Shooting Themselves in Both Feet

As is usually the case, the reason why the Democrats have failed to pass health care reform is staring at them right in the mirror. No, I'm not talking about the failure to take Scott Brown seriously. I'm talking about the actually pieces of legislation themselves.

The Christian Science Monitor has a very insightful piece explaining all of this quite well. People are tired of finding out that a party that is supposedly for the little guy is...well...not...really.

In what may have been a fateful move, some touted what they had won for their states. For example, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) of Louisiana announced that reports that she had won $100 million for her state in exchange for a healthcare vote were inaccurate. "It's not a $100 million fix. It's a $300 million fix," she said on Nov. 21.

Well, that's nice. I'm sure she is looking out for the "little guy" in Louisiana (part of her job) but not the nation as a whole which will eventually affect everyone in every state. And the word "fix?" Not good.

Of course, Milk Toast Boy didn't help out much.

"There are a hundred senators here, and I don't know if there is a senator that doesn't have something in this bill that was important to them," he said in a Dec. 21 press briefing. "And if they don't have something in it important to them, then it ... doesn't speak well of them. That's what legislation is all about: It's the art of compromise."

And therein lies the problem. You can't say you stand up for the American people and seek to improve a broken system when in reality what you are doing is looking after the interests of your own state with taxpayer money. Does Senator Reid want us to believe that every Senator doesn't give a shit about the rest of the country except their own little corner?

Health Care reform has to be looked at from a bird's eye point of view. The Democratic majority in both the House and Senate was suppose to do that but they didn't. They failed to realize that, in this new information sharing age, people were going to be looking at these bills with mucho scrutiny...as well they should.

So when Ben Nelson says...

This was never just about Nebraska. It was to be a placeholder to try to get [the Medicaid extension] fully funded for all states. My priorities are Nebraska first, Nebraska always – not Nebraska only.

...he's actually full of crap because his vote was secured by exempting Nebraska from paying a $450 million dollar fee over 10 years. People can find this kind of stuff out very quickly now. What was he thinking?

What were any of them thinking? This was their chance to fix health care. President Obama told them to get it done and they failed. It wasn't his Waterloo.

It was their Waterloo. And they're going to find out all about it this November.

Um...Mr. President?

Being bipartisan cannot mean that Democrats give up everything they believe in, find the handful of things that Republicans have been advocating for, and we do those things, and then we have bipartisanship. That’s not how it works, you know, in any other realm of life.

---President Barack Obama, Feb 9, 2010, commenting on his meeting with Republican leaders regarding bipartisanship.

Ah, but Mr. President, that is how it works in their "realm of life."

Most Assuredly

I get a lot of grief on here whenever I put up a post that illustrates the complete insanity of the right. The responses I get are usually of the following

The left has just as many crazies!

Talk about the issues!!

Offer a solution instead of yelling!!!

You're being mean and letting your emotions cloud serious analysis!!!!

I still contend that serious discussions can't be had...truly had...until this situation is resolved. The numbers show that the left has nowhere near as many crazies, the right never talks about the issues, they have no real solutions, and operate exclusively on the emotions of anger and hate. I base these contentions on what they say and what they do not because "I just hate them."

Unlike most of my colleagues on the right, I am reflective. When you offer the above opinions, or something similar to me, I will listen. So when I saw this Daily Kos Research 2000 Poll, my first reaction was to not mention it at all on this blog. The Daily Kos is a left biased blog so was the poll truly accurate? And what purpose would it serve to list the results here?

So I ignored it for the last week but then a discussion over at The Smallest Minority regarding the BBC article I linked recently and the frustration that many on the left have in trying to explain reality to the right, I brought up the poll. I got the following response from Ed, a more regular poster here these days and most assuredly a conservative.

Actually, it appears to be a legitimate poll which was properly conducted. I didn't see any surprises in it.

So, the poll is properly conducted. Alright....

He then went on to say

So what?

In fact, we have tried to explain to Marxy over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and… (I gotta stop doing that) the facts and logic which lead us to the positions generally reflected in that poll.

Facts and logic. Alright, here are the "facts and logic' that I gleaned from the poll:

39 percent think that Barack Obama should be impeached

36 percent think that Barack Obama was not born in the US

63 percent think he is a Socialist

24 percent think he wants the terrorists to win

53 percent think that Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president

31 percent think that Obama is a racist and hates white people

23 percent think that there state should secede

77 percent think that the Book of Genesis should be taught in public schools

31 percent think that contraceptives should be outlawed

As Ed pointed out to me in his latest response, some of these are minority opinions. How, exactly, do facts and logic lead us to the conclusion that Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Barack Obama? First, this really an opinion based argument. But if one really wanted to look at simple facts...which one of them quit their elected post?

As the discussion over there degenerates into yet another debate about hyper paranoia and socialism, I am wondering here how it's possible to have any sort of serious discussion with a very large group of people who look at reality this way. I'm not sure what President Obama is hoping to accomplish in his sit down with Republican leaders on February 25th to discuss health care.

When a quarter of the people of the opposing party think that he wants Al Qaeda to win as our armed forces begin an assault an a key Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, how can there be an sort of reality based discussion?

Rock On, Sarah

As I watched Sarah Palin's address to the Tea party convention last Saturday, I was reminded of a concert. "The Frightening Weakness of Obama", "Country In Danger", "The Thumb of Big Government", "Fascist Agenda", and "Death Panel" were all played and enjoyed mightily by the crowd.

The encore was "I ♥ Jonah Goldberg" which sadly left the crowd wanting more.

The Budget

President Obama unveiled his budget last week and, predictably, the right went ape shit. The Times has a very detailed analysis of how the money is going to be spent. Click here to check it out. So, my first question to my fiscally conservative colleagues is this: what do you think about the 738 billion that is going to be spent on defense?

Personally, I don't have a problem with it. Defense spending creates jobs in addition to the very obvious funds we need to finish the job in AfPak. What I guess I'm curious about is the fact that defense spending represents one of the two largest chunks of money. If it was removed, would the classic liberal be happy? Or is it just the entitlement programs that are the problem?

I guess I'm trying to figure out why it's OK to defend our citizens against attacks-both foreign and domestic but it's not OK to defend them against pneumonia. This pathological hatred of the government, that we see from folks like the Tea Party people, doesn't make any sense when you seriously consider how our government is defined and how our culture has evolved.

How a Minority Wins An Argument.

Where..again...now?

Health care has come up again in comments and I thought I would point to an excellent (and short) piece written by Andy over at Electoral-Vote.com. It's a perfect summation of some of the conundrums of health care legislation.

If people could walk around uninsured and then be able to sign up when they got seriously sick, many people would adopt precisely that strategy. For the average family of four, health insurance costs something like $13,000 a year. If a family expected its medical costs to be below $13,000 it rationally it would forego insurance. Then if a member got seriously ill, it would sign up for insurance and couldn't be refused. The consequence of this new law would cause healthy people to cancel their insurance until the insurance companies were just insuring sick people, which would cause premiums to skyrocket and more people to drop their insurance.

The only way to prevent astronomical premiums is to make sure the pool of insurees contains very large numbers of healthy people who pay premiums and don't file many claims. That is what insurance is all about, after all, sharing risk. That is why all other industrialized countries have mandates--everyone has to buy health insurance under penalty of law, to fill the pool with healthy people. Both the Senate and House bills contain mandates, which are unpopular but essential to prevent premiums from skyrocketing.

So my question is...how do we prevent premiums from skyrocketing with no mandate? Can we really rely on having pools of health people?

Ah Hah!

Last in Line will be happy to know that I finally have an answer to his question "Why can't you get anything passed with Democrats running both the executive branch and the legislative branch?"

My answer?

It only takes one person to cause a panic by yelling "Fire!!!" in a crowded theater.

The BBC's answer?

This brilliant article from the BBC.

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: "One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.

"Obama's administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans' Depression, caused by the Bush administration's ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him."

No shit.

"You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining."

Double no shit!!

The List

My friend Scott from the gym (an ultra conservative) made me promise him that I put this on the blog. He never reads it, barely checks email, yet was insistent that his thoughts be known to all of you. So, without further adieu, here is The List, by Scott, of the people/organizations that are destroying our country from within and without followed by a short explanation as to why this is so.

1. The Liberal Media-all of it is liberal including Fox News now. They seek to spread lies.

2. The Hollywood Elite-Scott hasn't seen a film since Titanic (or so he claims) because he refuses to fund the liberal agenda of Hollywood.

3. Democrats-well, we know why this is here.

4. Socialists/Communists-actually, just see #3.

5. Teachers-all liberal commie pinko faggots...thanks Scott!

6. Climate Changers/Environmentalists-they're all looney and want to take Scott's money.

7. Affirmative Action Supporters-taking away jobs from people who are more qualified. Also part of a commie plot.

8. ACLU-against all that is good and Holy about our country.

9. Unions-commies

10. U.N.-Anti American to the core.

11. Illegal Immigrants-go home. We don't want you.

12. RINOS-Republicans who, in any way whatsoever, support any of them previous 11 items.

Note: This list is real and Scott was very insistent that I put it down exactly like I did.

Export What?

President Obama recently announced that he wants to double the amount of exports from the United States. I'm curious as to what exactly he would like to export. And double.

Twice the amount of financial re-shuffling services?

Well, this is just....great....

Opened my copy of the Times this morning (ah...the simple pleasure of the Sunday New York Times) and found yet another example of why we need to get into the green energy game.

TIANJIN, China — China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year.

China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.

These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.

Meanwhile, here in America, we have this sort of thing.

Climate Change Hoax: Inconvenient Lies Exposed

News Media Falls For Climate Change Hoax

Does Climate Change Exist?

Here's what I can't figure out...why are there millions of people in this country who I KNOW love making money and beating competitors out (especially China) blinded by the insanity of simply having to be right?

WHO THE FUCK CARES IF IT'S REAL OR NOT? PEOPLE WANT TO SPEND MONEY ON THIS STUFF!!!!!!

At this point, any person that claims to be a supporter of the free market and also believes that climate change is a liberal commie plot to fluoridate our drinking water is restricting innovation and being a complete fool.

In ten years, when China is sitting on a fat pile of cash, people will ask why the United States didn't step up as an international competitor in the green energy sector. The answer will be simple.

The Wrecking Crew.

Yet Another Game Changer

I'm going to be talking about this one for the next few days. This is a long video (1 hour and 7 minutes) so take your time with it.

Some initial thoughts....has anyone ever seen another president do this before? I'm not trying to be snarky...I honestly don't know or don't recall.

The first line bit that jumps out at me....

When asked about the later health care conferences not being televised, President Obama said "It’s a legitimate criticism. So on that one, I take responsibility.”

Funny, though. Isn't that actually the fault of congressional leaders? Last time I checked he ran the executive branch.

God Loves The Marines

A while back, I became a "friend" of the Department of Defense on Facebook. They put out a lot of cool info every day and so, from time to time, I thought I would share it with all of you.

American Forces Press Service
TYNDALL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., April 22, 2009 – All 64 major Air Force bases in the United States are participating in a campaign to change out incandescent bulbs with energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs, or CFLs.

In the past year, beginning with Earth Day 2008, Air Force participants have changed out more than 228,000 bulbs. This will save millions of pounds of greenhouse gases and enough energy to power 3,841 homes for a year, officials said. The Air Force will save $7.5 million over the lifetime of the bulbs.

And that's not the only way that our armed forces are going green. In fact, they have a whole section of their web site devoted to it. Check it out.

Pretty cool, huh? Well, that is if you think that climate change is not a stinkin' commie liberal plot designed to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. If you are someone who thinks this way, what runs through your head when you see all of these green initiatives from the DoD? Heck, I'm not even convinced that man made climate change is happening with a hundred percent certainty yet I still think it's great.

Hats off to our brave men and women in the armed forces who, once again, are going above and beyond the call of duty.

Three For Thursday

1. State of the Union-I thought it was great but what does it matter? 30 million people hate him no matter what he says or does so I'm still feeling like a cynical and bitter fuck today. They want him to fail especially if it means success for this country...which would mean they were wrong about their ideology...which means the end of all that is holy.

2. No Ben-I think Ben Bernanke should not be elected to a second term as Fed Chair. Clearly, he wants to maintain the status quo on Wall Street. How about we nominate Jim Manzi? Or Bruce Bartlett?

3. Karma-Apparently conservative activist James O'Keefe, last seen dressed like a pimp and entrapping ACORN (aka actually being the person engaging in voter fraud) has now been arrested. Apparently, O'Keefe and some of his pals thought it would be cool to try to tap into Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu's phone system. Ah, the mid 20s mafia (geek conservative subset)....I take comfort in the fact that if they do go to prison, they can enjoy all the "luxuries" from our hard earned tax dollars:).

Bitterness Rising

I'm feeling bitter and cynical tonight. I've always been excited on the night of the State of the Union speech regardless of who was in office. The part when the Congressional Sargent at Arms yells, "Madame Speaker, the President of the United States!" But tonight, no matter what President Obama says, it won't matter.

The vomitous spew that is our current political climate will gnaw over the metaphorical piece of meat that is our president...removing all honor, dignity, and truth from anything he says. No doubt he has the best of intentions but does anyone really care any more?

No.

The chief concern of most media outlets is to sell advertising through higher ratings. They get these ratings by presenting what is essentially political porn. Whatever your political stripe, there is a channel for you to wax your poly-rod whilst thumping your chest and feeling happy that your side is "right."

Meanwhile, our country is falling apart and all of the solutions slip away in a vitriolic spew of propaganda.

State of the Union (Part Eight)

Manzi leaves us with two other broad reaching fix-its. The first one obviously hits close to home.

Over the coming decades, we should seek to deregulate public schools...We now need a new vision for schools that looks a lot more like Silicon Valley than Detroit: ­decentralized, ­entrepreneurial, and flexible.

To a certain extent, he's right. He ignores the central problem with teacher today, however...they are lazy. The real problem with our education system is that it is built to not force teachers to adjust their pedagogy to fit the times and culture. Tenure, for example, should be done away with forever. His idea of the entrepreneurial student intrigues me and this gets back to teachers being lazy. Instructors need to shift their focus from themselves and onto the students. Students should decide how best they learn and should choose how to assess themselves, not teachers.

His other idea is fantastic.

We should reconceptualize immigration as recruiting...we should think of immigration as an opportunity to improve our stock of human capital...It would be great for America as a whole to have, say, 500,000 smart, motivated people move here each year with the intention of becoming citizens.

No shit. Enough with the rants against illegals. Let's be realistic. They're here...let's embrace them...and get this country moving again.

And now, of course, we come to the key, concluding idea.

Balancing economic innovation and social cohesion is the challenge of every free nation today — but it is a particularly pressing challenge for the special nation that holds in its hands so much of the fate of democracy and capitalism in our world.

On this day, I declare that the central mission of this blog will be to search for this balance and, hopefully find some answers. I can't promise that I won't get off on a rant from time to time (I am only human) but Manzi will be in the back of my mind forever.

So much hangs in the balance...

State of the Union (Part Seven)

We now come to the point in Manzi's article where he lays out solutions to the problems he identified earlier. He points to four very broad solutions to these issues.

Most obviously, government ownership of industrial assets is almost a guarantee that the painful decisions required for international competitiveness will not be made.

Agreed. But that also means that if companies start to fail they can't go hat in hand to DC and beg for money. They need to file for bankruptcy and take their lumps. Speaking of which...

When it comes to the auto industry, for instance, we need to take the loss and move on.

Also agree. Detroit has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have no idea how to run a manufacturing business. And remember, our country is not about manufacturing any more.

Manzi goes on to detail how the government should pull its tentacles out of all industries and get back to the pre-stimulus status quo. I'm not certain I agree with him on this one. Banks, for example, are already causing a problem by not lending to anyone. If not the government, what is the mechanism to push them to do what has to be done in order to jump start this economy?

The financial crisis has demonstrated obvious systemic problems of poor regulation and under-regulation of some aspects of the financial sector that must be addressed — though for at least a decade prior to the crisis, over-regulation, lawsuits, and aggressive government prosecution seriously damaged the competitiveness of other parts of America's financial system.

So the government does too much or too little. Yep, pretty much says it all.

Regulation to avoid systemic risk must therefore proceed from a clear understanding of its causes. In the recent crisis, the reason the government has been forced to prop up financial institutions isn't that they are too big to fail, but rather that they are too interconnected to fail. For example, a series of complex and unregulated financial obligations meant that the failure of Lehman Brothers — a mid-size investment bank — threatened to crash the entire U.S. banking system.

The best paragraph in the entire piece, really. President Obama is basically going to do this when he takes on the banks. I can't wait. It's one of the reasons why I voted for him. Glass Stegall needs to be law again.

As we work to adapt our regulatory structure to fit the 21^st century, we should therefore adopt a modernized version of a New Deal-era ­innovation: focus on creating walls that contain busts, rather than on applying brakes that hold back the entire system. Our reforms should establish "tiers" of financial activities of increasing risk, volatility, and complexity that are open to any investor — and somewhere within this ­framework, almost any non-coercive transaction should be legally ­permitted.

Yep.

The tiers should then be compartmentalized, however, so that a bust in a higher-risk tier doesn't propagate to lower-risk tiers. And while the government should provide guarantees such as deposit insurance in the low-risk tiers, it should unsparingly permit failure in the higher-risk tiers.

Definitely. If such compartmentalization was present, a bigger bank could fail and an insurance agency wouldn't fall as well.

Such reform would provide the benefits of better capital ­allocation, continued market ­innovation, and stability. It would address some of the problems of cohesion by allowing more Americans to participate in our market system without being as exposed — or unwittingly exposed — to the brutal effects of market ­collapses. It would also help get the government out of the banking business and preserve America's position as the global leader in financial services without turning our financial sector into a time bomb.

But do the wealthy elite of this country want "more Americans to participate in our market system?" I don't think so. Herein lies the real challenge behind the second part of Manzi's solution. Why on earth would anyone want to share their power? It goes against human nature and the need to control and dominate your sphere of influence.

So, I don't see this happening any time soon in our little plutonomy.

Tomorrow I will wrap up my State of the Union series just in time for....the State of the Union on Wednesday.

State of the Union (Part Six)

And now we get to even more bad news for the left.

All told, finance, insurance, real estate, automobiles, energy, and health care account for about one-third of the U.S. economy. Reconfiguring these industries to conform to political calculations, and not market-driven decisions, is likely to transform American economic life. And the fiscal consequences of the spending involved will be enormous. The federal budget deficit for 2009 was about 11% of gross domestic product, which is far higher than any the United States has experienced since World War II.

Transform it, indeed. Obama's stimulus package has had an enormous impact on all of the sectors mentioned above. In fact, only about 5 percent of the federal stimulus funds went to things like roads and bridges. The rest went into the banking industry, the automotive industry, schools, food stamps and health care. One could argue that much of this funding was needed in anticipation of possible economic collapse. But this sort of spending carries with it great risks.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that existing laws will now lock in a structural budget deficit of more than 3% of GDP every year for the foreseeable future. And this assumes we will escape the current global economic situation without further financial catastrophe (and that America won't be forced into a war or other unanticipated major contingency over the next several decades). The CBO states flatly that this long-term budget path is "unsustainable."

The basic character of America's financial position is changing before our eyes. One year ago, federal government debt held by the public was 41% of GDP. Today, it is about 54% of GDP. The CBO projects that it will approach 70% of GDP by 2020, which is a level not seen since the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Clearly, not good. So what are our options?

According to Manzi, there are three: raise taxes, default on debt, or devalue our currency. I highly doubt the last two are going to happen so, more than likely, it's going to be raise taxes. Manzi talks of a value added tax but an easy fix would be to raise the top tax rate. Of course, this will never happen because raising taxes in this country is akin to going on a shooting spree at an elementary school.

An option that Manzi doesn't mention is cut spending. Does anyone out there think that is going to happen considering our government? But let's suppose it did. Where would we cut spending?

We begin to see a fairly apparent direction.

The end result would be an America much closer to the European model of a social-welfare state, which prioritizes cohesion over innovation. Of course, the European model is not an inherently terrible way to organize human society. It is, however, a model very poorly suited to America's current strategic situation, and would leave us in a far worse position to deal with the challenge of balancing innovation and ­cohesion. We do not have the luxury of drowning our sorrows in borrowed money while watching our power and influence wane.

He's right. We can't move towards a European model of socio and political economics. It won't work here and it will leave us vulnerable to our enemies in a plethora of ways.

Before I get to Manzi's solution, does anyone have any idea at all how to achieve the balance between innovation and social cohesion? Obviously, I have a few ideas of my own but would like to hear from you first.

State of the Union (20 Second Time Out)

Before we continue with the Manzi article, I just had to put this up. This is courtesy of TH from a discussion on another site.

In a political arena business power is used to influence politicians, primarily with the goal of to creating barriers to competition or even eliminating competition in markets. This has the effect of retarding many of the benefits of having a free market system. For a competitive free market to flourish what is needed is a government that is powerful enough to resist the pressure of business power so that it can be the voice of the people.

What has really been hurting the US economy for a long time is that businesses have found it more profitable to use their influence over politicians to create regulation and conditions favorable to their interests than to innovate and to compete. The lack of competitive forces at work in health care (really, health care insurance) is one of the more egregious examples of this.

With the recent reversal of Federal campaign finance laws we can only expect to see more of this sort of thing.

A perfect summation of what I have been saying for quite awhile.

State of the Union-Time Out

I would be remiss in my political commentary if I did not address the election last night in Massachusetts. First of all, the Dems have only themselves to blame for two reasons. One, they ran a lack luster campaign there thinking it would be an easy win. And two, they dicked around with election law so much that it came back to bite them in the ass.

I find it tremendously sad that Ted Kennedy, a champion of health care reform, lost his seat to someone who vows to torpedo it. It's crushing, no doubt.

The GOP have confirmed exactly what they are all about...destruction. They want Obama to fail and they really don't give a shit what harm it does to our country. Without significant reform, we are going to be in big financial trouble. It amazes me that even if conservatives are adversely affected by this, they will never admit how wrong they are.

Compare how the Dems conceded to Bush on so many issues (Iraq War, education) to what the GOP is doing with Obama. They'll never give an inch. They are, after all, The Wrecking Crew...bent on the destruction of the other side. They don't care...even it means our country going down the fucking tubes. The Dems don't get this and are still running campaigns in a very warm milk and damp toast sort of way.

People ask me all the time...how does the minority party have any say in anything? Well, three quarters of the people in this country voted for change. Two thirds wanted universal health care. Cue the hate, anger and fear machine and now we are down to 50 percent on both.

Mission Accomplished.