Clipmarks | mklosinski's clips

Business and ObamaCare

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:35:53 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski
clipper's remarks: "Democrats have defined success as dragging any bill into law as quickly as possible, no matter how damaging, while leaving the mess it creates to be cleaned up in the future once the entitlement is entrenched and higher taxes are inevitable."

Clip Source: online.wsj.com

As Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon accurately put it in September, "The problem with the health-care market in this country is that it doesn't really function as a market—leaving major consumer needs unmet, costs unchecked by competition, and basic practices untouched by the productivity revolution that has transformed every other sector of the economy."

Yet in Congress the market-based policies that could encourage such changes have been ignored, dumped or converted into timid pilot programs. Instead of increasing the competition and consumer choice that would result in better value and reduce the annual double-digit cost increases in health spending, ObamaCare will simply expand the status quo and make it more expensive.

Democrats are about to pass the largest entitlement expansion in more than four decades when federal spending is already at unprecedented levels.

Tags: health care

Kick the SOB Out

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:37:36 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski
clipper's remarks: This makes me sick.

Clip Source: www.foxnews.com

A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Max Baucus says the Montana Democrat was in a romantic relationship with the woman he nominated for U.S. attorney.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus was romantically involved with a former staffer when he recommended her earlier this year to become the next U.S. attorney for Montana, a spokesman said.

The Montana Democrat and his former state office director Melodee Hanes began their relationship in the summer of 2008 after Baucus separated from his wife, Ty Matsdorf told The Associated Press late Friday.

Baucus nominated Hanes for the U.S. attorney post in March. But she later withdrew, saying she had been presented with other opportunities she couldn't pass up.

Tags: congress

The fox guarding the hen house. . .

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:30:18 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the allegations raised by leaked e-mails in the so-called "climategate" controversy were too serious to ignore.

Critics of the IPCC, which has spent more than 20 years engineering what it says is a now global consensus on climate change, today questioned whether it could be trusted to make an unbiased examination of the case.

"I don't think anyone can trust the IPCC on this particular issue," said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was set up by the former Tory chancellor Lord Lawson.

"Obviously the IPCC has a vested interest in this," he added. "It's not transparent and it's inherently biased on this issue. We welcome the independent inquiry, but we are spectical about the IPCC."

Tags: global warming

The Gig is Up.

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:53:29 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski
clipper's remarks: Arnold, it is all a hoax. Al Gore made it up. So there is no need to continue to frighten the poor residence of the state of California.

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

A map of how California will be affected by climate change in the future was unveiled yesterday by state governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The coastline on the map was also coloured, highlighting how nearly half a million Californians are at risk from rising sea levels.

'Within a century, Treasure Island, this place where we are right now, could be totally under water,' the governor said. 'It is technology in the end that will save us.'

Though California leads the U.S. in its legal mandate to cut greenhouse gases, Mr Schwarzenegger explained how

Tags: global warming

Health Care Math

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:24:57 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski
clipper's remarks: This is one of the "Random Thoughts," by Thomas Sowell. Always a great read.

Clip Source: townhall.com

Here is a math problem for you: Assume that the legislation establishing government control of medical care is passed and that it "brings down the cost of medical care." You pay $500 a year less for your medical care, but the new costs put on employers is passed on to consumers, so that you pay $300 a year more for groceries and $200 a year more for gasoline, while the new mandates put on insurance companies raise your premiums by $300 a year, how much money have you saved?

Tags: health care

Methods to Increase Unemployment

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:58:17 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski
clipper's remarks: I think the guy that wrote this article is serious.

Clip Source: post-gazette.com

There are some ideas kicking around the margins that can help shape what today's Big Four might look like. Three of the best ideas would update elements of the New Deal.

First, the minimum wage should rise again with the overall wage level. Though long forgotten, between 1938 and 1968, the purchasing power of the minimum wage more than doubled. Let's put minimum-wage earners on that same track today.

Unionization is another important tool to rebuild the middle class, starting in the service sectors that pay too poorly -- in offices, health care and child care, supermarkets and retail stores, hotels and restaurants, and building services.

Today's unemployed workers don't just need income to tide them over until the assembly line starts moving again. Unemployed -- and many employed -- workers also need more access to job training

The final piece of today's Big Four would be a massive investment in an environmentally sustainable low-carbon economy,

Tags: unemployment

Real Health Care Reform

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:54:59 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski

Clip Source: townhall.com

The result is an overregulated, overbureaucratized system of surpassing arbitrariness and inefficiency. Throw a dart at the Senate tome:

The bill is irredeemable. It should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool.

Then do health care the right way

First, tort reform.

Democrats don't want "to take on the trial lawyers." What he didn't say -- he didn't need to -- is that they give millions to the Democrats for precisely this kind of protection.

Clip Source: townhall.com

Second, even more simple and simplifying, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines.

Third, tax employer-provided health insurance. This is an accrued inefficiency of 65 years, an accident of World War II wage controls.

Tags: healthcare

Where Do These People Come From?

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:32:40 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski

Clip Source: www.cnsnews.com

(CNSNews.com) – Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) told CNSNews.com that civilian courts are well-suited to prosecute al Qaeda terrorists and that "if people don't believe in our system, maybe they ought to go somewhere else.”

Conrad also dismissed a question about the rights of terrorists captured on foreign battlefields and the rules of evidence in terms of a civilian court trial as not serious.

Tags: congress

Obama's Cabinet - No experience required

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 04:35:25 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski
clipper's remarks: WOW

Clip Source: blog.american.com

A friend sends along the following chart from a J.P. Morgan research report. It examines the prior private sector experience of the cabinet officials since 1900 that one might expect a president to turn to in seeking advice about helping the economy. It includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.

When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet—over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector—is remarkable.

Tags: obama

Austrailia leads the way

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 02:58:06 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski

Clip Source: blogs.telegraph.co.uk

ABC news reports that five frontbenchers from Australia’s opposition Liberal party have resigned their portfolios rather than follow their leader Malcolm Turnbull in voting with Kevin Rudd’s Government on a new Emissions Trading Scheme.

Though the ETS squeaked narrowly through Australia’s House of Representatives, its Senate is proving more robust – thanks not least to the widespread disgust by the many Senators who have read Professor Plimer’s book Heaven And Earth at the dishonesty and corruption of the AGW industry.

For the rapidly increasing number of us who believe that AGW is little more than a scheme by bullying eco-fascists to deprive us of our liberty, by big government to spread its controlling tentacles into every aspect our lives, and scheming industrialists such as Al Gore to enrich themselves through carbon trading, this principled act by Australia’s Carbon Five is fantastic news.

Tags: global warming

Global Warming "Science" Exposed

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:48:55 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski
clipper's remarks: and thus how far-reaching the implications if the obvious turns out to be true.

Clip Source: www.realclearpolitics.com

Baron Lawson of Blaby), the former British chancellor of the exchequer, who is among prominent persons demanding a full and open public inquiry, summarized the content of the e-mails in this way:

"Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals. ...

"There may be a perfectly innocent explanation," he continues with that impartial aplomb for which we have always adored British lords, but then he reminds just how much government spending and bureaucracy, in Britain and all over the world, has been mounted entirely upon this dubious research;

Tags: global warming

The Media

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:36:58 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski

Clip Source: randyhaddock.com

A Leader

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:20:46 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski
clipper's remarks: You better turn around every once and a while to make sure someone is following you.

Oh, and you better rush that cap and tax bill through the senate real quickly, because the world is about to find out what a hoax "climate change" has been.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

President Barack Obama is to pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the US in several stages, beginning with a 17% cut by 2020, the White House has said.

The cuts Mr Obama has proposed are similar to those included in a bill passed by the US House of Representatives in June.

But with legislation currently stuck in the Senate, correspondents say the president will be unable to commit to any of the figures he is proposing at the summit.

Tags: global warming, obama

Red Ink and Jobs

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:35:46 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski
clipper's remarks: If I recall correctly, the stimulus package was to keep unemployment under 8 percent. It is over 10. So, congress wants to spend more money to create jobs.

They will want to spend $1 trillion and promise to keep unemployment under 15 percent. Watch it rise to 20 percent.

We need to take our country back, leave no incumbent in office.

Clip Source: www.foxnews.com

Building the case for a brand new jobs-creation bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says most Americans would not mind inflating the already-gaping deficit in exchange for more jobs.

The California Democrat said on a conference call Tuesday that Americans could "absorb" the hit to the federal budget, and she argued that their biggest complaint is not that the deficit is big -- it's that they're not seeing any benefit in return for increasing the U.S. debt load.

Despite the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February, unemployment climbed to 10.2 percent in October. While critics cite the jobless rate as a sign that the stimulus has failed, Pelosi argues that the federal government is just not trying hard enough.

Tags: jobs, pelosi, congress

Three more years. . .

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:19:53 GMT

clipped by: mklosinski

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Mr Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly criticising the US President and his delays in sending more troops to bolster the mission against the Taliban.

A “period of hiatus” in Washington - and a lack of clear direction - had made it harder for ministers to persuade the British public to go on backing the Afghan mission in the face of a rising death toll, he said.

The Defence Secretary’s blunt remarks about the US threaten to strain further a transatlantic relationship already under pressure over the British release of the Lockerbie bomber and Mr Obama’s decision to snub Mr Brown at the United Nations in September.

Tags: obama, afghanistan