Friday, November 27, 2009

On the Backs of Babes

No, I'm not talking about hot chics. I'm talking about your kids and mine and the Obama, Pelosi, Reid plan to fund health care by forcing them to buy crappy government health insurance then jacking the price of it through the roof. 

What is that you're saying?

Well, it's like this: The commie libs have to have people who are less likely to have to use their crappy health insurance -- 18-35-year-olds -- to 1) to be required by law to buy their crappy health insurance and 2) to  pay more for it than they would ordinarily have to pay for GOOD private health insurance so they can fund "insurance" for the old and the sick.

I put "insurance" in quotation marks because we're not really talking about health insurance in the true sense of the word. What it actually is is a ponzi scheme whereby the sick person or senior pays a nominal fee to have the cost of their treatment paid for by someone else. This is, of course, the very essence of what liberals are implying when they say they will require insurance companies to cover "pre-existing conditions". As far as covering "pre-existing conditions" goes, anyone with a second-grade education can understand, you can't accept a nominal fee for payment of tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars in medical bills for very long without going broke, even if you have kids funding this scam for grandma and grandpa. Eventually, the insurance company goes broke and in steps the only entity that can operate on Bernie Madoff accounting rules (x100) and not have its leaders thrown in prison for fraud -- the federal government.

Throughout this debate, Pelosi, Reid, Obama and the other Marxists have tried to draw an analogy between requiring kids and others without health insurance to purchase it and the requirement that every driver have car insurance. This argument is absurd on its face and, again, the absurdity ought to be evident to anyone with a second-grade education. First of all, the primary purpose of car insurance is to mitigate your liability to the other drivers on the road should you run into them. Secondly, you don't have to have car insurance if you don't own a car. The Marxists running wild in Washington want to make buying health insurance your "birthright". For the distinct privilege of being an American, you will be required to buy health insurance or be fined or jailed or both. As far as the requirements that health insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions goes, here's a car analogy that does work: It's exactly like the government requiring an insurance company to cover me AFTER I crashed my car into a tree without having car insurance.


Right now, many young people choose not to buy health insurance due to the fact that they have other things to spend their money on like movies and gas and beer and they don't want to pay for health insurance when they are healthy and don't usually go to a doctor. If they do want to by health insurance, there are still many affordable options in the quasi-capitalist American society of 2009. I happen to know that a 21-year-old healthy female can get a very good private health insurance policy through an insurance agent for far less than $200 a month. Under the Obama, Reid, Pelosi Marxist health plan, these plans will be phased out as soon as one little detail of the policy changes and the young adult will be forced on to the government health care plantation for three times the price for inferior care. All so they can pay "their fair share" to help equalize the cost of paying for the care of someone who is paying a nominal fee for having their pre-existing condition covered. Although is sounds positively absurd, the explanation of this ridiculous Marxist scheme isn't nearly as bad as it is in actual practice.

What does this mean in actual practice? What it means is that we are hog-tying young folks who are just starting to make their way in the world -- starting families, establishing homes, making lives together. Off they go into the cold cruel world with knowledge that not only are they not going to be able to provide for their families the quality health care they had grown accustomed to as kids, they're going to be paying two to three times as much for access to the crappy care and they'll have to start getting used to doing as the Brits and Canadians do: Getting in line and waiting for months for the basic services most of us have grown accustomed to immediate access to in our quasi-market-driven system. When you're paying three times as much for crappy health care, it's a hell of a lot harder to save up for that down payment on a house or make a car payment for a dependable car. In short, it means that the Marxists in Congress are dooming our kids to a standard of living that will necessarily be lowered by looming double-digit inflation coupled with a crushing new tax burden to fund the Marxist's bloated "stimulus" spending. And the cherry on top is three times the premium for crappy health care.

This is an issue that hits kids in the pocket book right now -- it's easy for them to understand. Talking about this to your young adults is a perfect opportunity to make inroads with your conservative message on a demographic that leans heavily Democrat or liberal simply because so much of the pop culture and fake news they consume has a decidedly leftist bent. Do you think their buddy John Liebowitz of the Daily Show is going to talk about the fact  that Obama, Pelosi and Reid plan on hosing them to fund their health insurance scheme? Hell no! Once the message starts to sink in, you're liable to get a reaction such as "What? You mean they're going to force ME to buy health insurance? .... But, I thought it was going to be free if you couldn't afford it." Then the light really starts to go on as you explain that, no it's not going to be free and whatever meager income they make will be good enough for the health insurance sickos to take away from them to fund their scheme. Then you can explain to them that's not all. Talk to them about how the Marxists claim that this plan will cost $1.5 trillion over ten years but that's likely vastly underestimated because the federal government has a habit of vastly under-projecting the cost of the medical programs it funds. If you want to use the amount they under-estimated the cost of Medicare as a rule of thumb, for example, you can increase the ten-year amount by three to four times or $4.5 to $6 trillion over ten years. Then if you take into account the fact that because of numerous schemes and scams and set-asides and "fixes" that aren't included in the cost, you're looking at closer to $2.5 trillion over ten years x3 is $7.5 trillion to $10 trillion over ten years. Then you can hit them between the eyes with the fact that this plan is front-loaded for three years -- the taxes are paid for three years before the plan even kicks in which means that should this pass, they start paying higher health insurance premiums NOW and don't receive ANY "benefits" until three years from now. Then you can tell them that if they happen to be lucky enough to attain a family income of $96,000 a year in the lousy Obama economy, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that they will spend 19% of this gross income on government health insurance premiums and co-pays.

Finally, if you happen to get the question about how you know that this bloated bureaucracy that we are going to fund on the backs of our kids and their kids is going to necessarily produce crappy health care, tell them that for this little fact we have actual experience: The crappy socialized health care systems that exist in other countries. Take Canada's for example, where waiting lists for routine surgeries are the norm and people are routinely denied life-saving drugs and treatments. 

Another example that the government health care commies point to consistently: Great Britain, where women give birth in hospital corridors and ambulances triage patients outside of emergency rooms to avoid the requirement that British citizens be served within four hours of entering the emergency room. And do you want to talk about rationing? Tell them about NICE -- the Natonal Institutes for Health and Clinical Excellece -- the deceptively named body that is charged with rationing care to Britons. If you go to the NICE website you can find all kinds of "guidelines, contained in spreadsheets, PDFs, Word documents, etc., all couched under the heading "NICE guidance" that prescribe ways to "cut costs" at various stages of treatment -- most of which involve denying care or holding back on care depending on age and progression and severity of illness. If you dig far enough, you can actually find the "Quality Rated Years" calculation that assigns an arbitrary value to your life based on your age and medical condition which is exactly like the one the commie libs deny they will have in place here via their medical standards board.

It is only by getting the word out and letting people know how this monstrosity the Obama, Reid and Pelosi want to foist upon us will affect them, their kids and grandkids that we will be able to keep our health care system from being traformed from the best in the world (albeit, with its own problems) to a five-times larger version of the inept, failed government bureacracy Great Britain has.
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Lord Obama to Pronounce Afghanistan Strategy

The lefty media is all atwitter today with the info that The Messiah, all Exalted President Most High Barack Hussein Obama will descend from his throne and make a proclamation to the peasants about his strategy for Afghanistan. Yes, this inexperienced hard-lefty Marxist has apparently gathered all the information he needs to gather to make his Solomon-like determination that is apparently NOT what the battle-hardened generals on the ground whose job it is to do this type of thing have told him they need. I predict that this strategy will more nearly resemble a convoluted commie lib hodge-podge that balances appeasement of his lefty peacenick constituency with the appearance of trying to do the right thing by our troops. In other words, just the politically-calculated "solution" that our generals and brave fighting men and women don't need. Which explains why he is announcing military strategy during a prime-time address to the nation a week from today. What more could we expect from a Saul Alinsky-worshiping commie lib who hasn't yet figured out that he's the president of the United States, these decisions are more than political calculations and he can stop with the campaign speeches.


I can hardly wait to hear what the Marxist-in-chief has to say he says with more than a hint of sarcasm.
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Monday, November 23, 2009

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Plead Not Guilty

In order to get all his grievances against the United States out. 

It's just as all of us rational-thinking people have been saying: Affording these despicable scumbags -- these despotic thugs -- all the rights available to your average petty criminal (Charlie Rangel, William Jefferson or a couple of Barney Frank's boyfriends for example) puts the United States on trial for the "crime" of going after the evil bastards who were directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans through the worst acts of terror ever perpetrated on our soil. We will be forced to divulge national security secrets to the scum who would defend these reprehensible bastards; we're going to have a hell of a time finding jurors for these trials because New Yorkers will rightly be afraid for their lives to sit on a jury (what, pray tell, is the make-up of a jury of a terrorists "peers"? Other terrorists?), the judge will have to be guarded for the rest of his or her life and forcing the families of terror victims to see this circus played out in the lapdog liberal press will be nothing less than ripping off the scab and stabbing a sharp knife into the deep wound that is the loss of their loved ones on 9/11.


And this is just the beginning.


Trying these dirt bags as you would an American criminal makes a total mockery of everything 4500+ of our brave soldiers have fought and died for in the last eight-plus years. For all we know, the fact that we treated these scum as what they are -- vile enemy combatants who hate us, our culture and everything we stand for as Americans -- and now are going to treat them as Americans with all the rights afforded them by the Constitution of the United States raises the question of whether we can even get convictions in these cases. Oh, Eric Holder says they will be convicted and so does The Messiah, but even this assertion raises questions of prejudicing a jury that the crooked lefty lawyers who will defend these bastards will pounce on in an effort to get their charges either greatly reduced or thrown out altogether.


And the simple fact of the matter of all of this is that Eric Holder and Barack Obama just don't care.They don't care about the fact that 3,000 Americans died eight years ago at the hands of vicious terrorists. They don't care about the feelings of the families of the victims of these vile scum. They don't care about the danger posed to all the citizens of New York City by holding these trials there in the first place. They don't care about the possibility that these slime could walk free. All they DO care about is slavishly obeying their radical leftist ideology and appeasing their leftist constituency.  And it's truly despicable that men such as these two could be in such high positions in the government of the United States of America.
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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Behold Eric Holder the Clueless

Say what you want about Lindsey Graham -- better than half the time he's a worthless twit as far as I'm concerned -- but today he absolutely obliterated Eric Holder on the issue of trying terrorists in the American court system and affording them all the rights we would afford a shoplifter:




The only thing to disagree with in the entire four minutes is when Graham calls Holder "an honorable man". He is nothing of the sort. He's a disagreeable, discombobulated leftist twit who is in way over his head and has no idea what he is doing in deciding to try ruthless enemy combatant savages in federal court in New York City -- just blocks from where their buddies slaughtered thousands of Americans. 
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Friday, November 13, 2009

An Open Letter to Any Senator Who is Still "On the Fence" on Government-Run Health Care

It goes without saying that any senator who can't make up their mind on the issue of turning the best health care system in the world into a massive inefficient government bureaucracy is a moron. But the fact is that these morons hold our liberty in the palms of their hands and it's up to us to do everything we can to persuade them to vote against their leadership and the clueless jackass who is the current occupant of the White House. Here's my attempt which I recently faxed to any of the aforementioned morons that I think might be persuadable. I strongly suggest that any of you who value your liberty do the same. I don't even care if you copy and paste mine. We all must do anything we can to stop this:

Ladies and gentlemen of the United States Senate:

* 10.2% unemployment, -- 17%+ if you count the underemployed and people who have stopped looking for work. We've lost almost 4 million jobs on this president's watch and all he has for the unemployed is unsubstantiated talk about "saved" jobs and a "jobs summit".

* $100 trillion in deficits national debt and unfounded liabilities in current entitlement programs. Trillions in debt sold to our enemies who could destroy our economy in the blink of an eye by merely calling it in. All this to be passed on to my kids and grandkids (and everyone else's for that matter) creating the first generation of Americans - ever - that may not be able to give their kids a better standard of living than we gave them.

* Medicare: Bankrupt. Medicaid: Bankrupt. Social Security: Bankrupt

And to this, your leadership and your president want to add the granddaddy of all entitlements - national health care - that will necessarily give us a lower standard of care, rationing and huge bills for premiums, a bill that, again, will be borne on the backs of our children and grandchildren. This monstrosity is purported to cost $1.3 trillion over ten years, but three of those years are front-loading: We start paying for it three years before it even starts! Using this type of "fuzzy math", we'll probably end up right where Medicare was 25 years after its inception: 1100% over the 1965 projections! So let's be conservative and say that your genius leaders have only underestimated by half as much. That means, the front-loaded costs over ten years of funding seven years of this plan will only be a "modest" $6.5 trillion! What a deal, ladies and gentlemen! An entitlement that eats up roughly half of the current annual gross domestic product over ten years. Add this to Social Security, the newly slashed Medicare, Medicaid, the S-chip program and other entitlements and you have an unsustainable mess that will turn this country into Botswana quicker than you can say "somebody get me a doctor".  And while we're on our way to turning the world's most prosperous republic into one of the world's largest slums, we'll start out by raping current families to pay for the "benefits" of crappy health care like they have in Canada and Great Britain.

Let me tell you ladies and gentlemen, my family is by no means "rich". But Nancy Pelosi's health care bill that you are going to attempt to "reconcile" with your own calls for $15,000 in premiums for a family in my family's income range - roughly three times what our portion of the premium on our employer-provided "Cadillac" (Who in the hell are you to tell me that my health plan is TOO good?) plan is. When you tax employers 35% on their "Cadillac" plans on the one hand and have them pay an 8% penalty for not carrying health insurance on their employees, any third-grader can tell you that you have set up a recipe for employers to drop their coverage. It's common sense, ladies and gentlemen. So it's disingenuous at best and a lie at worst to try to tell middle class Americans with employer-sponsored plans that they aren't going to end up in the government pool at $15,000 a year for crappy care.

What do we need? We need REAL health care reform:

1. We need to fix the problems with Medicare, Medicaid, the VA health system and the Tribal heath care systems before we tackle anything else that has anything remotely to do with MORE health care. The government has proven it can't run four separate (at least) health care programs. Why should we have any reason to think it can successfully run yet another health care plan?
2. We need market-based solutions: Get the government OUT of health care, don't get it more involved. Some of us are actually old enough to remember when the health care system ran well and was cost-effective - before the mid-sixties when the government waded into the fray. You paid cash for basic services and the services were priced so that you could pay cash for them. You had health insurance for catastrophic claims.
3. Along these lines, the government needs to encourage free market alternatives to government intervention: Health savings accounts; allow insurance companies to expand their risk pools by selling across state lines; get rid of all the ridiculous mandates for care and let Americans pick the coverage that works best for them.
4. Tort reform: All of you know that one of the biggest drivers of health care costs is the outrageous costs of malpractice insurance, litigation and all the tests doctors call for to make absolutely certain that they won't get sued if the patient isn't happy with the outcome.

Ladies and gentlemen, you may not be my senators. But your vote will affect my liberty and property and that of my children and grandchildren for years - decades to come. We have the best health care system in the world, and I ask that you help keep it that way - vote against the Obama/Reid/Pelosi health care boondoggle. My family's prosperity and health care and your prospects for reelection depend on it.
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Saturday, November 07, 2009

The Death of Liberty

This is what the U.S. House of Representatives brought us tonight with the passage of the most invasive, unconstitutional, .liberty-robbing, tax-raising monstrosity in the history of our Republic:

Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. House passed legislation with the most far-reaching changes to the nation’s health-care system in four decades, requiring all Americans to get coverage, and subjecting insurers to new restrictions and competition from a government program.
The House voted 220-215 today to approve the measure, which would cost more than $1 trillion over 10 years. Just one Republican, Representative Joseph Cao of Louisiana, backed the plan, and 39 Democrats broke ranks to oppose it.
Lawmakers hailed the step as a historic follow-on to the 1965 creation of the Medicare program for the elderly and disabled. They said the bill would cover 36 million uninsured Americans and curb costs. New rules would prevent insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, and seniors would get help obtaining preventive care and medicine.

It has become crystal clear at this point that the people we sent to "represent" us in Washington D.C. don't care what we think - period. Poll after poll over the last few months has indicated that the overwhelming majority of Americans are happy with their current health care and health insurance and oppose any attempts to change it. The majority of us instinctively know that this boondoggle will raise our taxes, rob us of our health care choices and give us vastly inferior health care at a higher cost. Scores of Americans showed up at liberal politician's "town hall meetings" to express their concerns about government-run health care. Tens of thousands flooded the email servers at the capital, melted the phone lines and tied up the fax machines. Twenty thousand showed up in Washington the other day to look their congressman in the eye and tell them they better not vote for government-run health care if they know what's good for their re-election. The radical lefties that run Congress didn't care.

As us conservatives have said all along, this has never been about "health care". It's always been about power and control. And 220 members of the U.S. House of Representatives -- including one RINO Joseph Cao of Louisiana, phone 202-225-6636, fax 202-225-1988 -- just voted themselves power over every aspect of your life. Because if these morons have control over the most personal aspect of anyone's life -- their medical records and their personal health care choices -- they have control over everything. And when the government is paying the bills, which they will be in five years if this bill becomes law, they will assert control over every aspect of your life. It starts with unconstitutionally mandating that you buy health insurance if you don't have it and levying stiff fines and penalties against you if you don't. It ends up in them dictating what you can and you can't do with your life based on the fact that the government is paying for your medical care. Overweight, well you had better lose weight or you won't be covered. Perhaps the government will have some bureaucracy to manage your diet for you. Too old? Well we'll probably just "give you a pill" (in the imortal words of The Messiah) if that and keep you confortable until you kick the bucket. Are you above the "golden ages" of 14 to 40? Well one of the guys who will have a big role in the implementation of this outrage "Zeke" brother of Rahm Imanuel will use his "complete lives system" do determine just exactly how much your life is worth but at the age of, say, 48, you've already had your shot at a complete life so if it comes down you you or the 20-year-old for kidney dialysis, you're SOL buddy.

This is an absolute outrage and the firewall now is the U.S. Senate. If you value your liberty, if you truly want to leave your kids a better society than your parents left you, the only choice we have now is to stop this in the Senate.
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Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Christie Wins New Jersey Governor's Race

Yes, Bob McDonnell won Virginia's governorship as well but that was widely regarded to become the royal ass beating that it was several days ago -- The Messiah threw McDonnell's opponent Creigh Deeds under the bus long ago. But The Messiah was counting on the sheer force of his magnetic personality and the help of the team he personally installed to revive Corzine's campaign. It didn't work. Moderate Republican Chris Christie is currently beating Corzine by five to six points despite the fact that Corzine outspent him better than five to one.


In the next few days you'll hear a lot of talk from the commie pinkos in the administration that these races don't count for much -- it's started already.  Excuse the hell out of me, but New Jersey is such a dark blue state that it's practically navy and in the last few days Obama did everything to get Corzine elected besides install himself as the candidate. He even took the unpresidential and unseemly step of recording a robocall in support of Corzine. Can you imagine getting up from your plate of spaghetti to answer the phone only to hear the president of the United States apologizing for interrupting your meal to stump for the little bald rich guy from New Jersey? For Corzine's part, he not only spent tens of millions of that little bald rich guy money, he sold his soul to the Obama Administration in exchange for their support. This is a HUGE loss for Obama and both of these governor's races are a HUGE reflection of the fact that Americans overwhelmingly reject the socialist agenda of the administration of the liberal's exalted Messiah. I can't wait for 2010. And 2012. Can we run the 2008 presidential election over again next month with Sarah Palin on the top of the ticket instead of McCain?  Heck, I'd even let the Democrats put Biden the Boob on the top of their ticket.
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Sunday, November 01, 2009

Stop the Obama/Pelosi/Reid Health Care Power Grab

As most of you may have heard, Nancy Pelosi unleashed the latest health care monstrosity -- a 2000-page liberty-robbing health care bill that would essentially mandate the eliminate of private health insurance policies within a five-year period, robbing all of us of the right to make our own health insurance choices, driving up costs for all of us and steal our liberty in the process. All this while leaving the same number of Americans uninsured that are already uninsured.

Here is an overview of how Pelosi/Reid/Obamacare will harm American families:



The Fix Health Care Policy blog at Heritage.org contains links to the specifics about what makes this a horrible bill.Here are just a few of the main reasons:

1. The fact is that the costs are spread over ten years starting immediately but the plan doesn't even start until 2013. So $1 trillion in costs are squeezed out of employers and employees alike over ten years to pay for six years of "health insurance reform" while they spend the first three years paying for their current health care plans. Additionally, with the federal government's propensity to underestimate the cost of everything, costs are likely to be far higher. If you use the amount that they underestimated the cost of Medicare as an average (it's likely to be much higher because this plan would cover many more Americans), the plan would actually cost between $7 and $11 trillion over ten years. This is after we've already rung up $1.4 trillion in debt in just the last year with a total national debt of $12 trillion and unfunded mandates of tens of trillions of dollars all placed on the backs of our kids and grand kids.

2. Like HR 3200, the newer bigger and worse HR 3962 prohibits the sale of private health insurance policies after five years. If you currently pay for your own, private health insurance, kiss it goodbye after five years. You'll be on the government plan (public option) and the "health choices commissioner" will make your choices for you.

3. HR 3962 will reduce costs? As if! If you are a contributing member of society, get ready to pay dozens of new taxes to fund this boondoggle. When has the government EVER reduced the cost of anything?

4. That's okay you say, I don't want health insurance. Too bad. The government will fine you for not having it and fine your employer for not providing what the government says they should provide. These fines can't go to pay your health insurance premiums. ().

As I mentioned before, this has nothing to do with health care as evidenced by the fact that it leaves the same number of Americans uninsured as we currently have -- around 15 million -- and we could easily cover all of these folks using current programs at a cost of about $40 billion over ten years. Given that 85% of Americans are happy with their current health insurance and don't want this bill it's obvious that this has everything to do with government control of one-sixth of the nation's economy.

Nancy Pelosi wants to ram this 2000-page nightmare that no one has even read through the House this week. Thursday is supposedly the target date that our liberty will be snatched away from us. If you don't have the right to make your own health care decisions -- some of the most personal and private decisions you and your family will ever make -- what rights WILL you have in the future? We must all call our representatives at 202-224-3121 and make our opinions known. A mass outpouring of opposition to this massive Democrat power grab is the only thing that will stop it.
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