Mmmmm…tastes good

Hurry, hurry, hurry….

Like the Pork-ulus, like Cap and Tax, like just about everything else the Messiah’s administration has tried to do, we are constantly being harangued with “we can’t wait… we have to do this now”.

His legislative strategy moves in two gears — heedlessly fast and recklessly faster.

As with the stimulus package, Obama’s health-care plan depends on speed. More important than any given provision, more important than any principle, more important than sound legislating is the urgent imperative to Do It Now.

Do it now, before anyone can grasp what exactly it is that Congress is passing. Do it now, before the overpromising and the dishonest justifications can be exposed. Do it now, before Obama’s poll numbers return to Earth and make it impossible to slam through ramshackle government programs concocted on the run. Do it now, because simply growing government is more important than the practicalities of any new program.

The stimulus partly drives the rush on health care. The program was so ill-considered and so festooned with irrelevant liberal priorities as the price of hustling it through Congress that it becomes more of a drag for Obama every day. So health care has to be rushed through before Obama pays the full price for the failure of his previous rush job. Haste — and waste — makes for more haste. Rich Lowry – An Ideologue In A Hurry

Our Illustrious Leader is turning into a poor imitation of a carnival barker right before our eyes: “hurry, hurry, hurry, step right up…”

Succint summary

As usual, Victor Davis Hanson is able to summarize things so much better than I can concerning the problems with the Obama administration.   His conclusion to a great article Growing Worries About Our Pied Piper:

So the problem is not just that Obama, like Bill Clinton, is proving insincere, or like Richard Nixon, at times duplicitous. And the rub is not even that he, like Ronald Reagan on occasion, is showing a limited repertoire or, in the manner of the Bushes, is becoming predictable in speech and custom. Obama, like Jimmy Carter, earns the added injury that all wannabe prophets incur when they promise more than mortal purity while proving to an ordinary human in character.

Americans are waking up to the fact that their president says, promises, and does things that simply do not make sense, at odds with what they know of human physics — with the predictable nature of the way humans have conducted themselves for centuries: Borrowing is debt, not “stimulus”; serial apologies soon sound insincere or become counterproductive; blaming someone else becomes tiresome; scapegoating leads nowhere; taking responsibility for failure is as necessary as being praised for success; people can be fooled only so many times by sonorous, ego-laced rhetoric.

Because Obama is a revolutionary who seeks to overturn 50 years of doing business in America both at home and abroad, his shortcomings have the potential not only to diminish his own stature through unmet impossible expectations, but to take all those who signed on to his megalomania down with him.

‘Nuff said!

More of what hasn’t worked?

The oft quoted modern definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So what are we to think of our “geniuses” in the Congress and the Obama administration who are seriously talking about another economic “stimulus” because the first one clearly isn’t working? What to do?… why, more of the same, of course!

For those with short attention spans, please remember that the first package was pitched as the absolutely-must-pass-now-no-time-to-actually-read-the-bill way to prevent unemployment from “exploding” to more than 8%!  So it was passed in such a hurry that no member of Congress could possibly have read the bill prior to voting on it… and our Illustrious Leader then proceeded to wait 4 full days to sign the “emergency” bill!

But wait, unemployment has now not only surpassed 8%…but has passed 9.5% and is likely headed to somewhere north of 10% nationwide.   How can this be?  The “smartest people in the world” (who, coincidentally, all work for or support the Messiah…go figure!) assured us that their policies of MASSIVE government spending would fix everything and keep things from getting this bad.

Yet even that paragon of wisdom, Joe Biden (who, it seems, only opens his mouth to change feet) has had to admit that our resident geniuses “misread” how bad conditions were.  Of course, this is all still the fault of the “evil” Bush administration, who didn’t tell poor Joe and Company how bad things really were!  This is passing strange, since one of the central themes of the Obama/Biden campaign was a constant drumbeat of how this was “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression”.  Exactly how does one square that with Biden’s current claim that lack of information from the Bush administration lead them to underestimate how bad conditions were??

At some point there needs to be a statute of limitations on blaming problems on the previous administration and start facing the cold, hard fact that, just as many of us predicted, the actions of the Obama crew have made things worse rather than better.  One may not like how the basic principles of economics work, but that doesn’t mean you can repeal them by fiat.   No nation has ever taxed itself out of a recession/depression!  Massive increases in spending leave a government with 2 basic choices — increase taxes to unbearable levels or to just print more money to cover the deficits and, thereby, open the door wide open to exploding inflation!  The government taking over more and more sectors of the economy does absolutely nothing to encourage the innovation and individual risk taking desperately needed to get the economy going again.

But the Democrats, drunk with power, only seem to know one answer for everything…. throw incredible amounts of money at the problem.  Yeah, that’ll fix everything!  And if it doesn’t work the first time, keep doing it again and again and again and again….

Insanity!

More truth on Canadian healthcare

From one of the very few intellectually honest people at ABC:

Stossel on Socialized Medicine

Rick Moran
ABC’s John Stossel has spent his career documenting government waste, fraud, and lies. He has exposed the political motivations behind many actions taken by government that are ostensibly done for our “health.”

Stossel has a winning column in RealClearPolitics today that demonstrates why our system – expensive and wasteful at times – nevertheless is far superior to Canada’s or Great Britain government run nightmare:

In America, people wait in emergency rooms, too, but it’s much worse in Canada. If you’re sick enough to be admitted, the average wait is 23 hours.

“We can’t send these patients to other hospitals. Dr. Eric Letovsky told us. “Every other emergency department in the country is just as packed as we are.”

More than a million and a half Canadians say they can’t find a family doctor. Some towns hold lotteries to determine who gets a doctor. In Norwood, Ontario, “20/20″ videotaped a town clerk pulling the names of the lucky winners out of a lottery box. The losers must wait to see a doctor.

Shirley Healy, like many sick Canadians, came to America for surgery. Her doctor in British Columbia told her she had only a few weeks to live because a blocked artery kept her from digesting food. Yet Canadian officials called her surgery “elective.”

“The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live,” she said.

It’s true that America’s partly profit-driven, partly bureaucratic system is expensive, and sometimes wasteful, but the pursuit of profit reduces waste and costs and gives the world the improvements in medicine that ease pain and save lives.

Polls show Canadians like their government run system. But Stossel points out most people aren’t sick when responding to the pollsters questions. And the world is almost totally dependent on American medical innovations for things like drugs and new technology because  a government run system discourages it.

But here’s the kicker; in Canada, there are patients who do indeed get immediate tests and no waiting to see the doctor:

[W]e did find one area of medicine that offers easy access to cutting-edge technology — CT scan, endoscopy, thoracoscopy, laparoscopy, etc. It was open 24/7.

Patients didn’t have to wait. But you have to bark or meow to get that kind of treatment. Animal care is the one area of medicine that hasn’t been taken over by the government. Dogs can get a CT scan in one day. For people, the waiting list is a month.

Better start practicing your Deputy Dawg imitation.

Maybe a clue

In recent weeks as the members of Congress have piled one spending program on top of another and now are beginning the inevitable tax increases to cover them, my wife has repeatedly asked me, “Why are they doing this? Don’t they realize what they are doing to the ordinary, hard working people who are struggling to get by?”

I have responded to that question several times by pointing out that most of what they are doing will not affect them… they conveniently exempt themselves from these burdens they keep imposing on the rest of us!
Then I ran across the following, from Rich Galen, which condenses it to a nutshell:

How much do Members of the U.S. House and Senate make? Are they suffering as are regular people? Do they feel the pain of tax increases and new regulations?

In reverse order: No. No. And $174,000 per year.

In addition Members of Congress get a tax break on their housing, have health care completely paid for by you and me, and have a pretty good retirement system although the other benefits are so good you can’t get them to retire much before their 113th birthday, on average.

That $174,000 is for the rank-and-file, show-up-for-work four-days-a-week members of the House and Senate. You want to be really aggravated? The Speaker of the House, who happens to be Nancy Pelosi, and who happens to be one of the wealthiest members of Congress, makes $223,500.

And she gets to fly home on an Air Force jet which the rank-and-file, show-up-for-work four-days-a-week members of the House and Senate do not get to do.

So these “representatives of the people” get paid about 6 times as much as I do, only work a 4 day week (instead of the 5 or 6 the rest of us put in) and only work about 30 weeks a year.  In addition, they have all kinds of perks from provided cars/drivers, free office space and supplies, free postage and on and on and on and…………

This might be a clue as why so many in Congress are sooooooooo arrogant and out of touch with the people they claim to represent.   Just wondering…..