The Lame Reject The Sick

clipped from thehill.com The Obama administration has not ruled out turning sick people away from an insurance program created by the new healthcare law to provide coverage for the uninsured. Critics of the $5 billion high-risk pool program insist it will run out of money before Jan. 1, 2014. That’s when the program sunsets and health plans can no longer discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. Administration officials insist they can make changes to the program to ensure it lasts until 2014, and that it may not have to turn away sick people. Officials said the administration could also consider reducing benefits under the program, or redistributing funds between state pools. But they acknowledged turning some people away was also a possibility.

The Manchurian Moonbat

clipped from www.moonbattery.com In case anyone failed to grasp that the long-term objective of ObamaCare is to nationalize the insurance industry: A socialist organization with close ties to Barack Obama has outlined a plan to turn the president's health-care legislation into a government-run system that will ultimately eliminate private insurance companies. Obama's health-care bill "should create millions of new stakeholders in a health-care system governed by democratically established rules rather than by the fiats of private insurers," wrote Frank Llewellyn, national director of Democratic Socialists of America. Writing in the latest issue of the socialist Democratic Left magazine, Llewellyn said "progressives" must use Obama's health-care legislation "to build support for the elimination of private insurers." Lift the rock of Obama's background and prominent members of Llewellyn's Democratic Socialists of America can be found among the repugnant creatures that wiggle and writhe in horror of the light.

Ass In A Hole

clipped from biggovernment.com The administration’s stimulus program has failed. Growth is slow and unemployment remains high. The president, his friends and advisers talk endlessly about the circumstances they inherited as a way of avoiding responsibility for the 18 months for which they are responsible. But they want new stimulus measures—which is convincing evidence that they too recognize that the earlier measures failed. And so the U.S. was odd-man out at the G-20 meeting over the weekend, continuing to call for more government spending in the face of European resistance. The contrast with President Reagan’s antirecession and pro-growth measures in 1981 is striking. Reagan reduced marginal and corporate tax rates and slowed the growth of nondefense spending. Recovery began about a year later. After 18 months, the economy grew more than 9% and it continued to expand above trend rates. clipped from biggovernment.com This more appropriately looks like an ass in a hole. Or would that be a well?

A Fit Resting Place

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

The Price

clipped from www.quotedb.com "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." --  Plato

Yes They Have II (Which Doctors?)

clipped from blogs.telegraph.co.uk Economics should never be treated as a science. Its claims are not falsifiable, which is why economists can disagree so violently among themselves: a rarer spectacle in science, where disputes are usually resolved one way or another by hard data. It is a branch of anthropology and psychology, a moral discipline if you like. Anybody who loses sight of this is a public nuisance, starting with Dr Athreya. As for the Fed, I venture to say that a common jury of 12 American men and women placed on the Federal Open Market Committee would have done a better job of setting monetary policy over the last 20 years than Doctors Bernanke and Greenspan. Actually, Greenspan never got a Phd. His honourary doctorate was awarded later for political reasons. (He had been a Nixon speech-writer). But never mind.

Yes They Have

clipped from blogs.telegraph.co.uk However, Dr Athreya’s assertions cannot be allowed to pass. The current generation of economists have led the world into a catastrophic cul de sac. And if they think we are safely on the road to recovery, they still fail to understand what they did. Central banks were the ultimate authors of the credit crisis since it is they who set the price of credit too low, throwing the whole incentive structure of the capitalist system out of kilter, and more or less forcing banks to chase yield and engage in destructive behaviour. They ran ever-lower real interests with each cycle, allowed asset bubbles to run unchecked (Ben Bernanke was the cheerleader of that particular folly), blamed Anglo-Saxon over-consumption on excess Asian savings (half true, but still the silliest cop-out of all time), and believed in the neanderthal doctrine of “inflation targeting”. Have they all forgotten Keynes’s cautionary words on the “tyranny of the general price level” in the early 1930s? Yes they have.

In The Middle With Tea

clipped from pajamasmedia.com VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Where Did The Tea Party Anger Come From? “In short, sometime in the last ten years public employees were directly identified with most of what is now unsustainable in the U.S. The old idea that a public servant gave up a competitive salary for job security was redefined as hitting the jackpot. . . . Emblematic of the anger at both top and bottom was the 2008 meltdown: those who had not played by the rules still got their mortgages, then defaulted, and left the taxpayer with their bills; those who made the loans and profited without risk, took the bailout money, and left us with the cleanup. Those in between with underwater mortgages and higher taxes pay the tab.”

Nonbelievers

clipped from www.investors.com Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere. And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without "due process of law." Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference. With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution. If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don't believe in constitutional government.

Affirmatively Scheming Liberal Hypocrites

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The Stupid Gap

clipped from pajamasmedia.com COMMENT OF THE DAY: A reason for the “wealth or income gap”: Smart people keep on doing things that are smart and make them money while stupid people keep on doing things that are stupid and keep them from achieving. People who get an education, stay off of drugs, apply themselves, and save and wisely invest their earnings do a lot better than people who drop out of school, become substance abusers, and buy fancy cars and houses that they can’t afford, only to lose them. We don’t have an income gap. We have a stupid gap. Ouch.

Unengaged

clipped from www.ocregister.com To return to Cohen's question: "Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?" Well, he's a guy who was wafted ever upward – from the Harvard Law Review to state legislator to United States senator – without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. "Who is this guy?" Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. "What are his core beliefs?" It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It's the "nothing else" that the likes of Cohen are belatedly noticing. Did all those hopeychangers realize that Obama's war would be run by Bush's defense secretary and Bush's general? Hey, never mind: the Moveon.org folks have quietly removed their celebrated "General Betray-us" ad from their website. It took the oil spill to alert Americans to the unengaged president.

But they're just good people looking for a better life

clipped from www.moonbattery.com One advantage of our rulers deliberately allowing Mexico's underclass to colonize and culturally annex the Southwest is that when life in Los Angeles, Houston, and Phoenix becomes indistinguishable from the chaos south of the border, shopping will be much more exciting. Highlights from a trip to a jewelry store in Monterrey:

Once And Future Slav(e)s

Main Entry: slave
Pronunciation: \ˈslāv\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English sclave, from Anglo-French or Medieval Latin; Anglo-French esclave, from Medieval Latin sclavus, from Sclavus Slavic; from the frequent enslavement of Slavs in central Europe during the early Middle Ages
Date: 14th century

1 : a person held in servitude as the chattel of another
2 : one that is completely subservient to a dominating influence
3 : a device (as the printer of a computer) that is directly responsive to another
4 : drudge, toiler

— slave adjective

The Overton Window

clipped from chicagoboyz.net This is old hat to a lot of folks in the blogosphere, but defining terms is a good thing. Wikipedia: The Overton window is a concept in political theory, named after the former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Joe Overton, who developed the model. It describes a “window” in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on an issue. Overton described a method for moving that window, thereby including previously excluded ideas, while excluding previously acceptable ideas. The technique relies on people promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous “outer fringe” ideas. That makes those old fringe ideas look less extreme, and thereby acceptable. Delivering rhetoric to define the window provides a plan of action to make more acceptable to the public some ideas by priming them with other ideas allowed to remain unacceptable, but which make the real target ideas seem more acceptable by comparison.

Skimobiling

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The "Fix"

clipped from pajamasmedia.com But the centerpiece of the bill is supposed to be a tighter regulation of banks. One of the major elements of the legislation was a proposal to force banks to divest themselves of risky trades, marking the return of the so-called “Volcker Rule”. But Joshua Brown writing in the Christian Science Monitor argues most of the restrictions were for show; that loopholes ensured it is Volcker only in name. Wall Street wins this round. The “teeth” of the Volcker Rule have been kicked in and there are enough holes elsewhere for White & Case to exploit on behalf of their clientele til the cows come home. The Dems unanimously voted for it. Interestingly, Republicans all voted against it. They didn’t think the final version was strict enough or that it did enough to prevent Too Big To Fail. … There will be some limitation to what large banks can do on a proprietary basis, but they will still be de facto giant hedge funds, albeit hedge funds with higher capital reserve requirements.

"Sweeping" Reform

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com

A Whale Of O Disaster

clipped from hotair.com The A-Whale bills itself as the largest open-water oil skimmer in the world, and it’s at least very impressive.  Originally an oil and ore tanker, the ship’s owners recently refitted the ship to do exactly the kind of work that the US so desperately needs in the Gulf of Mexico, and to do it on a vastly larger scale than current operations can handle.  According to the ship’s project manager, the entire American effort in 66 days has skimmed off 600,000 barrels of oil.  The ship’s owners claim that A-Whale can skim 500,000 barrels a day. So where is the A-Whale now?  In the Gulf?  Not yet.  It’s on its way there after being tied to a dock in Norfolk, Virginia, and won’t be allowed to join the cleanup effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets their standards

Who's The Real Smart *ss?

clipped from ace.mu.nu A small business owner has the audacity to tell Sheriff Joe, he'd like to keep a little more of the money he earns and Biden let's him know what he thinks about that idea.

Ouch

clipped from pajamasmedia.com THE REAL SCIENCE GAP: “It’s not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It’s a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.” UPDATE: A reader emails: I work for a very large high tech company. I presently manage a research team in the corporate lab. The problem is that there is no encouragement for American non-minority males to go into science and engineering because we will almost never hire them. Instead we are being forced to look for technical females and under-represented minorities. Since very few American females choose engineering, we end up hiring Chinese and Indian women. I believe within less than a generation we will be in deep trouble, technically, in this country, and we’ll be without the means and capability to maintain the highly sophisticated civilization that we’ve constructed. Ouch.