Sunday, February 28, 2010
Obamacare
Why we think we should begin all over!
As many have pointed out, people do not like the idea of greater government intervention into their lives, and they see this bill for what it is: yet another arrogant power grab. Plus, they are convinced that the bill is being sold under very specious claims of cost reduction, when the real cost drivers are not addressed--in their opinion--and, as is usual for government solutions, the costs will inevitably explode downstream by factors of two or three at least. They liken this bill to making medicine a large set of highly regulated utility companies representing 1/6th of the economy, which is just one small step away from government ownership.
Further, many simply are not buying into the Obama agenda of ever greater government solutions, instead of market driven solutions. While some provisions are attractive, they do not account for how they are being paid for clearly, and there is suspicion that Medicare fiddles are counting savings twice, whether that is true or not, and to talk of a $500 billion reduction in Medicare scares the elderly to tears.
In short, the Democrats and Obama have lost the trust of many because of their fiddles with medical hot buttons, and see the need to begin over with clarity for all to understand.
Labels: Health Debate
Friday, February 26, 2010
Obamacare Should be Dead
A Terribly Arrogant Show by the Democrats
There are several issues with the proposed bill that do not show up in the text or are sufficiently vague, that the Republicans pointed out in huge detail.
These were:
1) Abortion funding by the feds, which is in there, that will add untold millions of deaths to the 50+ million so far;
2) adequate tort reform, which is nowhere to be found;
3) giving the states a free ride a la Nebraska's gift to the tune of 50 x 200 million dollars = $10 billion;
4) Reducing Medicaid by $500 billion without specifying how this will affect senior citizens; and,
5) disguising the actual cost rise the bill will confer on the public because of the addition of 31 million people, and not spelling out all of the assumptions given to the CBO, many of which are also chimeras.
There are more examples, but these were the ones I remember. We all know that the hope of reducing waste and fraud in Medicaid is a hopy changy chimera that will not pay off any time soon, or near the amount desired, if ever.
It is therefore highly disingenuous to tout that all of the public agrees with the bill's provisions, or lack of same, when clear suggestions have been continuously given all year by the Republicans in over 70 bills to reduce these very large impact costs drastically, but to no avail.
We do indeed need to begin all over.
Labels: Democrats, Obamacare, Republicans
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Civil Unions?
Conservatives Support Civil Unions
Some conservatives are driven by their understanding of the Bible and their religious leaders, which condemns homosexuality in several books—notably Leviticus and Romans.
Other conservatives, that happen to be atheistic in their religious outlook, are not bound by what the Bible and religious sects say, and can thus free-think their way out of the dilemma of respecting the customs and traditions of marriage versus a more open interpretation.
Still others simply wish that the whole issue would go away, disappear, and not come back.
There are also agnostic conservatives that wish to ride the tide of social change (read: the hedonistic tendencies of many to release all of the bonds of morality) regardless of the tide’s breakaway impact on fundamental Christian moral values.
Those minorities that want to sunder the conservative cause by calling the stand of Christian conservatives for Civil Unions and not gay marriage to be wrong, are themselves being intolerant of a religious and moral belief system and a tradition that is widely and deeply held in the nation; perhaps by 80-85% of the population.
I fail to see the advantage of elevating this now to a divisive, emotional, political, legislated, special kind of morality issue for conservatives, rather than leaving it to be the fundamental religious issue it most surely is and will remain to be in our society.
The long term question is: whose morality will be followed, that of the continued relaxation of moral standards, customs and traditions seemingly championed by humanists and feel-good hedonists, or of reinforcing the Christian moral standards of our society?
In all cases where this has come to a vote, Christian morality has won handily.
Labels: Atheism. Christianity, Moral Degeneration
Monday, February 15, 2010
Truly Annoying Things-- II
The Next Set of Annoying and Hateful Things
Number five in my list of truly annoying things is overzealous environmentalism. This includes attempting to save a few bugs from extinction by preventing homeowners from saving their houses from erosion, and the entire scam of Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW. From the small bugs to the sweeping impact of supposed fixes demanded by AGW proponents such as Al Gore, this is the most egregious con job on the public since eugenics.
The moral degeneration of our society is the next (or sixth) hateful thing. From teen pregnancies to abortions, to unfaithful husbands to hookups, and to the blatant TV and PC porn shows, we have become hedonistic and nihilistic. This trend has been wildly supported by leftists that appear to want our society to fall apart.
In seventh place is the almost total disregard for the provisions of our Constitution on the part of the Congresses and the Presidents, both current and past. We are in a Post-Constitutional period where any idea can be turned into law without regard to its constitutionality. This will lead us into chaos sooner or later. The abdication of our courts of their duty to preserve and protect, and to interpret and define the Constitution in favor of judicial activism is a prime cause for this situation.
The eighth place goes to the two political parties for their disregard of their duties to the public in favor of party confrontations, ideological stances that destroy bipartisanship and meaningful compromise, and the ever-widening gap between the left and the right as to the directions of the nation. It is the far left that has wrecked our government and economy, moved away from constitutionality, and will undoubtedly wreck the military and diplomatic posture of the nation in due time.
These eight annoying and hateful situations can only be corrected by our citizens electing to office at every level very qualified conservatives that know where to steer the ship, and to keep a wary eye on them while they are in office.
Labels: Constitution, Environmentalism, Moral Degeneration, politics
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Truly Annoying Things
The top of my list of truly annoying things
Absolutely at the top of my list is the entire Jihadist thing out of the Islamic Middle East. Perhaps annoying is too mild a word. It should be more like hate! With many thousands of people killed in the name of Jihadism, I see this scourge to be eminently destroyable!
Following along with that, the number two thing on my list is liberalism in all of its dishonest glory. For the sake of power and influence, they distort the world around us, and try to impose their odious, arrogant and atheistic thought processes on us and on our children. They are ready to sacrifice our way of life for an impossible ideal or Utopia that has no chance whatsoever of being realized. Many appear to have been raised in homes for anti-American people. The idea of being forced into using the politically correct-multiculturalism mindset of the left is simply obnoxious.
The third item on my list are the spendthrift souls in our Congress and the Administration that believe somehow that we can spend our way out of the debt hole, when anybody can tell them that ultimately you have to pay the Piper. This is not fair for us, for our children, or for our children's children. They seem to believe that government is the answer to all problems, including employment, when any fool could tell them that it is the private sector that generates jobs, not the government.
My fourth annoyance is tied to the current economic situation where, because of our financial troubles and our president's fiscally and diplomatically irresponsible policies, we are becoming ever weaker in the international scene. This cannot be a good thing! We have seen stupendous wars growing out of such weakness in the past, and they are too horrible to mankind to be allowed to happen yet again.
So those are the top four of my peeves or hates. There are a lot more to go!
Labels: Democrats, Fiscal Responsibility, Jihadists, Liberalism
Friday, February 05, 2010
Where Went Transparency?
Do politicos lie, or just bend the truth?
For a moment, let us return to the idea that some politicos say one thing and do another. Not that they do this in every situation, or for every statement they emit, but they do it often enough to merit extremely close attention to their words versus their actions.
It is clearly, clearly reserved for those times when they read the tea leaves; that is, when they realize that a significant sector of the public wants to insist on one way and the politico wants to go in exactly the opposite direction. Thus, they claim up front that they are going with the public desire, but behind the scenes they are working in the opposite direction.
This tactic was employed by Clinton quite often, and it appears to have been fully embraced by Obama. It is designed very cynically to misdirect and neutralize some part of the public as to the real intentions of the politico and his party at a critical point, such as before an election or a key legislative vote.
The open government theme of transparency is one perfect example of such a meme out of many that is readily embraced by the public, so stated as absolutely necessary over and over by Obama, and almost totally reversed in practice by him and by his party once he was elected.
A video of Democratic legislators and Obama horsetrading away on national TV to buy votes for the Obama Healthcare bill would be instantly devastating to the entire gaggle of politicos shown!
Labels: Democrats, Liberalism, Obama, Pelosi, Reid
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
My Government II
There is a long list of liberal legislators that would not survive in my government, headed by Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Waxman, and Feinstein, How they got elected speaks to the lack of smarts in their home constituencies, corruption in the voting process, or the inability of their voters to connect the dots correctly. These people propose anti-American and anti-constitutional solutions to national problems, and should never be allowed inside the Capitol building again, even as visitors.
Labels: Conservatism, Constitution, Democrats, Liberalism, Pelosi, Reid
Monday, February 01, 2010
My Government
A few of my views on where we must go in 2010!
One of the things I want for my government is dependability. I want it to be there in strength when the rest of the world goes bananas. What I mean here is that we should have a very well-equipped and substantial standing army, navy and air force to maintain the posture of peace through strength. Then no one will take us on, or try to humiliate us by attacking our friends.
I do not want it to look like a basket case financially, either, which means it should be prudent with our money. The idea of expanding entitlements translates to me as increased government handouts offered seemingly to buy the votes of recipients, which is simply not prudent. To extend these entitlements to illegal immigrants is the apex of stupidity and imprudence!
It pains me as well if the government is speculating or experimenting with my services or my rights. Services should be largely a fixed thing and fair for all citizens, so that one can rely on having such services for decades. I expect to retain my natural rights forever and ever!
Perhaps I am a bit selfish, but I cannot stand to see my tax dollars being used to afford healthy people a living without working, or to see the government gamed by people using multiple births to increase their welfare checks. We must take care of the indigent, the ill, the old and crippled for sure, but not the capable.
We have had a relatively free market approach to our economy, with some regulation thrown in to try to keep things fair and above board. We must maintain this free market posture. The market regulations and the regulators have not performed their jobs very well recently, so I can see the need to beef up some aspects of regulation, and the need to find some more honest regulators, in order to prevent future crashes of the kind we are in now. This does not mean that the government has to move in and become owners of our industry, which is occurring currently.
This has to extend to the Congress as well, in that they should keep their hands off the financial sector except through lawful regulations and inquiries. Their hidden hand in our mortgage crisis has yet to be fully exposed and dealt with properly.
The fact is, I simply do not trust big government or advocates of programs that lead to more big government; mostly by Democrats. We already have far too many government employees, government organizations, and government influences on our lives.
One reason we have an energy crisis is the government’s intervention into the realm of nuclear power plants, and stalling conversion to more nuclear generation of electricity, and then, for toppers, stalling on development of our own oil deposits, seemingly, just to make things worse. I have nothing against wind or solar power developments, which have promise of ameliorating the energy crisis, but they are both kind of ugly to look at and take up a lot of otherwise pleasant surface areas and views.
The final complaint I have for now is that we have been step-by-step weaned away from our Constitution into a Post-Constitutional government, where most anything goes. The checks on constitutionality of laws dreamed up by liberals (for the common good, and their own continuance, of course) have been subverted, and the Supreme Court has anointed itself as a super-legislating body able to extend their legal hands into everyday affairs without our representative bodies—the House and Senate-- having a say.
I do hope that 2010 begins a reversion to sound Constitutional government, and away from ad hoc interventionists.
Labels: Government
Elites
Who the hell are they, anyway?
Some day, someone will take on the task of identifying these so-called “elites” and their real preferences in life, government, and associations. Till then, I think that the concept is far too hazy, sort of like “the poor”, which is quite largely a transient state in the US.
Tell me how to recognize an “elite” when I pass one on the street, meet one socially, or go hunting for one. Just who are they, anyway?
Are they the dreaded popcorn-idea-men intellectuals that Thomas Sowell writes about that want the power to make laws of their popcorn and to experiment on the public with all manner of provisions; are they the wealthy, the high Democratic officials, the professors, the politicos, liberals, Ivy League grads, kooks, some of all of this, or what?
No one seems to want to name names and give bios, so the elites can’t be hunted down effectively, even with bird dogs.
It reminds me of Jeff Foxworthy’s: “You may be a Redneck if….” joke list. You may be an elite if you graduated from Yale, are worth over a million inherited dollars, have the required liberal guilt syndrome, are a frustrated professor of something exotic, write books no one reads, and vote Democratic across the board. (or not!)
Labels: Elites, Intellectuals
