Continuing on with yesterday’s topic
Government cannot relieve from toil. The normal must take care of themselves. Self government means self support.
Calvin Coolidge
How unremarkable it is that we find those who most want to “Change” America actually needing the government to help them run their lives on a day-to-day basis.
McCain was rightly laughed at when he hoisted the idea of taxing your employer paid health care benefits during the last Presidential election.
That then candidate Obama and the Congressional Dems mocked this idea when McCain brought it up hasn’t stopped them from inserting it into their still growing health care legislation.
Of course, they can’t go demanding that everybody be included under the legislation. They still have so many capaign debts to pay off.
Union members and their families who receive healthcare benefits paid for by their employers would be exempted from a new tax on healthcare under one option being proposed by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mt), according to a report by the Fox Business Channel’s Peter Barnes.
It is no longer hard to find the redistribution of wealth fantasies in the left’s ideas. The have the majority in Congress and believe they have public support for this. They will have support for this right up until the first non-union worker sees his paycheck cut by 10% to cover the new taxes.
Found via the SayAnything blog
Be aware that there is a new group that is looking to disenfranchise your vote and thin out your wallet.
Their name is Community Organizers International.
You may have heard of their prior incarnation, ACORN.
Visiting New Jersey for the first time?
Hope you brought an analog map because the government there doesn’t like them thar new-fangled digital ones
It is already illegal to manually use a cell phone for texting or calling while driving in New Jersey. A state legislator has aimed at the next in-car distraction: GPS devices. Democratic Assemblyman Harvey Smith wants a ban on manually programming GPS devices while driving. You would need to pull over to input your destination, or have a voice-operated unit. Punishment otherwise would be a $100 fine.
Yet another reason to never go there. Not that I needed another.
And I’m not being mean to New Jersey. Washington recently passed a mandate that makes it a driving infraction to drive without your headlights on when itis raining. This is Washington, so that’s 275+ days a year. Basically, if your wipers are going, your lights must be on or you’re Trooper-bait.
I’ve sen the WSP lined up six deep under the overpass picking off drivers who didn’t hear about this new one. Sure, it’s common sense to put your lights on during a downpour, but anyone with an IQ over room temperature knows you cannot mandate common sense.
Unless you want to make money off of it (cough, cough).
“This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low- grade and trivial things—broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon — laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution — these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage,” – Satan, in Mark Twain’s “The Mysterious Stranger.”
Found at Sullivan’s place. Joe Huffman’s often mentioned a good way to attack gun bigots is to make them look like fools. This quote made me think of that.
One way to keep the newly unemployed from being quite so riot-inclined is to pay them more in unemployment benefits. And, since December 2008, it appears that we have been doing just that. Went from $1k average check to $1,800 now (i.e., May), with $2k projected for June 2009.
I dunno, shouldn’t there have been a debate in Congress? Maybe passage of a law?
For the last couple weeks I have been reading and re-reading The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal by Robert P. Murphy, Ph. D.
If you haven’t ventured into “The Politically Incorrect Guide” series of books, this is as good a reason as any, and as good an example as any, to start with. They are quick reads, set up almost like textbooks, and are full of relevant information from both, or in this case, all three sides of the argument.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. From middle school students to adults, this is true intellect and knowledge base growing material. We already know why the Keynesians (such as Krugman) are wrong in theory as well as by example. This book will also show and prove how the Friedmanites (Bernanke and Greenspan) have not learned the lessons laid out for them by our grandparents’ examples.
I have a more than two weeks worth of quotes at hand, but we’ll see how long it take y’all to tire of them. And when I say “tire” I’m implying that they’ll depress you when you compare them to current events. So get your HopeAndChange supplied Zoloft and/or Prozac ready, because here we go.
To begin, I’m posting the most famous anti-New Deal quote of them all
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong somebody can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot.
Henry Morgenthau – FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury
/sarcasm on/ Oh, those heady days of 2007? All that unregulated capitalism got us into that mess. /sarcasm off/
What do you get when a government funded scientist completes a “Climate Change Study” and concludes that there have been no increase in hurricanes, Nor’easters, tornadoes or thunderstorms, and no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells or increases in rain fall or drought?
Why, you get the Obama Administration saying that the world is going to end because of Global Warming.
The new federal report on climate change gets a withering critique from Roger Pielke Jr., who says that it misrepresents his own research and that it wrongly concludes that climate change is already responsible for an increase in damages from natural disasters.
…..
You can check out Dr. Pielke’s blog for a detailed rebuttal of how the report presents science in his area of expertise, the study of trends in natural disasters and their relation to climate change. While the new federal report (prepared by 13 agencies and the White House) paints a dire picture of climate change’s impacts, Dr. Pielke says that the authors of this new report, like those of previous reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Stern Review, cherrypick weak evidence that fits their own policy preferences. He faults all these reports for all relying on “non-peer reviewed, unsupportable studies rather than the relevant peer-reviewed literature†and for “featuring non-peer-reviewed work conducted by the authors.â€
Dr. Pielke contrasts these reports’ conclusions about trends in natural disasters with the some quite different findings last year by the federal Climate Change Science Program.
I’m waiting for the sooper sekrit conspiracy theory from the eco-socialists on this one. Who got to him and what did they pay him off with.
Remember kiddies, when you tell the truth about the Glowball Warmening myth, you make AlGore cry.
Someone within the California government has been eating their Wheaties
With California slipping into a financial sinkhole, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing to save more than $180 million by cutting short the sentences of thousands of immigrants in the state’s prisons and turning them over to federal authorities for deportation.
The idea faces certain hurdles — for one thing, commuting some sentences will require court approval — and immigration authorities warn that a mass release of inmates from California and other states could swamp the federal system, which is already at capacity.
Sounds like we finally found something worthy of spending Stimulus money on.
Obama and the Dems wanted more government jobs. Too bad for us the ICE is the “wrong” kind of government jobs.
I am certain that that is what the pro-socialized medicine faithful call the Wait Time Alliance
The 2009 report card released Thursday by the Wait Time Alliance, says there remains “much unfinished business,” in improving the amount of time between when a patient is referred by a family doctor to when treatment is provided by a specialist. The WTA is made up of 13 medical associations including the Canadian Medical Association.
…..
For cancer patients, the study found that the median wait time for radiation therapy was almost seven weeks, exceeding the benchmark of four weeks.
“If I have cancer, I don’t want to wait at all. I want to be a priority and not because I have money or influence, but because I need care,” Canadian Medical Association president Dr. Robert Ouellet said in a speech Thursday to the Montreal Economic Institute.
Patients are also facing long delays when they go the emergency department, the WTA said, waiting an average of nine hours to be seen and treated and for patients who needed to be admitted, the average wait time was nearly 24 hours.
“The longer wait for patients to be admitted is often due to the inability to find an available hospital inpatient bed,” the WTA said.
Seven weeks for an Oncologist.
Nine hours just to be seen in an ER.
Yet, American medicine is supposedly “broken”.
When my doctor saw something on a Thursday she didn’t like in a set of x-rays that followed a bout of pneumonia, I saw a Pulmonary Specialist the following Tuesday. The PS agreed and I was biopsied on the next Tuesday. The only reason I wasn’t looked at on the Thursday was because the procedure was a bit invasive and I would have had to sit out a pistol match that weekend.
Yes, I have medical insurance I pay for through my current employer, and yes, it took me 4 months to pay my portion of that bill off. However, I wasn’t left wondering for nearly two months if there was going to be serious trouble in my future. More importantly to me, neither The Mom or The Wife were left to worry about said serious trouble. Seven weeks of daily worrying would have possibly killed one or both of them.
Less than a decade ago, when I worked in the “government funded medical transportation” world (as I like to call it), we’d have people call up to be transported to the ER because their farts stunk extra bad. They’d get seen, be told they were being paranoid, and be back at home within a third of Canada’s ER wait time.
No, we couldn’t deny them a ride per my then employer’s contract with the county. Not surprisingly, after leaving said employ, no one in the media wanted to talk with me about the wasting of county medical funds by publicly housed hypochondriacs.
It is a fact of life that when something is “free”, people tend to waste it. Medicine will be no different, because to those to whom it is already “free” are already wasting it.
Found via the SayAnything blog
