated the state the next year. Just imagine how slow rebuilding would have been without decent jobs to employ people whose homes had been severely damaged or destroyed.

How much money would tort reform take out of a non-productive part of the economy (insurance and lawyers) and restore to a productive part of the economy (the consumer’s pocketbook)?

Tort reform isn’t the only tool in the toolbox. Let’s also look at the FDA, Medicaid/Medicare/SCHIP, and employer-paid insurance.

Changing the mission of the FDA to establishing food and drug safety, with truth in advertising claims being handled through the civil courts, would vastly reduce the cost of pharmaceutical R&D and the consumer’s price of pharmaceuticals. If a drug is safe for a guy to take, why is it the government’s business whether he uses it to lower his blood pressure or regrow hair? It’s his doctor’s business and his what they use a drug for, yet the government gets involved with its regulations. Tort reform would also reduce the costs of prescription drugs to Americans. Fore more ideas about pharmaceuticals see here.

Before voting in Obamacare to ruin our health care forever, fix Medicaid first. It’s much smaller than Obamacare and it is already broken by the same things that will break Obamacare. If someone can find a way to repair Medicaid, other than imposing a much larger version of Medicaid doomed to fail even more cataclysmicly than Medicaid and Medicare, they will have the credibility to tackle health care for the portion of the nation that still pays its own bills. While at it, tackle SCHIP and Medicare as well as the VA system.

Also, insurance needs to be decoupled from employment by letting other organizations that are made of freely associating members, such as civic organizations, clubs, private gyms, and other such organizations, obtain 100% tax deductible group insurance plans, from any insurer in any state, for members and their families. The availability of health insurance that doesn’t go away when you lose your job would immediately increase entrepreneurship, spur job creation, and lower the cost of insurance and health care since people would have to pay the whole bill out of their own pocket.

3. And more people are being denied coverage every day.

This is a complaint about insurance company bureaucracy denying payment for a covered sick person because of some shady loophole snuck into a contract in a smokey room far away from all oversight. Is putting the government in charge of all health care decisions really going to make the bureaucracy better, more efficient, kinder, and the smokey rooms more transparent to oversight? How, by taking more money from the pockets of the people and giving it to those bureaucrats and Congressional hacks?

Actually, the truth is that government health plans always ration care.

4. Changing it is a moral imperative

Yes, getting the government out of health care is a moral imperative. 46% of every health care dollar is spent by government now. Every health dollar is regulated to death so badly that I’d guess half of them are wasted on unnecessary paperwork and tests. Once again it demonstrates the truth that Democrats want the government to take more money out of the pockets of the people for the pleasure of federal government bureaucrats hidden away in their Kafkaesque mazes of modular furniture.

5. A better system is also essential to rebuilding our economy

Huh? How about those far left “progressive” Democrat ideologues stop destroying the economy before we let them have a whack at health care with their unworkable, many-times-failed socialist schemes?

The American people trusted Democrats more with the economy than they trusted Republicans. I don’t think they’ll make that mistake again, not for a long time. George W. Bush and his Congress spent like drunkards, but once Congress got turned over to the Democrats in 2007 everything went to perdition. Housing collapse followed by banking collapse followed by automaker collapse followed by bloodthirsty takeovers of business after business by the federal government in a panic driven charge toward total command-economy fascism. Is that what Hope and Change meant to voters, or did they have a more benign idea about what it meant? I don’t think the voters expected this!

6. We want to make health insurance work for people and businesses, not just insurance and drug companies.

When the government takes over business roles from the private sector it is a great danger to the economy. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the abusive government policies that aggravated their flaws brought down the world economy last year. From what I have seen the far-left Democrats want to take more money from the pockets of the people and give it to slow-moving government bureaucrats. That doesn’t help anybody’s health. I want to make health insurance work for consumers and providers, and not particularly for insurance, employers, the far-left unions and their pet Democrats, or the leviathan of government. Consumers and medical providers are doing God’s work. The rest of them are just vacuuming protection money out of the pockets of the people. The best way to help consumers and providers is to stop government meddling.

Government interference in health care adds tons of paperwork so that no busy doctor’s office can ever get by with only one person spending all their time doing paperwork. You need at least two. Every time I see my primary care doctor I have to deal with a clerk, a nurses’ assistant, and an office manager who just take care of paperwork. Where does the money come from to pay for them? How much does their piece of the puzzle add to my health care budget? How much does it improve my health? Government paperwork requirements need to be cut by 90% or more. The page count of government regulations also needs to be slashed. Currently, with tens of thousands of pages of government regulations it is literally impossible to know when you are breaking the law. This means that the law has become impossible to obey, and people hold it in contempt. The federal regulations need to be cut to no more than 100 8×5 pages of 10pt Times Roman, and limited forever to the same page count (no changes in font size or margin size allowed either).

Solutions

The Obamacare argument finishes with its solutions.

1. Reform the health care system
2. Promote scientific and technological advancements
3. Improve preventative care

To which I answer

1. Reform the health care system by kicking government out of it. Government already spends half the money in the system and regulates every single dime in it. That amounts to total government control of the system. If the health care system is broken, it isn’t because there is too little government, but too much.
2. Promote scientific and technological advancements by using the profit motive so that pharmaceutical firms continue to conduct research and development. Change the FDA so it stops standing on pharmaceutical firms’ necks. Government price control of pharmaceuticals will kill off the world’s pharmaceutical industry, which only exists to any degree in the US.
3. Improving preventative care will increase costs and improve human lives. I think that’s worth the trade-off. But this flies in the face of actual history, that teaches us that all government health plans ration medical care. All. Of. Them.

Don’t be hoodwinked, flim-flammed, bamboozled, and given the old okey-doke. Obamacare may promise great things, but it is just another far-left Democrat scheme to take money from the pockets of the people for the pleasure of government bureaucrats.

Also read Jeff Emmanuel’s two cents at RedState. More on Obamacare here. And say “NO” to Obamacare, STAT!

Technorati Tags: Obamacare, Obama, Health, Government, Common Sense

The Code of Ethics of The Society of Professional Journalists is a flawed document because it holds journalists to inhuman and contradictory standards. No intelligent journalist with an ounce of empathy who learns about the facts of a situation can ever be non-biased and free of attachments to people in the community in the way that the code demands. Can a journalist who receives hard information about the identity of a murderer truly claim to hold no opinion about the murderer’s guilt? Can a journalist who watches corruption take place at a city council meeting fail to draw inferences and conclusions about the corrupt official’s other official actions? Any posture claiming non-bias and non-attachment requires either an extraordinary lack of curiosity, memory, and empathy or wholesale concealment of facts.

Strong claims, indeed. Read on if you wonder whether they can be defended. Before we start, please familiarize yourself with the Code.

The principles are clear, and with one exception are good.

1. “Seek truth and report it” is the nut of it all, isn’t it? It means you do not begin to investigate with a hypothesis in your mind. That is crusading, not journalism. It means you go out and find the answers to the questions who, what, where, when, and how. Answering “why” requires mind-reading that is impossible for human beings, even human beings who believe in it, and has no place in journalism. It’s just as bad as “anonymous sources,” which is a phrase that conceals the reality of slanderer, libeler, traitor, and rumor-mongerer in a pretty package as if it wasn’t a corruption of truth-telling and journalism. After answering the questions of who-what-where-when-how to the best of his ability, the journalist writes the story from the beginning and stops at the end. Opinion, mind-reading, anonymous sources, and speculative rumor-mongering do not belong in journalism.
2. “Minimize harm” is meant to protect innocent individual people from being victimized by the journalist, especially if they have already been thrust into a tragedy the journalist is covering. It is not meant to protect governments, belief systems, criminal gangs, journalists, newspapers, or politicians from inconvenient facts or to sustain a political narrative. It is meant to protect individual human beings from degradation, crime, and retaliation. And it is meant to protect law abiding private citizens. Governments and criminals can take care of themselves. Journalists are supposed to serve as a counter to government spin and as the white light of truth when it comes to criminal enterprises.
3. “Act independently” is inherently wrong-headed.Now if you are just looking at the principle, “act independently,” you might wonder what the problem is. As is usual, the devil is in the details. Here are the SPJ’s bullet points under “act independently.”
   

   Journalists should:

   1. Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
   2. Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
   3. Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
   4. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
   5. Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.
   6. Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.
   7. Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news.

   The first three bullet points show the problem. They are not about acting independently, or about revealing the truth. They are about protecting the appearance of integrity. And they also presume that all ties to the community are bad. Do you just perhaps think that attitude might sneak into reporting? The fourth point, if followed, would testify as to the reporter’s failure to uphold the first three points. I’ve never heard of a reporter doing such a thing. To the contrary, I’ve seen journalists defending their own political party from inconvenient evidence without hesitation.

   This whole rule puts the journalist in the impossible position of affirming that he has no biases at all. Bias is human. Only an inhuman robot could meet this requirement. Further, the rule forbids the journalist from trusting those on whom he reports. It presumes that ties are bad. Trust goes both ways. If he doesn’t trust, he and his stories will not be trusted. And this enforced distancing from the community makes the journalist not part of it, and unable to understand or report accurately on it. It forces the journalist into solitary Egotism and Narcissism (or “me-ism”), the characteristic flaw of journalists today. Journalists need to join their communities, tone down the ego and distancing, become part of the community, and put their biases front and center. So do editorial boards.

   I’m not saying that journalists should write propaganda as covert agents for a political group or an ideological position. That would violate “Seek the truth and report it,” which includes the truth of what is within the journalist’s soul, and also the fourth principle “be accountable.” But journalists should be part of their community. They should feel free to join voluntary associations, to fall in love with their beat, or even run for political office without losing their status as “journalists.” These are what good and capable people do. Those who prevent themselves from acting like good and capable people demean themselves for a false principle.

   The third principle should be replaced with “Reveal the reporter’s and editor’s ties and biases.”

4. “Be accountable” is absolutely true, but not followed by most journalist organizations. It is mostly ignored because it is directly opposed to the official third principle, “act independently.” How can you “act independently” of the people in a community and also “be accountable” to the same people? In the long run, it is impossible. So current journals assign the accountability function to an ombudsman whose actual function is to spin and deflect rightful criticism about biased and outright false stories.Not only do journalists need to be personally accountable, but they also need to refrain from associating with organizations that are dedicated to falsehoods, such as criminal gangs, enemies at war, or those groups that are destructive of society in general. These kinds of organizations treasure their associations with journalists because friendly journalists buy them sympathy and public acceptance. And journalists must not let themselves be used as weapons against the social contract or law and order. Not if they have any wish to be the fourth estate of government. You see, they should be instinctively opposed to government, which extracts income by force from the citizenry much like a protection racket, but not to society.

If you have ever been the direct or indirect subject of a news story you can check this yourself. Were the facts reported correctly or incorrectly? Did they even get the names of the people involved right? Did the reporter delve into the thought processes of people involved in the story in ways that are literally impossible for the reporter to have known? Was the conclusion or lesson of the story transplanted into the facts of the story as if it was an invader from Mars? If you complained about it was it corrected, on page 17B, in white ink on a white background, with new falsehoods introduced in the correction? That’s barely an exaggeration. If newspapers were honest about the quality of their reporting most would have more corrections than original reporting in every issue.

And that is why newspapers are failing. They are not worth their cover price, even in debased 2009 dollars. Their version of “truth” is nothing but rumor, lies and bias: a tale full of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing. It is why newspapers will continue to fail. It is why the failure will accelerate. Even if the gubmint bails them out for now, once a Republican gets into office the reign of US gubmint newspapers (our Pravda and Izvestia) will be over.

Repairing the ethical code is a necessary step for recovery. The code requires journalists to take a step back from their community and look at it as outsiders. They may not trust things to be as they seem. This would allow them to be more objective, if they were capable of it. But they aren’t. Everybody has biases, and not only do journalists have their own biases, because they mistrust their sources they are also biased in favor of man bites dog stories.

More on detachment, the original principle three. When writing freely from the imagination, nothing comes out but bias. See Maureen Dowd, Jayson Blair, and Stephen Glass. When writing of something in the real world, as in the example of Plato’s cave, the writer actually records an image of the real world projected on his own thought-patterns; or bias. Without a connection to the community to provide a feedback and sanity-checking mechanism, the writer’s bias is never corrected. Instead, the reporter’s bias adds to the bias of the editor who never even sees the real world with his own eyes, but only through the keyboards of his minions. This idolatry of detachment from real life causes the “ethical” journalist to let his bias grow until it is the monster that controls him.

Rather than purifying a journalism based on detachment and obscured bias, the answer is a journalism based on involvement and an insider’s understanding: an insider’s journalism instead of an outsider’s journalism.

If insider’s journalism sounds like blogging, perhaps it should. In ye olde days, journalists were amateurs who had other jobs but wrote about what they knew for the broadsheets. It was only with the advent of cheap newsprint and the automobile that it became possible for a single newspaper to bundle together the news of the day, stock quotes, classified advertising, commercial advertising, comics, sports, and the other categories of news and distribute this news cheaply to a large metropolitan area. Newspapers collected a “monopoly rent” because their distribution system was expensive to recreate, a defacto monopoly. And now that the internet has developed into an instant distribution system, newspapers can no longer extract those monopoly rents and have to radically restructure to deal with changing realities.

THE WAY FORWARD

How could a newspaper take advantage of its strengths? One of the still thriving and growing newspapers is the Wall Street Journal, which daily features actionable information that can give a tactical advantage to those businessmen who read it before their competitors. In other words, the WSJ is an intelligence service for businessmen. That is valuable, and people will pay for it. But intelligence doesn’t have to consist of new information, it can also consist of the patient assembly of extant source information and connection to breaking stories for a first draft of history that will give those who read it a tactical advantage. The idea of connecting current events to history with minimal bias, vetting the connections, and maintaining a useful and actionable understanding of history as one of the roles of journalism is very new, when compared to the actual performance of journalists. It would make journalism into an intelligence service of use to everyone, not just to nations. It contributes to the transparency of world events, which should make the world safer for us all. And it combats the left’s post-modern attack on history with the truth, which is that reality is knowable and truth gives an advantage to those who know it.

I ask you, would you pay for a newspaper if it gave you a competitive advantage versus those who didn’t read it?

I would. But newspapers today do not give me any competitive advantage over a straight AP feed coupled with historically aware commentary from one of many bloggers I find compelling and trustworthy.

More Reading…

Links Concerning Ethics

• Society of Professional Journalists Ethics and FAQL
• Err on the side of ethics
• Ethics and new media
• Reader’s Reactions
• Consider Potential Harm and Public Interest
• Ways to Prevent Ethical Lapses
• Editors must be Ethical Purists

Papers’ Ethical Codes

• New York Times
• Tampa Tribune
• Kansas City Star
• San Jose Mercury
• San Antonio Express-News
• Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Other notes.

• Newspaper Ad sales plummet.

Technorati Tags: Media, Bias, Ethics, Journalism, Culture War

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord Hymn)

The shot heard round the world has its echoes today in the TEA PARTY movement, state sovereignty and nullification movements, and even the push for federalism amendments. Likewise the long list of abuses by the British crown against the American Colonies has its echoes in the Democrats’ refusal to read thousand page bills before they are passed, or to allow Republicans to read and debate the bills if they won’t, in Obama’s proliferation of unconstitutional “czar” positions and executive branch organizations without significant legislative oversight, in Obama’s intention to put an organization packed full of people who were convicted of vote fraud in charge of the 2010 Census, in the Democrats’ refusal to protect the country’s borders, in their intentions to nullify the rights to own and manage one’s own property and protect one’s self by force of arms, and in their intention to use the courts to enforce racialist policies under the misleading name of Equal Opportunity. The Democrats are too extreme, too far left, for America. Their bailouts, non-stimulus-stimulus, seizures and nationalizations of key industries, regulatory overreach, and subversion of the press’ role as a watchdog of government are destroying our economy and blinding us to the injury.

Will there be another shot? I am not calling for gunplay, but for a symbolic beginning to the political battle. Will more grassroots TEA Parties do it? Or will it take some great suffering, such as the scourging Sarah Palin has been subjected to since September 2008, to awaken America to the injustice of the Democrats’ plans?

Technorati Tags: 1776, July 4, Independence Day, Appreciation, Culture War, Patriotism