The Democrats and big media and their constant din of misinformation vs. the bullhorn and grass roots for truth. Hat tip: The Patriot Post
Whacko Politics
American Bolshevik
After the 2006 State of the Union address given by President Bush, we commented about the Democratic Rebuttal and the emergence of the new Democratic leadership in Congress.
Again, in April of 2007, we posted about the Un-American Gothic with Reid and Pelosi as Grant Wood’s immortal characterization of middle America. We included the photoshop of Wood’s famous art in both posts.
I recently found this contribution from Michael Ramirez:
You saw it here first.
Über apologies, again, to Grant Wood.
Chicago Politics
Abraham Miller describes how Obama’s Syndicate strives to deliver socialized medicine to all (and I mean ALL) persons in the U.S. Graphic and article courtesy Patriot Post.
“Chicago politics is not about ideology. It is about, ‘Who Gets What, When, and How,’ to quote the inimitable Harold D. Laswell, one of the outstanding political theorists of the last century. The sine qua non of Chicago politics is power, getting it and keeping it. Everything else is incidental. Even corruption is a byproduct of power and is functional only if it enables you to stay in power. In Chicago politics, you don’t make waves, you don’t back losers, and you ‘don’t talk to nobody nobody sent.’ Chicago politics is always about hierarchy and centralization. … If you want to understand Obama’s health care policy, you need to start where Obama starts. You need to start with Chicago.
You need to look at constituent interests. Obama won in 2008 because, among other things, he mobilized the electoral periphery. He mobilized young voters and minority voters, people who traditionally had a lower probability of showing up on Election Day. Chicago politics is about mobilizing the vote. ‘Vote early and often’ is the city’s sardonic refrain. Obama needs his newly socialized base. He needs them to keep coming to the polls. In the vein of Chicago politics, he needs to deliver benefits to them. Unrewarded, the electoral periphery will revert back to apathy. Health care is a reward to this base of people who are on the economic as well as political periphery.
Obama understands that his objective is to provide his base with the spoils of power — in this case insurance. … If all that Obama wanted were to insure those who fall between the cracks, he could put them into the same wonderful program that Congress created for itself by subsidizing their premiums. This would neither require a thousand pages of legislation nor a new series of bureaucracies. But building a new power base resulting from the mobilization of the political and economic periphery requires redefining the nation’s health problems as the nation’s health catastrophe. Health reform is Chicago politics on a national level.”
— University of Cincinnati emeritus professor of political science Abraham Miller
Perfect Timing – No COLA for Me
There comes a time in our lives when (if we’re lucky) we can hang up our toolbag and start to live the life of leisure. This is my year to put everything in motion to allow me to begin my retirement in just a few weeks. I have pulled all the handles to make things happen – it’s too late for me to stop the train from leaving the station now.
My first Social Security check will be deposited this Thursday.
Now, comes word that the Social Security Administration has suspended Cost Of Living Adjustments (COLA) for the next two years. Oh, by the way, they aren’t going to suspend premium increases for Medicare Part B.
From Yahoo:
Millions of older people face shrinking Social Security checks next year, the first time in a generation that payments would not rise. The trustees who oversee Social Security are projecting there won’t be a cost of living adjustment (COLA) for the next two years. That hasn’t happened since automatic increases were adopted in 1975.
By law, Social Security benefits cannot go down. Nevertheless, monthly payments would drop for millions of people in the Medicare prescription drug program because the premiums, which often are deducted from Social Security payments, are scheduled to go up slightly. …
Advocates say older people still face higher prices because they spend a disproportionate amount of their income on health care, where costs rise faster than inflation. Many also have suffered from declining home values and shrinking stock portfolios just as they are relying on those assets for income.
“For many elderly, they don’t feel that inflation is low because their expenses are still going up,” said David Certner, legislative policy director for AARP. “Anyone who has savings and investments has seen some serious losses.”
Hat Tip – Captain Ed Morrissey.
Trojan Horse Alert
It’s not only seniors who should be wary of the healthcare games the administration and congress are now playing. Everyone stands to lose from the government’s grab, including the younger demographic who will be forced to buy insurance whether they want it or not.
As we used to say when I was a kid, “there’s a rat in the woodpile.” Or maybe more appropriately, “there’s a hidden virus inside the Trojan Horse.”
From the Patriot Post:
Something Smells Fishy About This Kool-Aid
President Barack Obama appeared to backtrack on a key provision of his attempted health care coup, telling a Colorado town hall audience that “the public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.” So the president is giving in on the government-run option, right? Wrong.
While it’s a given that some on the Left are going bananas over the announcement, none other than former DNC Chief Howard “The Scream” Dean let the cat out of the bag on the strategy. “[T]he president knows very well that you aren’t really going to have health care reform without a public option,” Dean told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. “But he also knows he has to get this out of the Senate.” So the president is playing a cynical game of politics with health care? Say it ain’t so!
For now, 60 votes in the Senate are necessary to avoid a filibuster, and the public option is making that threshold harder to reach. If the bill were passed without the public option, it could be added back during reconciliation, at which point only 50 votes would be necessary for passage.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs spun the strategy shift by calling it a “boring consistency to our rhetoric.” Nothing’s changed, according to Gibbs. The facts, as usual, contradict the Democrats. On July 18, Obama said, “[A]ny plan I sign must include an insurance exchange: a one-stop shopping marketplace where you can compare the benefits, cost and track records of a variety of plans — including a public option to increase competition and keep insurance companies honest — and choose what’s best for your family.” But according to Gibbs, changing “must include” to “whether we have it or we don’t have it” is just “boring consistency.”
The proposed alternative to the public option is nonprofit health insurance cooperatives. However, as the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner explains, “Government-run health care is government-run health care no matter what you call it. The health care ‘co-op’ approach now embraced by the Obama administration will still give the federal government control over one-sixth of the U.S. economy, with a government-appointed board, taxpayer funding, and with bureaucrats setting premiums, benefits and operating rules. Plus,” Tanner adds, “it won’t be a true co-op, like rural electrical co-ops or your local health-food store — owned and controlled by its workers and the people who use its services. Under the government plan, the members wouldn’t choose its officers — the president would.”
As for the public option, Jacob S. Hacker, the liberal Yale scholar widely attributed with originating the idea, denies that it is a “Trojan Horse” to sneak in single-payer, government-run health insurance behind citizens’ backs. It seems, however, that Hacker also suffers from an acute case of “boring consistency.” In 2008, Hacker sounded a different note: “Someone once said to me, ‘Well, this is a Trojan horse for single payer.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not a Trojan horse, right? It’s just right there! I’m telling you!’ We’re going to get there [to a government-run system] — over time, slowly.” He continued, “But we’ll do it in a way that we’re not going to frighten people into thinking they’re going to lose their private insurance.”
Sounds like the frog in the boiling water to us.
EV Phone Home
Tesla Motors is a Silicon Valley-based manufacturer of Electric Vehicles (EV). They are the only company to offer EVs for sale to the general public in North America or Europe.
Tesla EVs use the lithium-ion battery technology and have a range of over 200 miles on a full charge. The standard EV roadster is capable of 0-60 in 3.9 seconds.
While all that sounds wonderful, the Tesla Electric Car just might have a few drawbacks . . .
Right: The Tesla Standard EV
From Planet Gore:
More on Tesla [Henry Payne]
President Obama, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, and an army of Washington politicians with no experience in the auto industry say that electric vehicles are the future. They’re so sure of it, they’ve invested $489 million of your taxpayer doctors [sic] in the EV tech leader, Tesla. But as Tad Friend’s in-depth look at Tesla for The New Yorker shows, the future is not quite ready for primetime.
A few highlights:
- The price for the power train alone for battery-powered Tesla cars costs $15,000 — or about five times more than a standard gas-powered sedan. The average price paid for an entire new car in America today is $26,000.
- Tesla’s hard-driving founder, Elon Musk, says Tesla plans to populate American rest stops with QuickCharging stations, which will allow drivers to recharge their batteries in “just” 45 minutes. In the meantime, Americans have to plug it into 110-volt wall sockets. Friend tried that while test-driving the Tesla for his story. “Its battery gained only nine miles in two hours,” he writes.
- To charge the Tesla in the five minutes that American are used to spending at the gas pump (while on their way to work or taking the kids to soccer practice) it “would require an 840-kW connection, which would drain the grid as much as a 100-unit apartment building does in the course of a day.”
- And then there’s this from longtime Detroit product guru, Bob Lutz (now with GM), an admirer of Tesla — even as he points out the gulf between a boutique technology currently prized by Hollywood millionaires and a mass-produced technology: “Over thirty-five hundred parts sourced from around the world have to come together at the right place and the right time to produce sixty to seventy of these things an hour. And to make them, you need. . . an unbelievable amount of reliability testing that Tesla can’t afford to do right now — and we can’t afford not to.”
Emphasis mine. This is just another example of the non-achievable Utopian hope and change that all those uninformed voters (I have some less politically-correct descriptions of them, which I won’t present here) thought they were going to get.
There Ain’t No M.D. Behind the President’s Name
Damsel is quick to remind me that there is no M.D behind my name when I complain about a pain or something and try to self-diagnose it. “See a professional,” she will insist.
Fair enough. I see the doc and get a real diagnosis. The president should take Damsel’s advice and get some professional help as well (psychiatric perhaps?).
As Obama desperately pushes his health care reform agenda, he doesn’t care whose toes he steps on along the way. Witness this statement from the American College of Surgeons (emphasis mine):
Statement from the American College of Surgeons Regarding
Recent Comments from President Obama
CHICAGO—The American College of Surgeons is deeply disturbed over the uninformed public comments President Obama continues to make about the high-quality care provided by surgeons in the United States. When the President makes statements that are incorrect or not based in fact, we think he does a disservice to the American people at a time when they want clear, understandable facts about health care reform. We want to set the record straight.
Yesterday during a town hall meeting, President Obama got his facts completely wrong. He stated that a surgeon gets paid $50,000 for a leg amputation when, in fact, Medicare pays a surgeon between $740 and $1,140 for a leg amputation. This payment also includes the evaluation of the patient on the day of the operation plus patient follow-up care that is provided for 90 days after the operation. Private insurers pay some variation of the Medicare reimbursement for this service.
Three weeks ago, the President suggested that a surgeon’s decision to remove a child’s tonsils is based on the desire to make a lot of money. That remark was ill-informed and dangerous, and we were dismayed by this characterization of the work surgeons do. Surgeons make decisions about recommending operations based on what’s right for the patient.
We agree with the President that the best thing for patients with diabetes is to manage the disease proactively to avoid the bad consequences that can occur, including blindness, stroke, and amputation. But as is the case for a person who has been treated for cancer and still needs to have a tumor removed, or a person who is in a terrible car crash and needs access to a trauma surgeon, there are times when even a perfectly managed diabetic patient needs a surgeon. The President’s remarks are truly alarming and run the risk of damaging the all-important trust between surgeons and their patients.
We assume that the President made these mistakes unintentionally, but we would urge him to have his facts correct before making another inflammatory and incorrect statement about surgeons and surgical care.
Hat Tip Jonah Goldberg