Sorry, But You Have No Lifelines

Glancing through the headlines over at ESPN, today, I noticed an article that contained the family of Andrew Gallo's response to the backlash against their son, who recently killed Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart in a car accident. Basically, the family of this guy, especially his Dad, is particularly upset, because they feel their son has been portrayed negatively in the media and that he has been made out to be a "bad kid" and a "monster."

First off, let's just account for all the little details, shall we? Mr. Gallo did not simply kill Nick Adenhart in a car crash; he killed him in a car crash during which his BAC was 3 TIMES the legal limit. In addition to being a drunk driver (who killed not just Adenhart, but 2 others), Gallo also decided that it would be a good idea to flee the scene (on foot); so instead of calling an ambulance and trying to help the people he'd just run into, he jumped out of his car and ran away. Better yet, this arrest is his second traffic-related violation, with the first being a....DUI back in 2006.

Sounds like a great guy to you too, huh?

Nevertheless, in the spirit of the semi-post-modern, personal-responsibility-be-damned era in which we live, Andrew Gallo's father has come out and decided to set the record straight by blaming everyone but his son for what happened. You see, poor Andrew is no normal kid (notice, the spin starts right here, as, despite being 22 years old, Gallo is dubbed a "kid," instead of an adult, to help him retain that aura of child-like innocence). His parents divorced, and he took it hard. Plus, he has a good friend who is an alcoholic. Heck, he is an alcoholic. And besides, he's been "devastated" by what happened and, of course, he "never meant to hurt anybody, ever."

In short, what Andrew's Daddy is trying to say, without actually saying it (for the sake of subtlety, I suppose), is that the accident is not his son's fault. Don't blame my poor, innocent, helpless boy - blame the circumstances.

What utter bullshit.

Sorry Mr. Gallo, I don't care if your son never meant to hurt anybody - he did. In fact, he effing killed somebody; 3 somebodies, to be exact. Besides, this wasn't your typical, everyday car crash. You see, sir, your son was drunk. In fact, he blew 3 times the California limit for BAC, which is 0.08, meaning that his BAC was around 0.24, which, for those of you keeping score at home, is somewhere between "wasted" and "passed-out" on the drunk scale. And while that particular level of BAC may make for some great entertainment at your local college frat party, it makes you a spectacularly shitty driver and a complete freakin' moron if you actually try to test those shitty driving skills on a road.

Moreover, being an alcoholic doesn't excuse young Andrew from the responsibility of this crime. Alcohol is not necessary for survival. It cannot open its own bottle, nor can it force itself down your throat. Ultimately, you are the one who decides what goes in your body; which makes you responsible when what goes in has adverse effects on the world around you. At some point in his life, Andrew Gallo decided to become an alcoholic through the drinking habits that he, himself, developed, of his own free will. Those choices led him to the bottle, and that bottle led him, quite literally, to the scene of the crime.

That is no one's fault but his own.

Lastly, I don't care if he took his parents' divorce hard - over half of the marriages in this country end in divorce, but you don't see great numbers of the kids from those marriages running out becoming alcoholics and committing vehicular manslaughter, do you?

Simply put, there is no excuse for Andrew Gallo, as he chose to get behind the wheel of that car, despite knowing how much he'd had to drink. Furthermore, he also chose to have those drinks in the first place; and, moreover, chose to drink where he would need a ride home, without thinking to, oh, I dunno, designate a driver or call a cab.

Going out and drinking alcohol does not make you a bad person. Having had a painful childhood doesn't either. Heck, even being an alcoholic doesn't necessarily make you a bad person. Vehicular manslaughter while driving drunk, however, does. And there is simply no way around that fact.

On April 15th

Ah, taxes, such wonderful things. Indeed, nothing like having to file one's tax returns, is there? Sadly, this year, I had the, uh....genuine pleasure of getting to file my own tax returns for the very first time. And I must tell you that I have come away from this experience with a new appreciation for all things aimed at cutting, simplifying, or eliminating taxes. Moreover, I have also come to the conclusion that it is high time for the 16th Amendment and the IRS to die brutal and painful deaths.

I'd even be interested in suspending the 8th Amendment for duration of the execution process.

Seriously though, my tax returns were, supposedly, relatively easy to file - and they still frustrated and confounded me. Consequently, I can't even begin to fathom how the average taxpayer is able to go through all of this hassle and not come away thinking that taxes should be lower, that the tax code should be seriously simplified, and that the IRS should burn in Hell. I mean, how you could not come away from such an experience with a high level of sympathy for the Ron Paul conception of taxes is beyond me.

Finally, I would just like to publicly acknowledge my Father and many other adults who, for years, have been telling me that: "Everyone's a Democrat until they start paying taxes."

You were right. And I say that not because I didn't believe you before, but because now I understand why.

(And just in case you need a time-of-year-appropriate laugh, some P.J. O'Rourke:)

"I'm a 47-year old middle-class male with a job. Every hippy-dippy thing that's thought up - from heroin addiction to special vegan lunch lines in the local high school cafeteria - I get to pay for. Of course I'm a Republican.

"The mystery of Government is not how Washington works, but how to make it stop."

Taking Statism Global

Having now poured stimulus upon stimulus into their respective National economies, and begun the long and arduous process of setting said economies on the road to bankruptcy, the leaders of the world's greatest economies have spent the last several days gathering to see if they could strike a deal to take their failed policies supra-national. And so they have. We are now set to get a new $1 trillion global stimulus package to complement the, now, $10.5 Trillion that the United States has already appropriated/spent on various bailouts, stimulus, and TARP projects over the last half-year or so.

(For those of you keeping score at home, our national GDP was $14.3 trillion last year - meaning that, if President Obama gets his wish and we do get a 'TARP II', we'll have kindda spent our whole, entire economy in order to, uh, save it. Because that clearly makes sense.)

Apparently TANSTAFL has been replaced as the one, hard-and-fast economic rule by a new one, which rests on a firm belief in the ability of deficit spending to cure all ills - the actual numbers be damned!!

As far as this new, global stimulus is concerned, its basically an extension of all the quasi-socialist/genuinely statist bullshit we've been getting here in the United States. We're going to give some more government bureaucrats the ability to regulate and restrict bankers' pay and bonuses - because, damn it, if some red-meat populism is good, more is even better. And nothing stokes populist fires (and poll numbers...) like hating on evil corporations, bankers, etcetera.

Nevermind that it's actually counterproductive as an economic policy.

Of course, having already gotten on the 'regulation' bandwagon with the banker stuff, it only made sense for these folks to take that a step further with other institutions. Thus, we are also going to get a new set of stricter and tougher regulatory policies for hedge funds and credit agencies. Because, again, nevermind the actual relationship between government regulation and economic growth, let's do it anyway.

We're also going to give more power to the IMF; because, clearly, what we need in order to solve these economic problems, and prevent them from happening ever again, is more input from international government bureaucrats whose own chain of command is somewhat murky. Finally, in this time of economic hardship and ballooning deficits, we're also going to take $100 billion and give it to poor countries; in other words, all the little tyrants running fake democratic countries in sub-Saharan Africa are having trouble in this economic climate too, so let's give them some cash.

And that's about it, more bullshit spending that inches us further away from a free-market system and transfers power and money from people to bureaucrats. Only this time, it's gone global. Change, indeed.

This Is Your Government...

...and this is your government on stupid. Ahh, yes, nothing like the sweet smell of government takeovers to start your week off right, huh? Indeed, having decided that Chapter 11 was too harsh for it to accept and that 'bailout' was its only option, GM now gets to find out the hard way what us free-marketers were warning them about all along - that public funding for your business also means public management of your business.

Not that the folks at GM have any illusions about what they're getting into though, Rick Wagoner was happy to go, and he'll take the $20 Million dollar retirement package that comes with termination of his job to go with him thank-you-very-much, and the new CEO has already said he knows that he's not going to be the one who's actually in charge.

The result is that President Barack Obama, the man who is a lawyer by training and a Law Professor/Community Organizer/Professional Campaigner by vocation is now fully and totally in charge of running, nay saving, the 9th largest corporation in the entire world. Oh yes, and he'll be accompanied in this task by a Treasury Secretary who can't properly fill out his tax returns and has an entire staff of people who are....yet to be appointed by the President. (And likely Congress too, but you really don't want us to get started on those fuckers right now.)

Anyone else really wish a guy like Mitt Romney, who, you know, understands this kind of shit, was President right about now? Of course, Mitt suggested, way back in December, that we shouldn't have bailed these bastards out in the first place because, shocka, by not making them file for Chapter 11 we were 'bailing them out' of the serious internal restructuring that they needed to do to remain viable. Instead, with bailouts, we would just be turning them into another welfare recipient (albeit an insanely expensive one).

Here's the thing though, as the nice little parting gift that former CEO Wagoner got helps to demonstrate, by bailing these assholes out we have subsidized their bad decision-making process. Instead of being forced to account for the $38 billion in losses they took last year by doing things like eliminating bad Union deals, cutting out their CEO's golden parachute, or generally figuring out what the hell they were doing so terribly wrong that it cost them $38 Billion, they're going to simply sit around and wait for whatever the government's next batch of instructions are. Moreover, how can we possibly blame them for doing just that?

Afterall, by giving them this bailout(/subsidy) we've now incentivized this corporate laziness; because now the company's money isn't coming from it's ability to sell automobiles, but rather its ability to grovel like a cheating husband at the feet of its new Government overlords. In other words, we're expecting this company to be able right the metaphorical ship despite having eliminated the incentives that might make it profitable again, and having turned its management over to people who have neither a direct financial stake in its future profitability nor the proper credentials to hold such positions.

Brilliant.

Of course, that, in a nutshell, is why the Government shouldn't run businesses - because their intervention, particularly on this massive of a scale, screws up the profit motive that is the driving force of capitalism. And honestly, if you don't understand why that's a bad thing (or why Capitalism is a better corporate manager than the effin Government), then you're either a hippie, a fascist, or a communist - in which case you'd be too far gone for me to give a damn about you at this point anyways.

Now, with apologies for all the cussing above, and in an attempt to make you feel even worse, here's the internet's newest viral video star, Daniel Hannan, a Conservative Party member of the European Parliament for England, on how, in addition to spending ourselves into oblivion, the Anglo-Saxon world now has to endure the additional humiliation of having the Germans and the French being the ones telling us that we must step away from the bailout trough:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

(For those of you who have, sadly, missed out on the Daniel Hannan craze, please, for the love of God, go watch this short video of the speech he made eviscerating Gordon Brown (and bailouts) at the European Parliament last week. I promise it'll make your day.)

***Update***

Irony alert: the new CEO of GM now says that Chapter 11 actually looks pretty good. It only took them a few months, a government takeover of their management structure, and a few billion taxpayer dollars, but at least they might finally be on the right track...

"When Did Things Get So Twisted"

Just in case you watched President Obama's national press conference earlier tonight, and have finally given up on trying to figure out how, exactly, he's going to be able to make good on his promise to cut the deficit with, uh, massive increases in spending, and where, exactly, he got the information that led him to believe the Dollar was doing well, I do believe I've got you an antidote!

It's Sarah Palin and a speech that she gave recently in Anchorage to the Alaska GOP's Lincoln Dinner (sans Teleprompter). Sadly, the audio is quite poor, and the Alaska GOP managed to omit two parts (one in the middle and the end), which is rather disappointing. Nevertheless, it's a great speech in which she finds time to wax poetic against the stimulus and get in some good shots at the "goofy defenders of wildlife," among others. I'll put my favorite of the 11 clips up here - it's the one where (starting at about 2:30 in) she rails against the stimulus:



The rest of the videos (in their proper order) can be found here.

Political Correctness Strikes, Again

As usual, I appear to be a few days late to chime in on a controversy that consumed at least part of the minds of the blowhards, er, pundits on TV over the past weekend. Anyways, in case you did miss it, last week President Obama decided that, with the economy, and confidence in it, heading further south than where I wish I was fishing right about now, he needed to go and speak directly with the American people on...The Tonight Show.

Because we all know that Jay Leno is going to be ready with the tough questions that Americans want answered.

Nevertheless, while he was there, the President, in a moment of self-depreciation, made what could only be classified as a somewhat formulaic-yet-still-humorous 'retard' joke in which he compared his bowling skills to those of a Special Olympian.

Cue the outrageously outrageous moral outrage of the United States Political Correctness SWAT team.

Indeed, while, admittedly, the outrage from the Fat Cats in the Media and the PC Police was noticeably less than it would have been had, say, George W. Bush made such a remark (although, since they considered W to be retarded, I'm not sure if they could have logically done this...), it was still there; in fact, the outrageously outraged Republicans trying to point out the double standard probably managed to more-or-less make up the difference with their zeal. Indeed, even my beloved Sarah Palin got in on the outrage and managed to shoot of a statement about how much she loved and respected the Special Olympics and how Obama needed to be more careful with his words and.....yea, you probably read the news too, so no need to rehash all of the bullshit.

What seems to be missing in all of this, of course, is the fact that it was a joke, and that taking jokes like this seriously - even if he is the President and is supposed to be 'more careful' with his choice of words - and getting pissed off or angry about them just....well, let's say it brings to mind a certain title utilized by Shakespeare.

Something about 'ado' and 'nothing.'

I mean, people seriously need to learn to develop a sense of humor and just laugh/chuckle at something like this. And seriously, who hasn't, at some point in their life, made a kind of off-color (even offensive!! *gasp*) joke like the President's? Granted, yours was probably funnier; but still, I think I recall something pertinent from the Bible that may apply here - something to do with 'casting stones' and 'sin.'

(Yes folks, retard jokes, Shakespeare, and Jesus, all in one post about Obamarama - that's just the kind of brilliance I offer here.)

A certain wise man once said that "if we couldn't laugh we'd all go insane" - and something tells me that getting all up in arms like Napoleon invading Russia over a joke like the President's is fast approaching the territory which offers tangible proof of this maxim.

Malpractice Reform in SC?

Last Month, some of the members of the South Carolina House of Representatives did a great thing by sponsoring a new bill (H. 3489) that would help bring some needed legal reform to our State. The legislation is a tort reform bill that would help insulate S.C. businesses from all those frivolous lawsuits that we talk oh-so-fondly-of on this blog. Needless to say, I'm a strong supporter of this bill, as pretty much every State in the Union could use some kind of tort reform for a whole host of reasons. However, as you might expect if you know anything about S.C. politics, the bill has run into some problems up at the Statehouse.

As per the legislative process, it was sent to one of the House's subcommittees; unfortunately, all but one of the members of this subcommittee just happen to be lawyers. Consequently, the members of this subcommittee haven't bothered to get the legislative process for the tort reform bill going; preferring, instead, to leave it swimming in the abyss that is Subcommittee Hell

Lawyers opposed to meaningful tort reform; you're shocked, I'm sure.

Anyways, here's the legislation's sponsors' site - One Law Suit Away - so you can go read up on the bill and see (for those of you in South Carolina) if your State Legislator comes down on the right side of it.

The New Iraq

I suppose we'll get to see just how permanent all of this is whenever Obama finally does pull all of the troops out, be it in 16 months or (as per the S.O.F.A) December 2011, but, for now, this ABC News report should make you feel pretty good about how things are going in Iraq right now:



I think that speaks for itself.

Thanks, General Petraeus.

Sanford in 2012?

Could my good Governor, Mark Sanford, wind up as the Republican nominee for President in 2012? And, if so, might he actually win? Well, The American Conservative seems to think that, if the great behemoth of Hope n' Change turns out not to be the very Will of God it has thus far promised, Governor Sanford, thanks to his "stringent free-market philosophy" and "elegiac demeanor," might be well positioned to do both of those things:

Mark Sanford is easy to overlook. If Republicans need a champion in the Obama era, there are more colorful candidates than the South Carolina governor. He doesn’t play electric bass, or to the Religious Right, like Mike Huckabee. He has made no attempt to rewrite the GOP’s almost forgotten small-government playbook like Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty or Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal. Though he is popular, Sanford seems incapable of playing a red-meat populist like Sarah Palin. He looks plain, his philosophy is old, and he has an elegiac demeanor that seems incompatible with electoral politics.

But unlike many other Republican politicians of his stature, Sanford recognizes that there are limits to ambition, that government treasuries are not bottomless, and that no ideology can captain the globe. If the promise of “hope” in the form of bailouts fails to revive the American economy, Mark Sanford will be the GOP’s most dangerous man in 2012.

In recent weeks, he has become the unofficial spokesman against Obama’s trillion-dollar economic stimulus plan.....While cable’s talking heads shout at him, he somberly quotes Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. He worries aloud that the bailouts represent a 'crisis of American civilization.' "

Here's the link to the full article, which is interesting both as a profile and 2012 look-ahead.

Insofar as the question of a run itself is concerned, it's been asked before and Sanford has repeatedly denied that he's got any future political plans after his term as Governor is up. Nevertheless, the race might actually set up rather well for him; since his term as Governor will end in January 2011, giving him a full year before the Iowa Caucuses to get a campaign up and running. Plus, he'd be an easy favorite in the all important SC-GOP Primary.

Will he? Who knows - and honestly, at this point, it's way too early for me to care all that much about the 2012 Elections. Besides, Sanford already has an important day job; and it's not going to be getting any easier over the next 2 years.

If At First You Don't Succeed

...then try, try again, right? And hey, if it just so happens to involve a few billion dollars of (yet to be earned) taxpayer dollars, well, so be it. Alas, while this attitude probably doesn't behoove folks like you and me, who will have to pay for all of these bailouts (plus interest!!) at some point in the future, it seems to be working out fabulously for the fine folks struggling to run AIG; who, it was announced today, are set to get a second round of bailout money from our Federal Government.

So, let's recap, shall we? Last fall, under the watchful eyes of President Bush and Secretary Paulson, we decided to sink billions of dollars in AIG because it was "too big to fail" and we needed it to turn around. Now, after we gave them all this money, they have come back to us to report $61.7 billion in 4th-Quarter losses, the largest loss ever reported by an American company. And, naturally, we decided it would be a really good idea to reinvest another $30 billion in this failing business.

Well, at least now we know why all the former Wall Street people now working in D.C left Wall Street - as the kinds of business decisions they're making on behalf of the government would have gotten them fired in the business world.

Seriously though, at what point does all this bailing out finally end? Hell, after we've gone in and bailed out AIG once, why shouldn't we go in and do it a second or third or even fourth time? Better yet, when do we reach the point where a company failing is finally less important than our government's checkbook failing?

Of course, such rhetorical questions help indicate the problems this kind of government intervention inherently entails; namely that, if you do it once, there's nothing to keep you from doing it again. Indeed, given the rationale that you used the first time around (i.e. 'too big to fail'), you're pretty much compelled, rationally at least, to repeat the bailout the second time around, too. Afterall, if it was too big to fail the first time, how can it not be the second (or third, or fourth) time around as well?

So how do we escape from this trap that our political logic has led us into? Well, as I see it, there are only two ways: either the company is fundamentally restructured so that it becomes, metaphorically speaking, small enough to the point where it can fail; or it ceases to fail and, once again, becomes a successful company. Unfortunately, by bailing out companies like AIG in the first place, the government makes it unlikely that either of these things will happen. That's because, through the bailout, the government has absolved AIG of its financial losses; losses which were incurred because of poor business decisions. In other words, somewhere along the line AIG took a risk that didn't pan out - which is o.k, because risk taking (and, yes, the occasional failure) is a part of business. Now, normally, AIG would be forced to take those losses, which would, most certainly, cause serious problems for the company.

Through the bailout, however, the government has decided to prevent AIG from having to go through the painful process of dealing with its bad business decisions. The problem is that companies, like people, aren't going to learn from their mistakes if they don't have to deal with the negative consequences of them. Screwing up and taking big-time losses are what cause companies to restructure and come up with a new business plan. Consequently, by using the government to bailout an AIG, you make it more likely that this company will fail again in the future because you've eliminated the gusto, if you will, of the market forces that would normally force it into severe restructuring.

And that, of course, means more bailouts - ad infinitum, I suppose - and also indicates to us that the bailout, like so many government programs that came before it, is self-perpetuating. Proving once again the validity of Reagan's maxim that government doesn't solve problems, only subsidize them.

On The Gaza Casualty Numbers

One of the more interesting statistics that I've heard tossed around in the aftermath of the recent Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip is the comparison of total casualties on both sides. As you might expect, the Palestinians, as in the past, had significantly more casualties in this war than the Israelis did. (Sorry, I don't know the exact numbers of the top of my head, so you'll have to google it yourself.) The argument, as I've heard it, essentially amounts to a knock on Israel for being excessively brutal or using, in what has become the new favorite catchphrase of UN policy wonks, 'disproportionate force.' In other words, Israel must be more of a bad guy because they're killing so many more Palestinians than the Palestinians are killing Israelis. Yet, simple as this logic may sound, I feel it has a couple of important flaws.

The first problem is that arguing casualty numbers in this way fails to take into account the nature of the Gaza Strip itself; namely, that it's rather small and really crowded. That combination, no matter who's shooting or what they're shooting, is going to result in higher casualty numbers for the Palestinians in Gaza because more people in less space makes the likelihood of collateral damage increase exponentially even in the most precise and well-planned attacks. This fact, in my book, can't really be blamed on either side, as it's just a reality.

Another obvious thing that should be noted about the discrepancy in casualty numbers is that they likely stem directly from the drastic differences in firepower. Simply put, the Israelis have bigger and better guns. No matter how accurate, a Hamas rocket will never be able to do as much damage as Merkava Tank. Moreover, this fact doesn't make the IDF the 'bad guys' - it just makes them the more technologically advanced military in this particular war. Indeed, I'd be willing to venture that, if given the opportunity, Hamas would happily kill many more Israelis; just because, at this point in time, they can't doesn't make them morally superior.

Nevertheless, I do think that, when looking at a war, it's important to try and distinguish, even at a rudimentary level, between good and evil. However, it's war, so people are going to be killing each other - that's just part of it (some would say the point of it...), so we can't distinguished based just on the act or its success rate. In order to truly gain a moral perspective on war, we have to look at what surrounds the killing, and that's why I think that, particularly in this case, intent matters a great deal. Afterall, it's one thing to kill civilians while targeting the enemy's soldiers; it's an entirely different thing to aim exclusively at the civilians from the get-go.

And I suppose this is why the statistical difference in casualty numbers does not increase my sympathy for the Palestinians; because, when I look at the "why" behind the actions of the Gazans' elected representatives, Hamas, I don't exactly see morally superior motives.

All You Need To Know...

...about the stimulus, you could probably learn from this chart, right here:


Based on my reading of that chart, I get:

Reagan - more-or-less budget neutral: 0% change
H.W. Bush - same as Reagan: 0%/-0.5% change
Clinton - slightly budget positive: +4% change
W. Bush - slightly budget negative: -4% change
Obama without stimulus - slightly budget negative: -5% change
Obama with stimulus: significantly budget negative: -10% change

Either with or without the stimulus, President Obama has already negatively affected the budget deficit, as it relates to GDP (what Democrats bragged about during the Clinton years), to a greater degree than any of the last 5 Presidents.

To be fair, of course, President Obama hasn't had a full term yet, and both Reagan and H.W. Bush started out increasing these deficits but finished by decreasing them. However, in their worst years, Reagan and Bush, Sr. increased the budget deficit by 2% and 1%, respectively; Barack is not only working on between 5% and 10%, but is well on his way to creating the biggest one-year increase in the budget deficit over the last 30 years.

These new heights of deficit spending come, naturally, at the same time that the long term deficit is also reaching new heights (depths, really...), and the future costs of programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are beginning to increase exponentially.

Now, I'm no economist, but I am a young, budding taxpayer - and I'm pretty sure all this means that I'm about to get screwed.

Happy Birthday, Ronnie

The Gipper would have been 98.

He won the Cold War and vanquished the "Evil Empire" without firing a shot, revived a stagnant U.S Economy and lead it into the modern age, restructured our tax code for the better, and made the United States, once again, the Greatest and most Free Nation on Earth.

He was the Greatest President of the 20th Century.

One can only imagine what he would have thought of the horrific "stimulus" packages the current President and Congress are trying to pass. And while those folks continue to try and hash out the final details of how, exactly, to spend the next few generations of American taxpayers' dollars, all for the stated goal of helping us "Ordinary Americans" in this time of recession, I think it appropriate to remember some of the wisdom of Ronald Reagan:

"The 9 most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."

"The Government's view of the economy can be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves; tax it. If it keeps moving; regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

"Government doesn't solve problems - it subsidizes them."

Indeed.

We miss you, Mr. President - and we sure could use some of your principled leadership these days.

Masking Mediocrity

Ah, the joys of "free" healthcare:

"A former soldier pulled his own teeth out with a pair of pliers because he could not find a dentist to take on NHS patients...

He said: 'I've tried to get in at 30 dentists over the last eight years but have never been able to find one to take on NHS patients.' "

Lovely, huh?

The great thing about this story is that it's a perfect example of why the type of "Universal Health Care" system desired by President Obama, other liberals, and even some 'Conservatives' (hello, Mitt Romney...) here in the U.S won't, ultimately, work.

Many a time during the campaign, when asked to defend himself against charges that his Healthcare plan was a thinly veiled attempt at socialized medicine, President Obama responded by saying that, since those who so desired would be able to opt out and get private health insurance, his plan couldn't be dubbed socialized medicine. Indeed, the point of the "universal" part of his plan, he argued, was simply to ensure that those millions of uninsured Americans would never have to go without, thanks to the government sponsored insurance he would be offering.

Well, guess what? In the U.K, people with the financial resources do have the option of getting private healthcare; and furthermore, in a manner that would seem to dovetail nicely with President Obama's plan, those who can't afford such a luxury are given all the health coverage they need via the NHS. Nevertheless, despite being fully provided for by their government, the British folks who were supposed to have been saved from the pain of being uninsured by the almighty hand of a government health care program still aren't getting the health care that they need.

Indeed, despite having a truly "Universal" system of health coverage at his disposal, Ian Boynton was unable to do something as simple as find a dentist to examine his toothache.

What this particular story illustrates so well is a point, which I have made on many an occasion before, that neither socialized medicine nor Universal Health Care (not that the difference is all that substantial...) will solve the current Health Care problems in the United States. This is due the fact that, like all big-government programs, they are inherently flawed solutions because they fail to address the real problem facing the system. In this case, both in the U.K and U.S, the real problem is that Health Care is to expensive. What Socialized Medicine and Universal Health Care both do to address this problem is to offer you either "free" or insanely cheap Health Insurance to make sure that you have enough money to cover this high cost. In other words, instead of directly addressing the problem of expensive health care, and trying to bring down these high costs, these programs are designed to simply mask it through government welfare.

Of course, the problem with masking crises instead of confronting them is that they tend to fester and come back - usually with a much greater degree of monetary pain than they hit you with on the first go-round.

That's why, if we want to try to offer real health care reforms here in the United States, we can't fall into the trap of simply offering up ideas that don't address the real problem. If we want to make Health Care in the U.S better, we need to look at solutions that will actually reduce the costs of health care and thus make it affordable to an even greater number of Americans - without us having to give them a welfare check, first. Two quick and easy ideas to jumpstart such a change would be to allow insurance companies to compete across State lines and to reduce our Doctors' operating costs through Medical Malpractice reform.

Just anything but Big Government, please. Because, afterall, I can already pull my own teeth out with pliers for free - and I don't even have to bankrupt my country's future in the process.

Score One For W

But, but, but....I thought that George W. Bush was turning American attention away from hunting down Al-Qaeda because he was so maniacally focused on avenging his Daddy in Iraq??

Alas, to the deep disappointment of Bush-haters everywhere, our former President did not forget who attacked us on 9/11, and he never stopped hunting them

"CIA-directed airstrikes against al-Qaida leaders and facilities in Pakistan over the past six to nine months have been so successful, according to senior U.S. officials, that it is now possible to foresee a "complete al-Qaida defeat" in the mountainous region along the border with Afghanistan...

The CIA has been using drone aircraft to carry out attacks on suspected al-Qaida and Taliban targets in Pakistan for several years, but such attacks were significantly expanded last summer under orders from President George W. Bush."

The way that 4th Generation Warfare is fought ensured that the destruction and incapacitation of al-Qaeda would be neither a quick nor easy process; however, with a strong resolve and continued dedication, it was always possible. Moreover, like nearly everyone in the United States after 9/11, from top-to-bottom in the U.S Military and across the political spectrum, President Bush had some things to learn about the evolution of war over the last 60 years; but, now that he's safely stashed away in Texas, we continue to hear more and more about just how well he and his top advisors came to understand the delicate and difficult nature of the tasks they were facing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East. Given the orientation of the U.S Military in 1999, and the general uselessness of Donald Rumsfeld, the fact that we have evolved our tactical and strategic capabilities to the point of being able to bring al-Qaeda to the brink of collapse is no small feat.

Finally, and this is for you President Obama, please note that while George W. Bush had no problem actually ordering military strikes within Pakistan, he never felt the need to talk about them on national TV or announce them to the world (and, by extension, our enemies). On the other hand, during his campaign, President Obama always talked about how he would send troops/drones across the border into Pakistan - apparently forgetting that one of the most important elements in any war is secrecy. So, for future reference Mr. President, be more like George W. Bush: do what you have to do to win, but try and keep the plans out of the news.