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POPSThe US House of Presumptive Meddlers Advocates of government control want you to believe that the serious shortcomings of our medical and insurance system are failures of the free market. But that's impossible because our market is not free. Each state operates a cozy medical and insurance cartel that restricts competition through licensing and keeps prices higher than they would be in a genuine free market. But the planners won't talk about that. After all, if government is the problem in the first place, how can they justify a government takeover?
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POPS Thomas Sowell: Random Thoughts
But what this means is that even the record-breaking federal deficit understates the government's real financial liabilities, because agencies like FDIC and the Federal Housing Authority are likely to need increased amounts of money to keep going. An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground. I doubt whether the man responsible for the massacre at Fort Hood will pay with his life for the lives that he took. He may well be free again someday. We can only hope that he does not get a hero's welcome when he arrives in some terror-sponsoring country, the way the Lockerbie bomber did. A recent study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights showed that, after the housing boom and bust, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asian Americans and American Indians all reduced their subprime mortgage loans. Only politicians seem not to have learned anything from the economic disaster ...
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POPSBush or Obama: The Quiz 5. While Obama criticized Bush for "a doubling of the national debt," the federal debt held by the public went from 35.1% of GDP in 2000 to 40.8% of GDP in 2008 -- an increase of 16% as of fraction of GDP. What is it expected to be in 2016 under Obama's budget plan? 6. Obama criticized Bush for Guantanamo, military tribunals, wiretaps, troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and "signing statements." Which one of these Bush practices has Obama ended?
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POPSObamaCare: A Bad Deal for Young Adults Massachusetts benefits from another type of subsidy that props up its regime of mandates and price controls: large subsidies from the federal government. In contrast, the United States as a whole has no external party it can exploit to subsidize a nationwide Massachusetts-style health care overhaul"unless Congress finances that overhaul through additional deficit spending, which is really just another way of taxing the young to subsidize the old. by Aaron Yelowitz Aaron Yelowitz is an associate professor of economics at the University of Kentucky and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. This paper is based on a lecture delivered to the Undergraduate Economics Society at the University of Kentucky on October 1, 2009.
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POPSPages, Costs, and Agencies Added To The Obama/Pelosi Health Care Behemoth “Additionally, this bill cuts critical Medicare and Medicaid funding by $628 billion, accounts for nearly $1.2 trillion in tax and fee increases and will explode the scope of government by putting the nation’s health care system in the hands of Washington bureaucrats. The $3 trillion price tag defies common sense " we simply cannot add all this new spending to the government rolls and claim to control the deficit. “If we continue to pile more and more debt on the next generation, they will never be able to get out from under it. The health care system needs reform, but this massive expansion of government, financed by our children and grandchildren, is the wrong way to proceed.” And listen…this is what our government believes will be the cost. But look at programs our government has run historically and you find decades of added costs and overruns that our forced onto the taxpayer. Insanity http://www.bizzyblog.com/2009/11/07/how-to-go-from-1200-to-2000-pages/
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POPS Washington and the Jobs Market The larger measure of joblessness that includes marginal and part-time workers jumped 0.5% to 17.5%. And the average hours worked in a week stayed the same at 33.0, which means that millions of Americans working part-time will have to become full-time before employers start hiring new workers. If Democrats really want to create jobs and save themselves from a debacle in 2010, their best policy option is to stop creating so much investment uncertainty and additional barriers to business hiring. Stop trying to raise business costs by making it easier to unionize via "card check." Stop trying to raise energy costs with a cap-and-tax bill. Stop adding to the deficit and future tax burden with a 12% increase in domestic spending for 2010. Above all, stop trying to ram through Congress on a partisan vote a health-care bill that imposes a 5.4-percentage-point income tax "surcharge" on anyone making more than $500,000 a year......
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POPSDrowning in Debt This is from Ross Perot's site (remember him?). One of the comments at the site that I thought was really good: "Our dollar is backed by faith, how much faith is left? Sheesh, they’re going to run out of paper, granted it’s all electronic transfer so maybe not. But man, I just don’t see how catastrophic inflation isn’t a forgone conclusion at this point."
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POPSCarly Fiorina Enters California Senate Race to Unseat Barbara Boxer I feel absolutely great and I am raring to go." True to her word, she wasted no time going directly after Boxer. "Sometimes I wonder whether California even has two U.S. Senators," Fiorina said. "There's Dianne Feinstein and then there's...what's her name?" Fiorina charged that during Boxer's 17 years in Washington, she had passed only three pieces of legislation and written two fiction novels. "What do you say we work together to give Barbara Boxer the chance next year to be a full-time novelist?" The Boxer campaign responded immediately to the assertion that Boxer had not produced meaningful legislation in the Senate. "Fiorina is just plain wrong about the Boxer record. More than 1,000 of Senator Boxer's provisions have been adopted and enacted into law," the campaign said in a statement. During a question and answer session following her speech, Fiorina was asked if she favors term limits. Yes, she said, she favors them and believes Boxer demonstrates why limits
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POPSWant to Lose Weight? Try Sleeping! Sounds pretty simple right? Then why do so many of us view regular sleep as something not all that important? "I’ll just make up the sleep on the weekend" we say. Well, unfortunately studies are showing it just does not work like that when it comes to sleep...
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POPSPublic Health Plan Covers FEW
"The public option is a significant issue, but its place in the debate is completely out of proportion to its actual importance to consumers," said Drew Altman, president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. "It has sucked all the oxygen out of the room and diverted attention from bread-and-butter consumer issues, such as affordable coverage and comprehensive benefits." The Democratic health care bills would extend coverage to the uninsured by providing government help with premiums and prohibiting insurers from excluding people in poor health or charging them more. But to keep from piling more on the federal deficit, most of the uninsured will have to wait until 2013 for help. Even then, many will have to pay a significant share of their own health care costs. The latest look at the public option comes from the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan economic analysts for lawmakers. It found that the scaled back government plan in the House bill wouldn't overtake
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POPSReal men don't read D.C. pundits
Even worse than Krauthammer's column today, though, was David Brooks in the New York Times. Partly it's because Brooks likes to pretend to be open-minded and reasonable, while spouting neocon talking points, and occasionally liberals get pulled in by him. But today was trademark lazy ideological Brooks. As Glenn Greenwald notes, unbelievably he bragged about "doing what journalists are supposed to do" -- which he defined as talking to a handful of anonymous pro-war sources, who uniformly criticized Obama's inaction to date on McCrystal's troop request. That's some brave shit. Not quite David Rohde brave, but hey, he made the calls! If it was unanimous, that means he didn't call retired Marine Matthew Hoh, who resigned from a civilian post in Afghanistan this week because he said we can't win, and our presense is only fueling the insurgency. Hoh told the Washington Post's Karen de Young he's "not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love" and that he believes
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POPSTravel: 36 hours in Sacramento Too long to clip – click through for the rest, including shopping, dining, wine tasting, at least one bar that serves absinthe, farmers' markets, and bicycling.
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POPSCharles Krauthammer: The Three Envelopes I suppose, explain away his own, well, yearlong drift on Afghanistan. This compulsion to attack his predecessor is as stale as it is unseemly. Obama was elected a year ago. He became commander in chief two months later. He then solemnly announced his own "comprehensive new strategy" for Afghanistan seven months ago. Obama is obviously unhappy with the path he himself chose in March. Fine. He has every right -- indeed duty -- to reconsider. But what Obama is reacting to is the failure of his own strategy. There is nothing new here. The history of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is a considered readjustment of policies that have failed. In each war, quick initial low-casualty campaigns toppled enemy governments. In the subsequent occupation stage, two policy choices presented themselves: the light or heavy "footprint." In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we initially chose the light footprint. This was the considered judgment of our commanders at the time,
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POPSSchoolgirl, 15, watches in horror as hoodie stamps on her tiny puppy's head and kills it She said: 'I'm devastated. It was such a shock - Sandy was a lovely puppy. Enlarge Sandy the puppy who was killed by a group of yobs 'She wandered over to three boys wagging her tail and one of them just put his foot out and trampled on her head. 'She was very well behaved and one of those things you can't replace. I am very angry.' Her mother, Loretta, 45, heard April screaming and crying after the incident and found her sitting on the kerb sobbing. She said: 'It is unbelievable. How could someone do something like that?' Grandmother Norma Peachey, 72, from Cherry Hinton, Cambridge, added: 'It is despicable. Sandy was such a little dear - so tiny she could have fitted in a coffee cup.'
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POPSOne of The Biggest Bait-And-Switch Acts in History I'm thinking it's time to pronounce Obama and his agenda precisely what they are - socialist and looking to bring down the last great remaining free capitalist system in the world so as to bring it in line with too much else of a statist world. What else can one call it with any degree of honesty? Certainly liberal no longer serves. The Left abandoned classic liberalism a decade ago. And the New Left has only gotten worse. It's time to draw the battle lines more clearly, start speaking of what freedom, capitalism, individualism and self-determinism actually are and explain to people how they won't be much of anything in some new Obama-designed state. It's time to forget about compromise and begin rejecting Obama and his grand plans completely as he and they deserve for being un-American in the most important meanings of the word. Obama sold his healthcare proposal as a way to reduce costs and help the economy. But, Pawlenty says,
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POPSHow to use Bach flower for ADHD Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) causes acute mental stress and embarrassment to children and adults who are afflicted by it as well as their near and dear ones.
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POPSAvoid being "skinny fat"! ever seen people who are thin all over, but with a belly...or thin but flabby? Here is a post that explains how to overcome being skinny fat.
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POPSSafety nets for the rich More: Enough! Goldman Sachs is thriving while the combined rates of unemployment and underemployment are creeping toward a mind-boggling 20 percent. Two-thirds of all the income gains from the years 2002 to 2007 — two-thirds! — went to the top 1 percent of Americans. We cannot continue transferring the nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid — which is what we have been doing for the past three decades or so — while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day. That money is never going to trickle down. It’s a fairy tale. We’re crazy to continue believing it.
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POPSMoodys Warns U.S. Aaa Rating In Danger if it doesn't reduce the debt - either with taxes or cutting expenditures. Notice they gave the administration "3-4 years" so as to allow for an Obama re-election before raising taxes. Then it's all hell breakin' loose for taxes. Either that or let the rating fall and apologize for the fact that we ever had a Triple-A in the first place and appeal to our "empathy for those nations that never had top rating. This would also fit into the progressive p.r. agenda.
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POPSExcuses Wearing Thin for Obama, Media Pals Yet just a few months ago, the Obama camp was singing a little different tune. It was under criticism for the $787 billion stimulus package it bulldozed through Congress on grounds that massive spending was needed to keep the unemployment rate from breaching 8 percent. When joblessness hit 9.5 percent in June, Vice President Joe Biden said, "We misread how bad the economy was." They inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, or the economy turned out to be worse than they thought. Which is it? It can't be both -- unless your brain is completely addled by the Obama charisma. That's the backdrop to the story of Rush Limbaugh getting booted from a group bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams. He was smeared on CNN and MSNBC with false accusations of making two racist comments. He is an abrasive critic of Obama, so he must be racist.. . Recently an MSNBC personality accused the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of lobbying for policies that amount to being "treasonous . . .
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