Could last week have gone any better?  And of course the icing on the cake was the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.  Great news for liberty and the First Amendment, but not so great news for the liberal blogosphere, as ekg’s “ corporatist dystopia” demonstrates.  After reading her blog, I felt I had just read a science fiction story of a corporate controlled future, in which nation states no longer exist and only corporate allegiance survives.  “Me?  Why I’m a citizen of Microsoft!”

But who are these gigantic corporate oligarchs bent on buying and selling Congressmen like shares of penny stocks?  In this case, the corporate behemoth was Citizens United.   “CZ” as we hip kool kids like to inappropriately nickname everything, is an non profit conservative organization set up to distribute films and documentaries to promote conservative causes.  In this case, they intended to buy time to air their film, Hillary: The Movie on DirectTV.  The Federal Elections Commission found that running the movie and commercials for the movie was considered “electioneering” and prohibited both the commercials and the movie itself from being shown.

Now, I’m not some big city lawyer, just a simple country boy blessed with the common sense that God has seen fit to bestow upon all of his non-attorney children, so really that is already more information I need to know to decide in which direction to go on this decision.

The government banned a movie.

That really should be all that needs to be said about this.

Sadly though, in times like these, when the word freedom is generally interpreted to mean getting something for free, the plain language of the First Amendment…

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

…just doesn’t seem to be a good enough argument anymore.

Have we really slipped so far off our moorings that a law that allows the government to ban books if they have a hint of political advocacy within a certain time frame to a federal election is supported by much of the country?

My first amendment rights are fully protected if I want to create “art” of a crucifix in piss, or make a sculpture of Mary out of shit.  Why then, that calls for a NEA grant!  But political speech, which was the very core of the Founders intent in crafting the 1^st amendment in the first place, should be regulated and banned?

I can’t imagine these same liberals would have felt that justice was being served if the FEC had banned Fahrenheit 911 from being shown in the 60 days leading up to the 2004 general election.  Apparently some right leaning legal group never thought of it, but up until the overturning of much of McCain–Feingold last week, that would have been perfectly legal to do.

A further irony is that McCain-Feingold explicitly exempts media corporations, such as major newspapers and broadcast companies.  These are corporations after all.  However specifically excluding them from McCain-Feingold is telling in itself.  Is it the government’s position that if they were not specifically excluded from the law, the FEC could regulate the coverage of media companies?  That’s why the canard about corporations being treated as people ring false to me.  The founders clearly didn’t intend that a newspaper owned as a joint stock company had no right to publish. That makes free expression a privilege granted by the government, not a right.  Equally ridiculous, if the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to corporations, does that mean the police require no warrant to search a company building?  Can a local government forbid a company from allowing prayer breakfasts on its premises?  Wouldn’t want a corporation treated like a person with the right to worship would we?

Although I think ekg’s vision of a return to the draft, banning of abortion, and evolution tossed out of the classroom in favor of the Old Testament is off the wall wacky, I can’t really predict what the long term results of this decision will be on the body politic. I don’t know that we will like the results.  However I know that I have to default to freedom.  This is not “hiding behind the 1st Amendment” or judicial activism, but a return to upholding the literal meaning of the 1st Amendment.

Liberals love to toss Ben Franklin’s warning of choosing security over liberty around as if they were playing catch in the backyard, but I’ve come to realize that they don’t really know what that means.  They will gladly toss freedom of speech over the side of the ship of state if they think they can accrue some short term political benefit from it. 

“Liberals” sure have changed.

I am sad that we’ve gone so far down the road away from liberty that this argument even has to be made.  Forty years ago, a liberal would have defined himself by how supportive he was of free expression.  No more.  Now he merely defines himself by what he hates.

Christmas Day found my mother in law insisting that we all go to the movies to see Avatar; specifically the IMAX 3D version, but the IMAX Theater was all the way across town… whahh….  I was not averse to seeing the movie, far from it.  It was a movie I was waiting for.  But I would have been happy to see just the regular movie version much closer to where I live.

But… I would have been wrong.  Seeing that movie, in IMAX and 3D, is the only way to see it.  The movie’s raison d’etre is after all, visuals.  That’s the big selling point; something that looks fantastic on screen that you’ve never seen before.  On that basis, the movie fulfilled the hype.  The visuals are lush, fantastic, and certainly something much beyond what I’m used to seeing on the screen. It provides the perfect beauty of a painting with the realism of … well real life.  The visuals of the movie are art, in and of itself.

As for the story… well if you’ve already seen the movie, you know it.  In fact, if you haven’t seen the movie, you still know it.  It’s pulled intact from Hollywood’s grab bag of twenty or thirty standard movie plots.  If you’ve seen any Hollywood movies in your life time, then you’ve already seen this one.  Dances with Aliens is a pretty succinct description.  But good story telling is good story telling.  I enjoyed the movie immensely even knowing how the story would play out.  Knowing the formula doesn’t necessarily ruin a movie for me.  The fun is the journey.

But I didn’t see much more than that.  Good popcorn type fun, but others saw much more into the movie than I did.  Science Fiction author Steven Barnes, who wrote about the movie at the author’s website, had a more unique view of the movie, If Spike Lee had directed Avatar?  Although that seems to be a subject ripe for a Mad Magazine satire, to Barnes it brought up issues of light skinned Na’vi lording over the darker blue skinned ones.  I didn’t even notice if there were various shades of blue among the alien Na’vi.  My view of a Spike Lee directed Avatar would have included the Na’vi calling each other “motherfucker” a lot and including an ending that would be totally incomprehensible to me.

But what really struck me was a finally throw away line at the end of the piece:

Oh…and if Spike had directed Avatar, there would have been at least one black male character to identify with. Say…the other Avatar scientist? Maybe one of the support staff?

What made me marvel a bit at this line is that after watching the movie, I never realized nor had it occurred to me that there were no black characters in the film.  True Zoe Saldana was one of the major characters of the film, but she was in blueface for the entire film so her film character was that of the alien Neytiri.  Anyway, she’s Dominican so it’s unclear to me if she regards herself as Hispanic or as Black.  That’s a whole nuther kettle of fish.

But Barnes comment was a reminder to me of how on a day to day basis that white people are isolated from race.  In America, we live in a white world.  If you’re white in the US, you just don’t have to think about race that much.  If I turn on the TV, I don’t worry about finding someone on the screen to identify with.  Firstly, because there is no one like me, and secondly, being able to live so removed from race and racial issues, the odds are against me not finding a “character to identify with.”  For Barnes, the issue is probably in his face on an almost daily basis.

Thanks to the television of Norman Lear, I grew up watching shows with predominately black casts, such as The Jefferson’s, Sanford and Son, and Good Times.  At least as a child, I had no problem identifying with the characters.  But television, like me, grew up.  Television expanded from 4 or 5 channels in a metropolitan area to 30, 40, then 70 or more channels on cable television, not counting digital channels.  Thirty or forty years ago, everyone, black and white, watched the same shows.  Now both the television and movie audience is much more segregated.  There is a channel for every taste, and ethnic and racial group.  We are gaining in choice, but we are clearly losing something else.  Perhaps a common popular culture?

But maybe, just maybe, there was more to James Cameron’s vision than a casting oversight.  Among the “human” cast, actors Dileep Rao (Dr. Max Patel), Sigourney Weaver (Grace Augustine), and Michelle Rodriguez (Judy Chacon) were the only “good guys” in the film.  Other than Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully, all of the “white” males were bad guys.  Women and Asians were the good guys.  Given Cameron’s politics, that was probably intentional.  It rather fits into the story and Cameron’s worldview.  Maybe Barnes should be glad that black males were left off this list, although in a broader sense, he may have brought up a good point.  One that I would never have noticed if it hadn’t been pointed out to me.

Most stories, but particularly in science fiction, require a sympathetic character that we need to identify with in order to be drawn into the story and to introduce whatever strange world we are being introduced to.  But how much does that sympathetic character need to be like us in order for us to really empathize with him or her?  Do they have to have the same skin tone, the same sex?  And if the movie doesn’t provide that, is it a slap in the face to the viewers who don’t look like our protagonist? 

But I didn’t notice those things watching the film, but I’m pretty sure that if I had walked into that theater and every character had been black, I would have noticed.  The question I can’t answer is, would I have felt as excluded by that theoretical movie as Steven Barnes did from Avatar?

Maybe Spike Lee should take a crack at a remake…

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• Review: Powerful ‘Avatar’ Stuns the Eye, Seduces the Heart (wired.com)

As much fun as Climate-gate has been generating the past few weeks, it’s almost hard to remember that Climate-gate is actually autumn’s second big global warming story.  The release of the book Superfreakonomics generated the first global warming contretemps, just as the weather got chillier and leaves began to fall.

Superfreakonomics is the sequel to the wildly successful Freakonomics, by economists Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in which the authors apply standard economic analysis to all sorts of other behaviors not traditionally examined by economists, such as the economics of drug dealing, incentives for cheating for Chicago public school teachers, and predicting what the most popular children’s names will be in the future.  Probably the most controversial issue they researched was the link to legalized abortion and declining crime rates.  Their conclusion?   There is a link; a finding that did not engender themselves to many on the right.

This time it’s the left’s turn to get skewered.  Levitt and Dubner turn their economic analysis to solutions to global warming.  First it’s important to note that Levitt and Dubner are not global warming “deniers” or “skeptics.”  They accept the media/Al Gore consensus that global warming is happening and it’s largely manmade.  What sets them apart is what to do about it.  They find it cheaper and more cost effective to resort to geoengineering. 

One method in particular strikes them as particularly cost effective.  In 1991 Mt. Pinatubo erupted, pumping 15 to 300 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere and reduced global temperatures by about half a degree Celsius for years.  Levitt and Dubner asked themselves, wouldn’t it be more cost effective to try to duplicate that effect rather than strangle our economy for decades at a cost of trillions?  Turns out someone is already working on the idea:  Intellectual Ventures is a company that is developing a workable, and affordable, method of cooling the planet.  They figured that 100 million tons of sulfur dioxide per year would be enough to reverse warming.  It sounds like a lot except that we already pump 200 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere per year.  We just aren’t getting it high enough in the atmosphere.  IV came up with a plan that would send, via a hose, pumps, and helium balloons, sufficient amounts of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to stave off any warming for an initial cost of $20 million, and operating costs of $10 million a year.

Find me another global warming solution cheaper than that.

Naturally this threw the true believers into fits.  I’ve always suspected that global warming was as much a religious belief as scientific theory.  The Superfreakanomics attackers basically confirm that (to me anyway) by arguing that the main issue is to change human behavior. Oddly, they even argue that the computerized climate models would have to be far more accurate in order to make such a plan work (More about why that is so funny later). If there was a real consensus on the right and left that anthropogenic global warming was actually happening, that is probably where the divide would be:  The right would want the most cost effective method that would impact people and business the least, and the left would want to control human behavior, control the global economy, and have international bodies tax nation-states to mitigate the results of climate change.

Since the true believers are primarily on the left, their “solutions” dominate the debate, with geo engineering considered as much a heresy as Arianism was to the early Christian church.

Which of course brings us to Climate-gate.

The contents of the e-mails have been gone over so many times on so many websites that they hardly need to be rehashed here.  The critical summary is that the Climate Research Unit’s scientists conspired to, fire editors of scientific journals to control the peer review process, cite instances in which they use “tricks” to massage the data, and delete data in order to avoid a Freedom of Information Request; a crime, and in fact, they now admit to deleting all of their original climate station data, leaving only the “value-added,” massaged data left.

All damaging to be sure, but the most damaging of all to me is the “Harry_read_me.txt.”  This documents the attempts of one of the programmers to translate the climate data into something that could be modeled on the climate modeling software.

Basically its crap.

 In fact, it’s so bad that I think the true state of climate modeling is even worse than I thought it was, and I never thought it was sophisticated enough to determine if climate warming was man made or not.  Since none of the climate models predicted the post 1998 cooling, I figured they weren’t any good, but these revelations make me think that we are not even in the ball park of reasonably close climate modeling.

A few weeks ago, before the news on Climate-gate had broken, someone claimed that nothing could convince me of anthropogenic global warming.  Ah but there is.  Build a computerized climate model that can accept the inputs of climate that we already know we’ve had, say, from 1960 to 1990, and see if it can predict the climate for the next ten years, to 2000.  Since we already know what the weather actually was for that period of time, reasonably close results would give us an indicator if the model actually works.  Then maybe you could put in the variable of increased CO2 and see if it shows increased temperature; global warming in other words.

But we still are not even close to doing that.  In fact we are still so far off from that I despair of seeing that combination of software and processing power for decades, if ever.  Certainly it won’t be ready for the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, which started today.  Not that they need actual science for the conference.  They are basing their conclusions on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which bases their science on, you guessed it, the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit!

About a year and a half ago I wrote a blog expressing my doubts of manmade global warming, and it looks to me as if everything that has come out since then have made my doubts grow.  However if you are a true believer, nothing, not the CRU e-mail scandal, or even the actual halt in global temperatures since 1998 will deter you.  The delegates to the Copenhagen conference, with their 1,200 limos and 140 private planes, are true believers.  President Obama, who will be flying in next week to put his stamp of approval on whatever agreement comes out of the conference, is a true believer.  And the EPA, which as of today announced that carbon dioxide will “pose a threat to human health and welfare,” are true believers.

Even if global temperatures continue to fall for the next 10 to 20 years, it may be at least that long before the AGW skeptics start to get some traction.  We’ve already had 10 years of no increase in global temperatures with no let up on the true believers dominating public policy in virtually every industrialized country on the planet.

It might take a new ice age to thaw out that consensus.

Almost immediately after news of the name of the shooter at Ft. Hood was made public, the left and the media girded it’s loins and prepared to do battle, to defend Major Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who killed 13 and wounded 31 more before being brought down by two civilian police officers.   Not defending the killing of course; that was beyond the abilities of even the New York Times to pull off, but defend him from his own motives.

The Nation was first out of the box with it’s defense:  Any mention of Major Hasan’s religion was Islamophobia.  Of course I’m suspicious of any word that tries to medicalize an opinion.  That’s like saying some opinions are akin to a mental illness.  That’s not even two steps away from an old Soviet psychiatric hospital.  Phobias are of course irrational fears, so I’ll let the reader determine if they think any suspicion about a radical islamist ideology is “irrational” or not.  Certainly Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security Secretary, seems to be more worried about an anti-Muslim backlash than the current anti-infidel one.

That’s different of course from plain old prejudice and bigotry.  Which of course, you can also be accused of for noting that Hasan said “allu akbar” before his rampage.  If a Christian says something like, “in the name of Jesus Christ the Redeemer, take that!” and opens up on a crowd of innocents, we don’t question that the gunman probably had some sort of religious motivation.  Allu Akbar?  Nothing to see here, move along…

Speaking of Allu Akbar, CNN tried to edit that phrase right out of it’s coverage.  As the milblog Mudville Gazette demonstrates, CNN went back and re-edited the article that interviewed PVT Joseph Foster, who heard MAJ Hasan yell “Allah[sic] Akbar!” to try to imply that Foster may or may not have heard it.  CNN, hard at work with the defense team already.

Almost immediately after news of the shooting began, the internet began to buzz with the name of …Timothy McVeigh.  Why McVeigh?  What does McVeigh have to do with this incident?  Nothing of course except… religious extremism?  Yes, apparently, in the collective mind of the left, McVeigh is some sort of Christian Terrorist; a factum that had never came out during the investigation or trial.  McVeigh, although raised Catholic, variously identified himself as either agnostic or atheist.  Apparently having blond hair is enough to have your religion classified as Christian in the minds of the American left.  I’m sure Christian ministers from Sao Paulo to Nairobi will be surprised by this.

McVeigh makes a poor defense for Hasan though, even by the standards of the left, but hey, if you throw enough stuff on the wall, some of it should stick.  But what’s stickier than McVeigh is just being plain crazy.  Dr. Phil made exactly that point when he asked, “how far out of touch with reality do you have to be to kill your fellow Americans . . . this is not a well act.”  Alan Colmes, normally a not-too-crazy liberal, made essentially the same point on the O’Reilly Factor:

COLMES: It’s an isolated incident. It’s one guy who went crazy.

CROWLEY: It’s about closing Gitmo.

COLMES: No, it’s not.

CROWLEY: It’s about matriculating these guys into the criminal justice system.

COLMES: It’s about.

CROWLEY: Come on, Alan.

COLMES: .you’ve got an incredible overreaction to one crazy person.

CROWLEY: He was not crazy. And he’ll tell you he’s not crazy.

COLMES: Okay.

CROWLEY: He’s just like Zacarias Moussaoui stood up in a U.S. court and said, I’m not crazy, I’m al Qaeda. And this is typical American B.S.

O’REILLY: I don’t know why.

CROWLEY: .which is exactly what it is .

O’REILLY: Colmes, I don’t know why you’re saying he’s crazy. He seems to be lucid.

COLMES: Oh, (INAUDIBLE). So someone who commits an act like this is not crazy?

O’REILLY: Well, look, then every murderer would be crazy.

COLMES: Yes, I think you’re going to do something like this, you’ve got a crazy (INAUDIBLE).

O’REILLY: Okay, so you couldn’t convict any killer on anything. They’d always get off on insanity.

COLMES: No, I wouldn’t necessarily get you off on insanity. But the claim, if you’re going to do something like this, you got a screw loose.

So if by definition, anyone who kills is crazy, well, nobody is guilty I suppose. 

Of course, there’s crazy and then there’s crazy.  The New York Times firmly came down on a more damning indictment of the stress of  military deployment driving Hasan to his act of ter—oops sorry, I mean acting out from profound stress.  Now I don’t want to minimize the stress of a deployment, I’ve experienced it myself, but Major Hasan, unlike the troops he would have counseled, wasn’t going to be thrown in the midst of a firefight in Afghanistan.  In all likelihood he would have been safely ensconced at Bagram AFB or one of the larger posts and in would probably never have heard a shot fired in anger (unless the war goes much more badly for us).  And Major Hasan, with no wife and children, wasn’t affected by one of the most stressful parts of deployment: separation from a spouse and children.  As far as military deployments go, Hasan’s would have been much more comfortable and danger free than the vast majority of troops he would have been sent there to support.

So everyone is carefully tiptoeing around the motives.  The President, who was quick out of the gate in determining the motives of a police officer towards a Harvard professor, suddenly feels that we “cannot fully know” the motive.

But no, let’s not rush to judgment.  The left would never do that would they?  Not like with the Holocaust Museum shooter that the left immediately blamed on right wing talk radio, but who turned out to be a hater of neo-cons, Bush, and McCain, and of course, was a 9/11 truther.  If he was listening to anything it sounds like it was Air America.

And of course the hanging of the census worker in Kentucky with the word “FED” scrawled on his body.  With no suspect in sight, the left had no problem targeting again, the right wing, and Glenn Beck.  Of course now, the case looks a little different, and police are thinking that this was not a murder at all.

The Army Chief of Staff, General George Casey, made clear that whatever the motive, the Army will continue to worship the gods of political correctness, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Really?  Diversity is more important than preventing massacres?

As for me, if someone described as a devout Muslim kills 13 and wounds 31 while shouting Allu Akbar, and thinks that non-Muslims should be set on fire, had contact with a radical, jihad promoting imam in Yemen, and had been described by colleagues, as expressing anti-American views, then I think there is a problem.

An Army that is so diverse that it allows enemies and people in direct opposition to the Army mission and the United States is a little too diverse in my opinion.  Does the Army really need to be diverse enough to include Jihadi’s, guerrillas, and traitors to the United States?  Whew, that’s one big tent!

I adore ekg.  For years she has been my liberal foil, challenging my assumptions and sharpening my arguments.  But lately, she has just seemed …off.  Like virtually every liberal worth his or her bureaucracy, she is wildly in favor of a “public option” in the current health care bill.  The more “publicky,” the better. Medicare for all is the dream, and VA care for all is the fantasy.  Yeah, I don’t get that one either.  But unfortunately, it’s a point that seems so evident to the liberal mind that any opposition seems either evil or crazy.

Or racist of course.  We can’t forget that one!

So her arguments in support of “health reform” have been of the self evident variety.  Hardly worth the title of “reasoned discussion” at all.  In discussing the case of Ian Pearl, she pulls out the familiar trope of the evil insurance company denying coverage for the wronged, ill, Christ figure.  Her blog on Ian’s plight is one part righteous anger and two parts accusatory anger.

But I do take her seriously and try to address her disagreements with my position:

Ekg, I don’t want to make you sad, so let me address your points one at a time.

Now, you are saying I don’t know what I am talking about because:

“1st.. Ian wouldn’t die from the ‘public option’… he would die from having to live in an assisted living home…”

So in order to live, Ian needs 24 hour home health care that is currently provided by his health insurance.  Now Ian is about to get the boot, the boot to Medicaid, which does not provide the sort of home health care that Ian needs, according to his parents to stay alive.  So once Ian is on Medicaid, his life will be nasty, brutish, and short.  Now assisted living is how Medicaid handles Muscular Dystrophy patients in Ian’s advanced condition.  So if Ian had never been covered under a private insurance plan, he would have been dead a while ago, correct?

But you say Medicaid is not a public option.  But the public option is government healthcare.  Do you think he would have a better deal under another government plan?

Which leads us to your second point…

”2nd medicaid isn’t the ‘public option’ .. that is what the poorest of the poor get. which no matter how bad(and it’s not), is still better than what millions have now..
The public option is low cost private insurance and it’s only low cost to the payer because the gov’t can purchase larger ‘blocks’ and get a better deal than a single person.”

If you’re correct, I’ve been following this issue for several months and have never heard that the public option is really private insurance.  In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong on that, so I will call bullshit until you can show me.  What I think you are getting it confused with are the private plans that will be sold through the exchange.  Those will have standardized basic benefits, prices, and will be subsidized for lower income people.  That is not the” public option.”  The public option is a government plan, not really insurance, with benefits and prices designed by the government.  Now the public option might be administered by a private company, in the same way that Tricare is administered by private insurance companies in different Tricare regions of the country, but it’s not a private insurance plan.  If there is a public option and it is administered by private health insurance companies, which seems likely, the insurance companies still win!

So one if us is really, really wrong on our understanding of what the public option is.  As long as we have been going over this issue, that’s pretty damn funny.  I don’t care who ya are…

Now I couldn’t help but notice this: 

“…healthcare companies pass the buck and raise the price while you cheer them on.. whether it’s because they are exempted under anti-trust laws or any other law doesn’t matter..”

I have not been exactly “cheering on” the health insurance companies while they raise prices.  Seeing as I’ve been in the middle of open enrollment at work, I find any cheers quite muted.  I’m trying to recall the last time I cheered price increases by health insurance companies in general and my health insurance in particular… let’s see, there was that time… no…how about… oh no… 

I guess no.  No cheers from me.

As far as anti trust laws go in general, I find them foolish, since monopolies generally require either control of a particular resource or some sort of government grant that gives a legal monopoly to a company.  Baseball has an anti trust exemption since we don’t want multiple baseball leagues bouncing around the country.  We would rather the current owners suck up all the profits.  For health insurance companies, If Senator Leahy or the President wants to pull that trigger, I say, let ‘em.  Just about everything else in the bill is designed to increase health care costs, so what’s one more? 

But the issue isn’t anti trust, it’s ERISA.  The federal law governing health plans gives a specific exemption from common contract law.  Under normal (and by this I mean both common and various state laws, although they may differ in specifics) contract law, a contract entered in good faith, even if there are flaws in the actual contract, such as doting the i or crossing the t , is still a valid contract.  Not so for health plans under ERISA.  The insurance company can retroactively cancel the contract of any member for any sort of contractual error.  They certainly have an incentive to dump high cost (i.e. really sick) patients if they can legally get away with it, and thanks to federal law, they can!

I guess lobbying really does pay.

Inevitably, when these hard luck rescission cases become big news, like Ian Pearl’s case or others that have become a cause celebre  for big government types such as the cases of Robin Beaton and Otto Raddatz’s, the reason they lost their health care was because of rescission; because the law allows them to.  Big government liberals easily forget the real villains in those cases:  ERISA.

Health Insurance II:  This time it’s personal.

“the quote you used was the PC/CYA reply to being asked why the VP would call someone like Ian or Chuck a fucking “dog”… which is something else you know, but chose to ignore because it doesn’t further your cause..

seriously.. how can you continue to protect an industry that would treat your wife the same way if she was diagnosed with MS tomorrow is simply beyond me..she would just be their new ‘dog’ to rid themselves of..”

Although I find myself offended at the term “dog” being used for either my wife or Chuck ( Ian I don’t know.  Sorry Ian, I’m sure you’re a nice guy and all…), the context seems to refer to the accounts, rather than the individuals.  But lets assume the worse.  The health insurance execs are meanies, they hate Ian, Chuck, and my wife and think they are dogs, and of course, hope they all die before too much money is spent on the sickly, when it could be much better spent on fabulous executive bonuses.   THIS is one of the key differences between people who trust the free market (as opposed to individual companies or executives) and people who trust the good naturedness of big government (stand by, teachable moment here): 

I don’t care that companies may hate me, are greedy, or that they are looking out for their own self interest.  Of course they are!  They are in business to make a goddamn buck!  Not to wipe the tears from our eyes and give us a shoulder to cry on. 

But it’s an observation that predates Adam Smith’s invisible hand:  Businesses and individuals in business are conducting commerce for their own ends.  However the result of that is that everyone’s interests are satisfied.  You want a widget, and a greedy company wants to make money by selling widgets.  Money and Widgets are exchanged, and voila!  Everyone gets what they want!  Contracts?  Same thing.  There is a centuries old body of law governing, “lets make a deal” between people.  As a general rule, it works pretty well.  It would probably work pretty well with health insurance too if our government allowed it. 

But if your thinking on private enterprise and business is totally dependent on companies being filled with nice guys and gals who think providing profits to their shareholders is less important than holding your hand and skipping through the meadow on a spring day, then you are pretty much going to hate capitalism and the free market.

And of course, let’s really get personal:

“.. you are as much of an accomplice in this as the ones who do it knowingly.. you have a president who will work with you.. but instead the GOP shat in his hand and walk over to tongue-kiss the insurance companies because they have the money to rile up the rank and inbred and to fund their re-election bid…”

Wow!  Me!  Personally responsible for Ian Pearl’s unfortunate condition, or responsible for the Republicans in Congress sitting on their hands and not embracing the President’s wack-a-nut health plan?  Either way, it’s a lot of responsibility to rest on my shoulders.  In any case, it was the President who spent the summer playing “wash the molars” with the health insurance companies, not the Republicans.  All the poor health insurance companies wanted was forced, mandatory requirement that everyone in the country get health insurance, a windfall worth billions to them.  That’s why they kept their mouths shut all summer and generically praised “health reform.”  Particularly after it looked like the Public Option was off the table. 

But a funny thing happened on the way to negotiations; the individual mandate and the fines to enforce it got weakened.  Weakened enough that suddenly the other higher costs enclosed in the health plan suddenly seem to outweigh the lesser amount of new customers the health insurance companies were expected to have the federal government  herd their way.  It is about self interest after all.  That’s what makes the world go round.  As fun as it would be to blame the Republicans for all this, or any of this for that matter, it’s strictly an inter-party squabble.  It’s Democrats versus the President.  Republicans?  They’re just out in the bleachers, yelling, “You lie” occasionally.

As for Ian, I don’t have a solution for him.  In that way, I’m no different than ekg.  I would have supported eliminating the part of ERISA that allows these situations to happen in the first place.  He would have either not lost his insurance, or if he had, his parents would have been able to sue the company in court.  That’s not an option available to him under current law.  But even if the Congress were to magically take an interest in that, I doubt it would be done in time to help Ian. 

Other than that, I only have Ian’s parent’s word that care under Medicaid is a “death sentence.”  I don’t know if that is their take on their son’s situation or a doctor’s opinion, but in any case, I hope they are wrong.  He’s getting the liberal dream:  government healthcare.  No greedy health insurance companies involved.   It’s government healthcare for Ian soon, and government healthcare for all of us eventually if the President has his way.  But If both Medicaid and Medicare, would have Ian die, why should this be shoved down my throat?  It’s funny that the biggest supporters of government healthcare suddenly are frightened by the thought of someone actually getting it.

As ironclad and inevitable as my logic seems to me when sealing the deal on an argument, I often find I have critics.  In this case, I’ve been accused of “lying” about some of the arguments I’ve made, particularly in my blogs about the Public Option and Rationing.  But, because I’m so fair minded I am more than happy to answer my critics and confront the accusation of lies.  To me the accusation of lying breaks down immediately and it seems like the “lies” are really just disagreements of opinion, not a conflict over the facts, although sometimes that comes up too:  In this case, my argument was the problem, not the facts:

the argument that we don’t want to be like Canada or Britain..
Because it’s the classic lie coming from the GOP…

what, is the lie?

That we will suffer the same consequences of these systems.. even tho this is NOT the system the Dems are trying to pass..

Well I would think that we can all agree that we don’t want to have the type of system that they have in the UK, but Canada has been held up as the gold standard of government healthcare by the American left for years.  But the problems that Canada has now were not evident immediately after they switched to their current system; it took years to outgrow the infrastructure that they had to reach the current position of having too few medical facilities and too few providers, resulting in long wait and appointment times.  We have the current medical infrastructure that we have, hospitals, urgent cares, outpatient surgery centers, even walk in clinics in Wal-Mart, because there is money in it.  Take the financial incentive out of the system and you are stuck with the infrastructure you have. 

The system the Democrats want to pass is one in which the germ of a government public option is available to eventually swamp over the current private insurance system.  The long term goal and result is to eliminate private health insurance, as The President and Democrats have been saying for years.  That would give us a system very much like Canada’s, with all that comes with it; shortages, long lines, months long wait for specialists and surgeries… no lie there.

Phrasing.. seriously.. I had to read it twice.. the placement of the word ‘uninsured’ makes it almost seem like you mean one those kinds of ppl getting breast or protate or any other cancer has a better survival rate here than anywhere else.. .. but thats simply not true is it.. because the survival rate you are quoting is only for those with insurance… those without of course, fare much worse than any other country don’t they..

I suspected that this wasn’t a valid issue to begin with, since counting only covered people would make the data fairly useless in determining actual survival rates worldwide.  That might be an interesting study in its own right, but there was nothing I could find in this study, regarding long term survival rates for cancer, that limited the pool to only covered people in the United States.  But I wanted to be sure so I went back to the original study, published in The Lancet Oncology, to review the methodology that was used in the study, and, as I suspected, health insurance coverage was not mentioned.  For an international study, that might not have even been a consideration when developing the data points for producing the study.  The NCPA’s analysis of the same study said that, “These figures reflect the care available to all Americans, not just those with private health coverage.”

Another “lie” seemed to be an interpretation of President Obama’s ABC Townhall on health care.  President Obama, in response to a question, said:

But what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that’s not making anybody’s mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn’t going to help.  Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.

To me, this sounds like an implicit support for rationing care to the elderly.   Of course we should eliminate waste in the system, but the President could do that now, without having a healthcare bill.  Medicare is losing 60 billion a year to waste, fraud, and abuse.  That is a worthwhile target to go after regardless of what happens to health reform.  It shouldn’t be held hostage to health reform.  In any case, there is nothing in the current HR 3200 that would attack this massive problem.  Instead, they use the example of trading off care. 

But President Obama, has made it clear, at least until the past few months, that he very much sees rationing as a method for cutting costs.  As recently as April in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, President Obama brought up the now infamous red and blue pill analogy:

So when Peter Orszag and I talk about the importance of using comparative-effectiveness studies as a way of reining in costs, that’s not an attempt to micromanage the doctor-patient relationship. It is an attempt to say to patients, you know what, we’ve looked at some objective studies out here, people who know about this stuff, concluding that the blue pill, which costs half as much as the red pill, is just as effective, and you might want to go ahead and get the blue one. And if a provider is pushing the red one on you, then you should at least ask some important questions.

That’s fine as far as it goes, everyone, from insurance companies on down, would prefer that you use generics if there are no specific medical reasons to use the “retail” pill.   But the President, who famously said last week that he did not want to kill our grandparents, seemed to have mixed feelings on his own:

I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.

So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.

And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question.

Yes that is a difficult question.  And that’s exactly what is bringing the oldsters out to townhalls.  They are afraid, and not because of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or whatever boogie man lefties have, it’s because of the President himself.  The great communicator, if he is not in favor of rationed healthcare, sure likes to bring it up a lot.

I think my favorite “lie” is this one:

take for instance the argument of “It costs too much”.. well it costs more to do nothing.. But this truth is flatly rejected because there is no arguing it.. so it goes on the shelf labeled “Ignore at all costs”

I’m not sure how exactly this is categorized as a lie, but it’s a strawman argument.  There is no advocacy for “doing nothing.”  Neither Republicans, “villain” insurance companies, nor blue dog Democrats are arguing that it’s Obamacare or nothing.  There are multiple proposals for reform, and I’ve made a few myself for years.  But  arguing that Obamacare is actually going to cut costs is ridiculous.  The CBO is not buying it, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence, other than President Obama’s say so, that his plan would cut costs, either in the short or long term.  It’s a money pit.  I wonder how in the tank to Obama you have to be to think that creating a major new entitlement program will reduce costs.

Anyway, I’m always open to respond to more “lies.”  Maybe someday I will actually get some.

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During the August recess, while the Community Organizer in Chief is leading the charge against communities organizing against his health care agenda, I thought I would take another look at the details, which the devil is notorious for being in.  To me, the clearest long term effect is that the health care reform will end up in health care rationing.  Not as an unintended side effect, but as the long term goal.

But no, you say, scare-monger!  Trying to frighten people from the vision of The One!  Well, maybe people should be scared.  It’s astounding to me that this plan has gotten this far.  True, the plan would have been passed months ago if Obama had been savvy enough to drop it already written onto the laps of Congress in early February.  The country was in the throes of an Obamagasm and the President figured it would last enough to get this done in the summer.  It’s easy to see how he miscalculated.  All the major media organizations are still lounging in the bed, nude, and bathing in the afterglow. But much of the country either never got their promised release, or did, and afterwards felt sticky and thirsty, with a pounding headache coming on.

It’s a simple economic truth that in the broadest sense everything is “rationed.”  That’s what money does; it determines a value for anything that there isn’t an infinite supply of, which is practically everything.  Health care in the United States costs money, so if you have a lot of money, you can get as much as you want, or like most people who don’t have a lot of money, you have a third party payer pick up the tab.  In Canada and Europe, healthcare still costs money; only the someone who is picking up the tab is the government.  In the US, the third party payers (insurance companies) compete against each other for member’s and employer contracts.  In systems where the government is the only purchaser of healthcare, there isn’t competition, or making a profit off of providing healthcare like there is in this country, only a staggering cost and annoying patients.  Wait times often do the rationing, with patients waiting many months for care in limited facilities with limited medical providers.  That’s one of the key differences between a private and government health care system.  Building more facilities and hiring more staff helps to make money in a private system, so there is a powerful incentive to expand, but for the government, it’s merely a drain on resources.

The country had a bit of luck though in that President Obama’s first choice for Health and Human Services Secretary, Tom Daschle, was derailed by tax issues.  Daschle, who had spent the years since losing his senate seat mucking about Washington as a lobbyist-who-never-registered-as-a-lobbyist also had time to write a book on health care, Critical:  What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis.  The book lays out a plan very similar to what’s contained in HR 3200.  Daschle was quite open in how he wanted health care to be rationed; he proposed a Federal Health Board  to determine both clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness, in other words, a board to determine approved courses of treatment in the same way that the Orwellian named NICE, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, does in the UK. 

NICE determines cost effectiveness based on a formula that says that a treatment is cost effective if it doesn’t exceed $34,000 per Quality Adjusted Life Year.  That means if an anti-cancer drug costs a cool 34K, but it will only increase your life span for 6 months, then sorry, go home and die.  This insures that only the older, cheaper, treatments will be used with any regularity.  That’s why the United States, with millions uninsured, has better long term survival rates on most common cancers, like breast, prostate, and colon cancer than the state supplied healthcare of Europe. 

Daschle isn’t the only one in the President’s orbit who wants to ration health care.  Dr.  Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, is a White House advisor on health care issues and has written extensively on various aspects rationing health.  His take on rationing healthcare is based on his Complete Lives System.   As Dr. Emanuel explains his proposal:

When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.

There is even a chart showing prime ages for using expensive medical treatment, and ages when…eh not so much eh?

      The gist of this proposal is that if you are between 15 and 40, you are considered a good bet to get high quality, expensive medical treatment, because these are the ages when you have the most value to society.  Under 15, not so much education or training has been spent on you, so there is no big investment.  Over 40, you are beginning the end of your highest value to society and now you are starting to cause nothing but problems, what with your middle aged health ailments. Oy!  As you can see from the chart if you are 60 or older, than it’s pretty much Soylent Green time.  Just go to the center, take your poison, watch an IMAX movie and “go home.”

Rationing is so ubiquitous among the supporters of government healthcare that there doesn’t seem to be any shyness in discussing it.  Apparently you can advocate health care rationing, just not use the word “ration” and that’s good enough.  For example, Senator Edward Kennedy wrote recently for Newsweek about The Cause of My Life:

We also need to move from a system that rewards doctors for the sheer volume of tests and treatments they prescribe to one that rewards quality and positive outcomes. For example, in Medicare today, 18 percent of patients discharged from a hospital are readmitted within 30 days—at a cost of more than $15 billion in 2005. Most of these readmissions are unnecessary, but we don’t reward hospitals and doctors for preventing them. By changing that, we’ll save billions of dollars while improving the quality of care for patients.

The problem with re-admissions of course, is that you can’t know they are un-necessary until after the patients are re-admitted.  How are you going to know which re-admissions are “unnecessary” until after they are re-admitted?  How is the government going to reward hospitals and doctors for not admitting patients to the hospital?

And of course, this goes all the way to the top, to the Rationer in Chief.  During the ABC Health Care Town Hall, President Obama made an astounding statement regarding that very subject, in response to a question from a woman who is a caregiver to her 105 year old mother, the woman told of her attempt to find a doctor to implant a pacemaker.  She finally found a doctor who found her mother to be worth saving, and the surgery was done.  Her question, would the government plan consider “a certain joy of living?” In determining who would get expensive medical care.

But what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that’s not making anybody’s mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.

I don’t know why the President seems to think that doctors don’t already have to make those decisions, based on the health and ability of the patient to handle surgery.  Now of course, there will be a new wrinkle added, the government’s desire to pay for healthcare for the unproductive.

Rationing isn’t a joke or an over the top accusation.  It’s happening right now in other countries, and astoundingly there seems to be plenty of people who want to import the worst of socialized medicine to this country.  My wife’s grandmother is British, and at 92 has been denied the gall bladder surgery that she needs by the NICE regulations.  In this country, a 92 year old may or may not get surgery, based on the physician’s judgment that the patient is able to handle the surgery, not on government regulations and rules.

A British friend of my wife’s family, in his late 50’s was diagnosed a few months ago as needing bypass surgery and a shunt.  He has a home in Florida as well as in the UK, and wanted to fly back to the States for surgery, since he was told that he couldn’t be scheduled for surgery for months. However the National Health Service has forbidden him to fly.   In this country, go see a doctor and be told that you need open heart surgery and chances are you’ll find yourself admitted to a hospital the same day. So he is trapped in the UK, hoping he lives long enough for the scheduled surgery (hopefully by the end of August).

So this is how the government plans to “control costs.”    True, the United States spends more per capita on health care than any other nation, but that’s because, goddamn it, we want health care, and we’re buying it.  In other countries, healthcare is a line item in the national budget.  You can’t buy more of it if you want or need more.  You get what you’re allowed to have.  Why anyone would want to copy that kind of system is beyond me, but what I do understand is why the government wants it.  That’s in the nature of governments to constantly try to expand it’s power over us, and it has plenty of collaborators.

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It’s hard to know what will rile up the left, or ekg, since some things that seem innocuous to me will set off her red alert button.  To be fair, it works both ways.  The allegation that the President was breaking the law in firing an Inspector General who was investigating a supporter of the President draws not even a yawn from her or the left.  Whether or not a real crime comes from that remains to be seen, but I doubt it will ever be a story on the level of Bush’s firing of his Justice Department Attorney Generals, which generated quite a bit media angst and airplay, even though Bush’s actions were perfectly legal.

That’s why I don’t get wound up at each Bush/Rove/Cheney “war crime.”  I expect the media to pick apart the Bush administration memo by memo and I have a perfect ironic faith that the media will leave no stone unturned.  If the Bush administration is guilty of crimes, they won’t stay hidden.  Every parking ticket will generate a Congressional committee to investigate the heinous atrocity of double parking by the evil denizens of the Bush White House.

So, when I’m told that the Bush administration falsified CIA threat assessments to justify shitting (once again) on the Constitution, I tend to think, “been there, done that.”  Like a conspiracy theorist, no amount of debunking will disprove it.  For the conspiracist, debunking is always proof of just how far reaching the conspiracy is.

So, when presented with this:

The IG report said an unnamed White House official inserted a paragraph into the first threat assessment prepared by the CIA after the Sept. 11 attacks, which was used to justify the extraordinary intelligence measures.

The paragraph said that the “individuals and organizations involved in global terrorism possessed the capability and intention to undertake further terrorist attacks within the United States,” according to the report. It also said that the president should authorize the NSA to conduct the surveillance activities.

I admit it, I shrugged.

So with my ironic faith in the media, I assume that if there was something really to this, Brian Williams would have informed me promptly at 6:30 pm, every single evening until Bush was arrested and perp walked to a paddy wagon.  Mr.  Williams has not made a peep.  If taken at face value, it does sound bad, but then I have to remember, if it’s so bad, why isn’t it a bigger story?  So I went right to the source material itself.

The unclassified version of the IG report on The President’s Surveillance Program is the source of the blurb in the above news article.  What’s interesting to me is what the news article left out.  Editing I suppose although the purpose of that article was more general than the insertion of one paragraph into a threat assessment: 

After the terrorism analysts completed their portion of the memoranda, the DCI Chief of Staff added a paragraph at the end of the memoranda stating that the individuals and organizations involved in global terrorism (and discussed in the memoranda) possessed the capability and intention to undertake further terrorist attacks within the United States. The DCI Chief of Staff recalled that the paragraph was provided to him by a senior White House official. The paragraph included the DCI’s recommendation to the President that he authorize the NSA to conduct surveillance activities under the PSP.  CIA Office of General Counsel Attorneys reviewed the draft threat assessment memoranda to determine whether they contained sufficient threat information and an compelling case  for reauthorization of the PSP.  If either was lacking, an OCG attorney would request that an analysts provide additional threat information or make revisions to the draft memoranda.

The threat assessment memoranda were then signed by the DCI.  George Tenent signed most of the threat memoranda prepared during his tenure as DCI.  On the few occasions he was unavailable, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, John E. McLaughlin, signed the memoranda on behalf of Tenent.  McLaughlin also signed the memoranda in the capacity of acting DCI in August and September 2004.

So the paragraph added by the unnamed White House official was inserted by the DCI Chief of Staff, and signed by the DCI, George Tenent in this case, every 45 days.  This sounds a lot less like threat assessment fraud by the White House and more like standard boilerplate on the threat assessment template in Word.  So forget the White House for a second, these threat assessments were reviewed by the CIA lawyers as well; presumably before Tenent signed each version.

There were no occasions in which the DCI or acting DCI withheld their signatures from the threat assessment memoranda.  The memoranda were co-signed by the Secretary of Defense, reviewed by the Attorney General, and delivered to the White House to be attached to the PSP Presidential Authorizations signed by the President.

Well if the former President goes down for this, he will be taking a lot of people with him. 

My take?  No laws were broken and nothing will come of this.  If there is something to it, I have faith in the old media routing it out.  They are constantly on the look out for a new Watergate  In the meantime, if you’ve ever seen a threat assessment, there is a lot of boilerplate to them.  I suspect this is more of the same.  In the meantime, the left screams.  They are in charge and they still can’t purge the old guard that’s already gone home.

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It’s difficult to figure out amidst all of the swirling mess that makes up “health care reform” just what exactly is getting reformed.  President Obama learned the lesson of the Hillarycare debacle and has been pretty cagey on specifics, even when he is expecting to sign a bill on it by the end of the summer.  Of course, Hillarycare was a full blown plan that could be analyzed and picked apart.  Obama is not interested in having the same result so the few real details that have been leaked have been rather limited.  Of course, with this Congress, who needs details?  They’re more than willing to vote for a bill unread and fresh off the presses.  After all, as Congressperson Malibu Stacy might say, “Thinking too much gives you wrinkles.” 

But one thing is clear, if it’s going to be reform in any way that Obama and the far left of the Democratic Party care about, it’s got to have the “Public Option.”  Right now the administration is having it both ways.  On the one hand it’s saying that it has no intention of driving private insurers out of business, but on the other hand, reassuring Congressional Democrats that the President is still committed to having a public option as part of his vision of health care reform. 

Why the Public Option?  The formal answer was included in Obama’s letter to Senators Kennedy and Baucus:

“I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest.”

Competition?  There are approximately 1300 health insurance providers in the US.  Really, will 1301 really make the difference and suddenly lead to “a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest?”  That’s all it would take, just one more provider?  The idea is so ridiculous that you would have to be a White House journalist to buy it.

What makes the public option the crown jewel of any health care reform plan?  It’s the camel’s nose under the tent for single payer government healthcare.  No, this isn’t just Republican scare-mongering.  I can hardly imagine any other conclusion for the insistence on a government healthcare plan.  And it’s easy to see how it would happen.  The logic is this:  One of the keys of health care reform is an individual mandate, but you can’t very well have one if people cannot afford to buy health insurance, so you have to provide an option for people too poor to pay.  Enter the public option.  An analysis of several public option scenarios shows that premiums could be 30 to 40 percent less than comparable private plans.  That of course hinges on the government paying reimbursement rates comparable to Medicare, which are 70-80 percent of what private insurers pay. 

So one of the ways the Obama plan controls costs is just by paying the doctors and hospitals less.  I’m sure that will make a great incentive for people to go into the medical field.  And who wouldn’t want to be taxed to subsidize their competitor?

But that’s not the fiscal time bomb.  First, the same analysis shows that depending on the premium rate for the public option, 119 million people could lose their private health insurance.  Some of course, would voluntarily flee.  If the public plan has lower premiums, what do they care what rate their doctor gets paid at?  Others would find themselves dumped.  Why would companies want the expense of maintaining their own health insurance coverage when a public plan can offer lower premiums?  Private plans of course have to have doctors and facilities join their networks voluntarily. Not an issue for the government.

Another issue is that the Obama administration, in order to help finance their reform schemes, wants to make it more difficult for employers and employees to pay for health care benefits.  One plan is to tax the employee health care benefits by capping the employee health care exclusion.  That excludes company health care benefits from an employee’s taxable income.  Another actually violates one of Obama’s campaign promises, not to tax health care benefits.  Obama criticized John McCain’s plan to tax employer health care benefits during the campaign, but at least McCain was going to transfer the tax benefit to individuals to enable them to purchase health insurance with a tax credit.  Obama is just keeping the money for the federal trough. 

Driving Private health insurance out of the market has happened before.  TennCare was supposed to be Tennessee’s version of “the public option.”  The goal was to reduce health care costs by covering a larger group of lower income people than were normally covered by Medicaid guidelines.  Many features of TennCare mirrored some of the Obama health reform proposals.  The few remaining insurance companies have dumped their most expensive members onto the public plan, and the cost has far exceeded projections.  Closed hospitals, doctors fleeing the state, uncontrolled spiraling cost… that’s our future.

It’s fairly easy to see how this will play out if we get the public option.  First it will cover a few of the lower middle class, and then the taxes on both employers and employees will push some companies that are in marginal fiscal health (a rather large number since we are in a recession) to drop their plans.  Eventually, it will make no sense to provide a health insurance benefit when it no longer provides any tax benefit to the company or to the employee.  As the companies in Tennessee discovered, it was easier and less hassle to pay the extra penalty tax for not providing health insurance to it’s employees.  Eventually, a health insurance benefit will be as uncommon for the average American worker as a defined benefit pension plan now is.  The government will end up with the healthcare costs of most of the American workforce.

At that point, the rationing will begin, but that’s another story.

What I can’t figure out, is why the government would want to take up an open ended financial liability that it does not currently have, to provide a service that is currently being provided by the free market, and in doing so destroy large segments of the economy that is now providing that service?  Anyone?   Bueller?  If there is a better reason than just runaway statism that wants to make dependent charges of its citizens, I would love to hear it.

Now does President Obama know what he’s doing, or does he sincerely not see how his plans would destroy the private insurance market?  He gave a little clue during his June press conference on health care.  When asked by ABC’s Jake Tapper how he could guarantee that cheaper public plans wouldn’t drive out employer funded private care.

“When I say if you have your plan and you like it,…or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don’t have to change plans, what I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform…”

That’s a change from earlier comments on the same issue:

“If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

OK now I guess you can lose your health plan.  Period.

At that point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if President Obama had turned to the camera and winked.

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I’d like to take a minute for this “Friday Rewind” to introduce my friend and politically polar opposite, Lil Mike. He has an amazing ability to argue his side of an argument and like me will go on for days on a single subject. At present time, we have logged over 10000 hrs(ok, that may be exaggerated a little) into the “Valerie Plame, Leak case” and I haven’t a single doubt that no two people on the planet,including those involved and the so called ‘experts’, are more well versed than we are when it comes to that subject(that’s not an exaggeration) . We both are abnormally addicted to current issues and researching them in order to prepare for the debate that will follow. There have been many topics that I had no knowledge of until Mike decided to bring them up for debate.. and then I was forced into learning the minutia of said topic in order to keep up with him.. as he has had to do with me…HA!

I can’t say that either of us have ever changed each others mind on any particular issue.. and given our politically polar opposites, that’s not a surprise… what is a surprise are the things we actually agree on. But those are so ‘eclectic’ that they can not be predicted… and that’s what makes it fun.

Mike is the best adversary I’ve ever come across. He can make me laugh,cry,wonder wtf planet he is from.. he can even anger me to the point of having to drown small animals just for the ‘release’.. but through it all, after 10 years we’ve been able to go from such extreme emotions on one topic, to another topic with not a single hard-feeling or ‘carry-over’. Each conversation is a clean-slate no matter how intense the last one, or in most cases, the current one is.

He will be joining The Velvet StraitJacket soon.. and you will soon see that Lil Mike is always right. (even when he’s wrong)

and without further ado.. Your (late) Friday rewind…

Banana Republic

Some wag once said that Obama keeps all of his promises; they just have an expiration date.  I guess that’s how we got from “President Barack Obama will not pursue the prosecution of Bush-era officials who devised torture policy against detainees” to it “is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general” within a few days.  That was a quick turnaround, even by Obama standards.  However events and leftie blogs pushed Obama rather quickly after the release of the “torture memos,” which reveal the legal underpinning for what is euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation.”

The timing strikes me as odd considering just a week ago a Spanish court decided to investigate whether to pursue charges against Bush administration officials who provided the legal underpinning for those interrogations.  Then low and behold, the Obama administration declassifies those very documents written by those Justice Department lawyers.  That could hardly be a coincidence.  The message seems to be that the Obama administration will not attempt to protect and may even assist, in international prosecutions of Bush administration officials, and who knows, maybe even prosecute a few themselves.

I took a look at the torture memos out of curiosity and to confirm that things people were saying were in there actually was.  I’ve learned you can’t trust someone else’s interpretation.  Full disclosure:  I didn’t read the whole thing.  I just don’t have the legal background to make a determination if the case the Justice Department attorneys tried to make made sense or not, but I was curious about a few things.

First of all, what was the classification of these damn things?  Looking at the pdf of the memo, I could see that the pages were all classified Top Secret (scribble scribble) NOFORN, but what was the caveat or code word that was scribbled out?  I magnified and tried to see through the blackened areas, but no such luck.  Just curious I guess.  I was just wondering if it was a cool sounding codeword, Top Secret Maximum Hammer, or just something dorky, Top Secret Loosie Goosie?

Another thing; what was the deal with all the waterboarding?  The original leaks described it as the most successful interrogation technique since “good cop, bad cop.”  Abu Zubaida supposedly broke after 35 seconds.  However page 37 of the memo details something more complicated:

…where authorized, it may be used for two “sessions” per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42.  Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

…The CIA used the waterboard “at least 83 times during August 2002” in the interrogation of Zubaida…and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM”

So somebody check my math, but that that means either the guidelines for waterboarding are wrong, they ignored their own guidelines, or the number of waterboarding sessions is wrong, since the could not have waterboarded that many times in a month if they followed the guidelines.  Or they are counting applications, instead of sessions.  It’s too vague to tell.

As far as I know, I’m the first person to discover this, so somebody give a prize or something.

However I’m not the first person to notice the incongruity of it being reported that Zubaida broke after 35 seconds and being waterboarded 83 times in one month.  I don’t see how both of those can be true.

But like a 23 minute Arlo Guthrie song, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.  OK well maybe a little, but what I am really worried about is the Obama administration deciding to settle scores.  Since President Obama is the Attorney General’s boss, going from being not interested in pursuing prosecution of Bush era officials to saying it’s up to the Attorney General is tantamount to giving the green light to prosecute.

Now I am of two minds on this.  There is one part of me, the mean, hateful part, that would love to see lawyers have to take responsibility for writing legal opinions, and by taking responsibility I mean forced to pull their orange jumpsuits down in a dark corner of a federal prison and get doo doo raped.  I’m not a fan of lawyers as you might notice.  Generally, lawyers don’t have to take any responsibility for their poor performance. Their clients do. These lawyers, if prosecuted, certainly would.

Also there is the precedent.  Once one administration opens the door to prosecuting the previous administration for policies it disagreed with, every time there is a change in power, the new administration will do the same.  In 4 years I could sit back and watch members of the Obama administration be indicted for all manner of crimes.  What comes around goes around eh?

But that is only one side.  I have a more dominate opinion on this, not one based on score settling, hatred of the bar, or getting revenge on wrongs, real or otherwise, on the current administration at some point in the future, but based on reason, rule of law, and the dangers setting bad precedents.

 First of all, I’m not sure there is even a crime here.  There may be a crime somehow under Spanish law, but I’m fairly certain there is no Federal Statute against giving a legal opinion that the current administration disagrees with.  One can imagine the kangaroo courts if we decide it’s OK to prosecute judges for ruling on a decision that’s been overturned, or a legislator who votes for a law that is later found to be unconstitutional.  That would be as criminal as anything those Bush Justice Department attorneys did.

The precedent of one administration getting revenge on the previous one would be a bad one.  Senator Leahy’s idea of a truth and reconciliation commission; as if going from the Bush administration to the Obama one is equivalent to eliminating apartheid, or the Nuremberg Trials, is ridiculous.  During every election, we always like to repeat the old canard about “the peaceful exchange of power” but how long would that be true if we up the stakes every time  political parties switch positions of power?  If hundreds of administration officials could expect nothing but indictment if a rival party takes power, are we really not that far from Peron’s Argentina?

It’s one thing to indict and prosecute officials who have actually done criminal wrongdoing, but I’ve noticed from my friends on the left is their tendency to want to criminalize policy differences.   They would love to have Bush and Cheney doing the perp walk, weighed down with chains, but ask them what sort of charges its usually something vague, like “war crimes” or just that they were criminals.  Their real crimes?  Holding different policy positions.  Not violating federal statutes.  If we try to prosecute attorneys for writing legal opinions, that won’t be justice, it will be punishment.  Punishment for losing the election.

Once we cross that particular Rubicon, it’s damage that cannot be undone. Rome could never go back to it’s Republic, and if we allow score settling after every change of power, we won’t be able to go back either. 

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• Released Memos Could Lead to More Disclosures (nytimes.com)