Happy First Birthday to my littlest sweetie-pie.

How lucky I am to be your dad!

I think Roberts' decision is well thought out and the right one. He called a tax a tax. Yes, the administration tried very hard to present the "mandate" as anything but a tax, but a tax it is. I don't see this as any new power for the Federal Government either.  If the Feds hike everyone's taxes by $700, then provide a $700 tax credit to those who buy approved health insurance, the effect is exactly the same as putting a $700 tax on not-buying insurance.  Surely the Feds have the constitutional power to do the former.

I have seen a lot of posts on conservative blogs calling the mandate "a huge tax increase on the middle class" and saying how the mandate represents a new and crushing power of the government to run every aspect of our lives.  It's nonsense.


In a characteristically fine essay, Charles Krauthammer states:

I think the “mandate is merely a tax” argument is a dodge, and a flimsy one at that. (The "tax" is obviously punitive, regulatory, and intended to compel.)

I disagree. I find Roberts' analysis convincing. Essentially, since the tax is small in relation to the cost of health insurance, it is not punitive. See here. See also here.

The supreme court today upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare, under the power of the Federal Government to tax.

I think this is a HUGE win for the president.  Folks over at Althouse's blog though are saying that it is not, that taxes are unpopular and so this will be a political negative for Obama.  Yet very few people will end up being taxed.  If you have health insurance, you won't pay the tax.  If you are one of the 50% of Americans who pay no taxes, or pay negative taxes, I'm sure you won't be paying the tax either.  No politician will go along with a "tax on poverty."  Credits and deductions will be used to negate the penalty.

Insurance rates will skyrocket. People who have no insurance now won't buy it until they get sick. They won't pay the tax either.  The cost will have to be passed on to the people who do buy insurance before they get sick, i.e. essentially the 50% who pay taxes.

Washington Inmates Banned From Making Sexy Outfits for Female Prison Guards

These people are already in jail, under guard, and can't do much of anything until ordered to do so...so why in the heck couldn't this have been dealt with using prison disciplinary procedures? Why raise the issue to the height of a law?

An article about Obama at Occidental: Self-Made Man

This article does Huell Howser wrong! The critical point to understand about Huell's involvement in the video, is the fact that Huell can spend half an hour being absolutely fascinated and engrossed by anything! Huell is a California institution. He goes around California with a camera man, heads for sites both exciting and mundane, and spends half an hour making you think even the silliest, stupidest, most boring site is simply fascinating.

I've watched him clomp through a forest so that he could stand on the actual border between California and Oregon! Wow! And by the time the half hour is over, he's made you want to go there too.

I've seen him go to a shell factory--a place where a single family harvests shells and cleans them out for sale as decorative items--and make it sound like you'd want to invite the family over for barbecue next weekend.

 Here's the summary from a full hour-long episode of his show. Because it's Huell, he really can make this special:

California's Gold #1 - California Aqueduct Special

In this special one-hour episode of California's Gold, Huell takes a look at the California Aqeuduct. Constructed in the 1930s, the Colorado River Aqueduct is considered one of the greatest engineering projects in the world - bringing water to thirsty Southern Californians across over 200 miles of barren, remote desert. Starting at Lake Havasu, we trace the route the water follows through huge pipes, tunnels, canals and pumping plants. Along the way we meet the men and women who are carrying on the proud MWD tradition of bringing water to Southern California. 

It sounds so thrilling! And yet, if you came across it on the TV and didn't keep flipping, you would actually spend an enjoyable hour--in large part because Huell is just so gosh darn fascinated by everything!

Did I mention he's  not actually from California, and does his shows in a heavy and slow Georgian drawl? I love the guy.

France is going bankrupt, it's increasingly uncompetitive, the government is too big and spends too much...but they go and do this:

French president cuts retirement age

Workers who entered employment aged 18 will be able to retire at 60 rather than 62, under the decree agreed at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. 

 60!!

The case that started the hysteria over child abductions has now been solved, 33 years later. The Etan Patz case began the media saturation of child abductions, and, along with that theme recurring almost nightly on prime-time television, led to a distortion of reality. Despite our fears, only 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year. The majority are returned home within a day; only 50 are murdered or are never found. To put that in perspective, you have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than your child has of being the victim in a "stereotypical" (really, atypical) kidnapping. We don't walk around with lightning rods on our heads (at least most of us do not,) but we lock our kids away, imprisoning them at home, keeping them under constant supervision, stunting their emotional and social development, all in fear of a minimal risk.

Leonore Skanazy (Free Range Kids), Etan: The End « FreeRangeKids:

Readers – As I'm sure almost all of you have heard, there has been an arrest, 33 years too late, of a man who confesses to murdering Etan Patz.

In the wake of 6-year-old Etan’s 1979 disappearance came the era we are living in to this day, the “Don’t let your child out of your sight, he could be snatched like that little boy” era. It’s an outlook reinforced daily by the media (“Up next: Children at risk!”) and the marketplace (“Buy this! Your children are at risk!”). It has been embraced by schools (“No walking allowed! Your children are at risk!”), and day care centers (“We have cameras everywhere. Your children are at risk!”), and by the law (“No letting your kids wait in the car. Your children are at risk!”). In short, the fact that we can see Etan even with our eyes closed has allowed the fascism of fear to flourish.

Knowing how he died provides cold comfort. I’m also not sure there’s any way to make a murder “meaningful.” But it does make me want to take action. For the sake of the next 33 years’ of children, I want to help our culture regain  its perspective. We remember this tragedy more than a generation later precisely because things like this do not, thank God, happen all the time. We cannot raise our children as if they do. And we can’t organize our lives around avoiding random, rare, heartbreaking events. Lisa Belkin makes this point movingly in her Huffington Post piece today.

Let me repeat the words another writer sent here a few weeks back: Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life.

Let’s not prevent it in Etan’s name anymore.

For my brother:

The part I remember most starts as at about 4:45.

Rarg

Chinese communist leaders denounce U.S. values but send children to U.S. colleges - The Washington Post

Where, if the schools have anything to say about it, they will be perfectly safe from learning anything about American values, while constantly hearing praise for the values of their Chinese masters.

She’s an Indian too | Power Line

Valerie Plame could not be reached for comment.

The PJ Tatler » BOMBSHELL: Al-Qaeda Infiltrator was Working for Brits not CIA, Cover Blown for Election Year Politics

If I had the cartooning ability, I'd redo Obama's Life of Julia like this:

Born into a wealthy family, Julia attended the best schools, including a boarding school. Being taller than average and very athletic, she excelled at sports.

She attended the all-women Smith College, where she earned a degree in English.

After graduating, she worked in advertising and news.

She left her post-college jobs to join the US spy agency. She was posted to Sri Lanka and China. She earned a meritorious service award for her work.

She met and married a fellow spy. After they both left the agency, he took a job in the foreign service in France.

Without a job of her own, Julia attending Le Cordon Bleu cooking school to learn the art of French cooking.

When she and her husband returned to the United States, she began teaching French cooking to others and co-wrote the seminal modern cookbook.

She moved from small cooking classes to television, where she created the seminal food television show.

Having become the founder of both the modern cookbook market and the televised cooking, she became an icon to foodies everywhere.

She continued to make television programs and write cookbooks all of her life.

Her kitchen is now an exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum.

She did all of this without a single government handout.

...Cherokees For Trail of Tears

Thanks to Breitbart and Legal Insurrection for this one. It's one of the funniest things to come out of politics in a long time:

Elizabeth Warren Ancestor Rounded Up Cherokees For Trail of Tears

I bet right about now Warren is hoping to be judged, not by her ancestry, but by the content of her character. Her problem is, it's her character that's under scrutiny--for having claimed such a tenuous link to Native American heritage in the first place.

EPA Official Armendariz

“You hit them as hard as you can, and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there. And, companies that are smart see that, they don’t want to play that game, and they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up.”

Or, they decide at that time that business would be better in Mexico...or Brazil...or Canada... And the US is out another business and several hundred jobs.

Would there be bluegrass as we know it today without Earl Scruggs?  I doubt it.  He was a truly innovative virtuoso. Rest in peace.

Examiner.com:

Angry over steps being taken due to a financial emergency in Detroit, New Black Panther Party leader Malik Shabazz declared he would burn the city down.

I have to wonder...who would even notice? Lost Detroit:

Formerly the Detroit Public School Cass Tech

Wow, this is amazing.  James Cameron went down alone to the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean.

(National Geographic pic)

I have long marveled at the feat of the Trieste team, who went there 50 years ago.  Nobody went back, until now.  The Trieste adventure was way ahead of its time.

Is it possible that in 7 years, a person may take it upon himself to go back to the moon, 50 years after the Apollo landing?  How cool would that be!

My belief that this is fake is exceeded by my wish that it were real.



Ann says: The video in this link has died, but the Huffer Post is reporting that the guy that made the film is admitting it was a hoax.

The woolly mammoth video from a couple weeks ago really had me wishing it were true too...even when it was a much more obvious fake than this video.

I got a bit worked up over on Facebook over the post of this picture, posted by someone with the organization name "Americans Against the Tea Party", but linked to by a high-school acquaintance:

My initial response was:

"B.S.

Buy your own d*&^ birth control. What people are pushing for isn't reproductive rights; what they want is to take money out of other people's pockets to pay for their sex life. Pay for it youself [sic, unfortunately]!!"

To that, the usual high-level, high-culture liberal argumentation began: I was asked, literally, and I do mean literally, whether I knew what an org-sm was, then accused of wanting to put women in prison for menstruating. That was actually the answer I got. Since this walking brain also mentioned taxes, I ignored the sexism of her response and responded with a lengthier:

Did I say taxes?

What do you think insurance is? Everyone puts in their money, and the people who need it get it...and it was supposed to be people who NEED it--like people with chronic conditions, accidents, serious illnesses--not just people who want their bills managed by someone else.

What I really, and I mean REALLY don't get, is why people think it is more efficient and will cost less to hand all health care money to a bureaucracy--whether a private insurance agency or the government--then have that bureaucracy take their cut, paying for their salaries, offices, training, pensions, outreach/advertising, etc. instead of simply paying for the regular yearly costs--check ups, the occasional ear infection, routine preventative exams, etc., out of pocket and then leave insurance to be INSURANCE--meaning shared RISK.

There is no RISK involved when everyone gets a checkup--no one has a mega-expensive, bankruptcy-threatening annual physical (I'm perfectly willing for there to be a Medicaid-style program for the people who really can't even afford this.)

The current problems of insurance-distorted pricing--where no-one knows what the real cost of anything is, because there is so much dealing going on between insurance companies and providers--would be solved by the simple expedient of requiring there to be a single published price for any piece of health care (preferably set by the provider.) Knowing the price beforehand would allow consumers to price and quality shop on their own. A much simpler, more-efficient, and more-cost containing system than building an insurance bureaucracy to ride alongside the health care bureaucracy.

At that point I was accused of wanting to run away with newt [sic] to the moon (this was, I believe intended to be sexually suggestive) where we wouldn't have to pay for anyone else's anything.

Keeping a relatively level head, my response was:

It's a waste of money to pay insurance for routine health care (or dental care.) It's much more efficient to stream-line it and pay the provider directly. The indirect route just lets an intermediary take their cut. What is the point or the benefit of that? If someone truly can't afford it, that's one thing. Yes, let's help them. But for people who pay for health insurance, or get it as part of their pay package, it's really dumb to have a first-dollar, third-party health-care payment system. Let's have insurance for things that actually are shared risk, and pay directly for the normal, routine stuff.

Since I'm two time zones to the left of this brilliant debater, they may have gone to bed...or they may have just shut up...or plugged their ears. Regardless, no additional "argument" has yet been posted. Still, I couldn't leave it there...First I posted this:

Is your best argument really that I'm a newt-effing rich b*(&^%?

Then sat down and went on for a while...

Here's a hypothetical, let's say you have two relatively-healthy, middle-income, middle-aged women. Neither has any major medical condition nor do they get into an accident (those things would require real insurance, not first-dollar health-care financing.) They simply have the usual annual costs for health care; they get mammograms, maybe birth control, they get dental check-ups twice a year, occasionally they might have a rash or a minor infection that needs a cream or Z-pack.

Now let's say that the cost of their annual health care is roughly $1,500.

Woman-A buys an insurance policy that covers the first-dollar health care. For her, she gets $1,500 in care, but she also has to pay the overhead of the financing system. She's paying for the person at the financing company who receives the bill from the provider, the person (often an expensive nurse) who checks to make sure it's a valid health-care expense, the accounting department which keeps the balance sheets and cuts the checks, the lawyers to handle lawsuits, the underwriters who write the policies, the marketing department that sell the policies, the managers who keep everything running (or crashing), and the suits who take long vacations on islands in the Caribbean. Now, according to Obamacare, insurance companies are required to spend at least 80% of their revenues on actual health care, but get to spend 20% of their revenues on all of this overhead. So for $1,500 in reimbursements to health care providers, they will actually spend $1,875 (0.80 * X = 1,500. X = 1,500 / 0.6 = 1,875,) or $375 extra on non-medical payments. Since Woman-A is paying for all of her insurance, she is paying all of this, and the extra is reflected in her nice, big premium payments.

Now, let's look at Woman-B. She pays all of the costs out of pocket, she simply hands over the $1,500 directly to her health-care providers. She's done, and she's spending $375 less than Woman-A. Her lower costs are also reflected in her, cheaper, premium payments.

Now, let's reverse the question. Let's say each only can spend $1,500 on medical expenses. For her money, Woman-A has to pay 20% of the $1,500 to the financing agency, meaning she can only get $1,200 worth of health care. Woman-B, on the other hand, gets to spend $300 more on actual health care. She could choose to spend this by going to a better doctor, getting her mammogram at a more-convenient facility, getting a DNA test for BRCA genes...or, she could just keep the savings.

Which system is preferable? A wasteful system where an intermediary gets a cut of every health-care dollar? Or a system where most every-day expenses are simply handled between the patient and the provider without extra overhead? Which system would be cheaper for the country? And, which system would be more-likely to keep costs in check? One where the actual customer/patient doesn't notice how much something costs because they're only paying for it second-hand through their financing premiums, or one where the customer/patient is the one cutting the checks?

As a final point, all of this would be true whether the health-care financing agency is government-run or privately-run. The overhead is still there, and is still unnecessary.

I guess I probably overdid it, but I'm sick of letting this stupidity go unchallenged.

#BeBreitbart

Presidential Embarrassment about Gas - Victor Davis Hanson

The only reasons Obama is embarrassed about fuel, are because, despite his best efforts, we're drilling more oil and gas out of the ground than ever before, and the high gas prices (or is it low dollar) are undermining his re-election hopes.

If it weren't for those two things, he'd be thrilled with low supply and high prices.