HopenChange Cracks

Kim R. Holmes has some on-target Reality Check going on here:

When he promises an America in which “no one will die because they don’t have health care” or no one is poor, he is invoking an image of a world that simply cannot exist. But this matters little because in the world of imagination, anything is possible, and truth and reality spoil the mood.

...But “real” idealists are not utopians.

All good people hope the world will be and can be made a better place in which to live. But not all people believe it is possible for the U.S. government to guarantee that no one will die because they don’t have health care, or that every rogue nuclear state will give up its weapons, or that poverty can be eliminated by government fiat. The difference in these two propositions is more than that between the idealist and the realist.

It is rather between imagination and the truth.

Go over there and read the whole thing.

REALLY ouch!

Stewart Rips Obama's Broken Promises, Especially C-SPAN

STEWART: Oh, yeah we're going TO DO IT ON MOTHERF**KING C-SPAN. I got my 3-d glasses. I got my snacks. By the way, I always buy my popcorn at the movie theater and sneak it home because it tastes so much better when it's ridiculously expensive. Alright, let's turn on the C-SPAN and watch some healthcare negotiations. Alright, it's not on C-SPAN 1 there. Or, let's try again. Okay it's not on C-SPAN 2. Maybe it's on C-SPAN Classic. [...]

STEWART: Well, I've checked all the C-SPANs, even the ones I made up. What gives? [...]

I'm thinking the honeymoon is over.

That Time of Year

OUCH!

That's gotta sting. Especially considering the source.

The New Marriage Penalty

I had meant to write about this this week, but the Wall Street Journal beat me to it.

Married Couples Pay More Than Unmarried Under Health Bill

The built-in "marriage penalty" in both House and Senate healthcare bills has received scant attention. But for scores of low-income and middle-income couples, it could mean a hike of $2,000 or more in annual insurance premiums the moment they say "I do."

It's not just the premiums, it's the subsidies, and it gets even worse when you factor children into it. There would be a multi-thousand-dollar annual incentive for two-earner couples with kids to get divorced and live together, with the lower-earning spouse having custody.

Why do all Democratic proposals to raise taxes "for our own good" seem to penalize marriage and productivity, and boost incentives to be poor?

PANTS. ON. FIRE.

Democratic Leaders Plan Secret Health Reform Deliberations

Compare with:





No comment necessary.

Not comment really, just update:

Pelosi tells C-SPAN: 'There has never been a more open process'

C-SPAN wrote a letter to congressional leaders Tuesday asking that TV cameras be allowed to film negotiations to reconcile the House and Senate versions of healthcare reform legislation.

But Pelosi said Congress has already been transparent throughout the process.

"There has never been a more open process for any legislation," Pelosi said at a press conference.

You can't make this stuff up. More update: BREITBART-TV has compiled EIGHT separate clips of Obama promising that ALL the health care negotiations would be carried on C-SPAN.

More, from the CEO of C-SPAN:

C-SPAN CEO: White House Has Allowed Only ‘One Hour’ of Health Care Coverage

"...which was kind of a show-horse type of thing."

I like to think of them as ponies promised...that never get delivered.

Liberal Politics in Action

The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.

Despite its good intentions, San Francisco is not leading the country in gay marriage. Despite its good intentions, it is not stopping wars. Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, its homeless problem is worse than any comparable city's. Despite its spending more money per capita, period, than almost any city in the nation, San Francisco has poorly managed, budget-busting capital projects, overlapping social programs no one is certain are working, and a transportation system where the only thing running ahead of schedule is the size of its deficit.

...Amazingly, this gets worse. After securing the bond funding to save Laguna Honda as a hospital for the elderly, the Department of Public Health began transferring younger, often dangerous and mentally ill patients there and mixing them among the old people. This went about as well as you'd think: A 2006 state and federal licensing survey noted numerous instances of elder abuse, staff abuse, and patients toting drugs, alcohol, and even loaded weapons. One patient was assaulted four times in four months; to address this problem, staff erected signs reading "No Hitting." (That didn't work.) To cap it off, elder activists now worry that a 2009 Department of Public Health–commissioned report will pave the way for even more relatively young, mentally ill patients heading to Laguna Honda. The massively overbudget, behind-schedule hospital may not even end up primarily serving the elderly population that voters were promised it would.

Read the whole thing. San Francisco municipal government makes the DC municipal government look competent.

Circling the Wagons

Physics Group Splinters Over Global Warming Review

The scientist who will head the American Physical Society's review of its 2007 statement calling for immediate reductions of carbon dioxide is Princeton's Robert Socolow, a prominent supporter of the link between CO2 and global warming who has warned of possible "catastrophic consequences" of climate change.

..."It is Socolow whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming," says William Happer, a fellow Princeton University professor and head of the Happer physics lab who has raised the question of a conflict of interest. The reason: the ostensibly neutral person charged with evaluating a statement endorsing man-made global warming is a leading proponent of precisely that theory whose funding is tied to that theory.

Wait, it gets better!

Hal Lewis, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has been an APS member for 65 years, says that he asked both the current and incoming APS presidents to require that Socolow recuse himself from a review of this subject, and both refused.

That means the review will be "chaired by a guy who is hip deep in conflicts of interest, running a million-dollar program that is utterly dependent on global warming funding," Lewis says. In addition, he points out that the group charged with taking a second look at the 2007 statement, the Panel on Public Affairs, is the same body that drafted it in the first place. That, "too has a smell of people investigating themselves," Lewis says.

And the warmers wonder how people could ever doubt! When a company's books are called into question by the shareholders, the audit isn't handed over to the people keeping those books. Instead, the shareholders (and the SEC) demand an independent audit. For years, what most skeptics (and many climate scientists!) have called for is just such an audit, in the face of substantial evidence that the AGW "books" are at least slightly cooked.

Yet what we have seen over and over again, and what is on full display in the HCRU dump, is the "circle the wagons" mentality that shuts out all independent scrutiny of the details in the "books."

Instead, the response is to try to shoot those darn Injuns.

Is This the Change You Were Hoping For?

The Return of the Inflation Tax

In order to raise enough money to make their plan look like it won't add to the deficit, House Democrats have deliberately not indexed two main tax features of their plan: the $500,000 threshold for the 5.4-percentage-point income tax surcharge; and the payroll level at which small businesses must pay a new 8% tax penalty for not offering health insurance.

This is a sneaky way for politicians to pry more money out of workers every year without having to legislate tax increases. The negative effects of failing to index compound over time, yielding a revenue windfall for government as the years go on. The House tax surcharge is estimated to raise $460.5 billion over 10 years, but only $30.9 billion in 2011, rising to $68.4 billion in 2019, according to the Joint Tax Committee.

Americans of a certain age have seen this movie before...

I also recall some yak-yak from Our Puffery in Chief about only raising taxes on the rich. Being of a certain age, I remember the much less radical Bill Clinton making that same promise, and my subsequent annoyance at discovering that despite having a middle-class income at best we were somehow among "the rich."

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does play encores for the short-of-memory.

Election Night 2009

I'm kicking back with a bowl of popcorn to watch the results come in, for much the same reason a hardcore baseball fan will go watch a Little League game rather than hang out in a bar.

The pundits and partisans have spent weeks or months telling us what all the results will mean, and they're pretty much all full of crap. Without having turned on the newsfeed yet, I can tell you that Virginia is getting a GOP guv, Maine will probably turn back the anti-gay-marriage forces, NJ will have voter fraud and perhaps be contested, and that the NY 23rd is a unique situation that mostly just shows us the more strident divisions in the GOP and the right wing.

Jay Cost says it better than I do.

Wow. The pundit class is in full swing, interpreting the meaning of NY-23. "What's it say about Obama's administration?" "What's it say about the state of the Republican Party?" "What's it say for the upcoming health care debate?" So many questions. I'll do my best to answer them, each in turn.

Nothing, nothing, and nothing!

If you're watching the elections tonight rather than, say, re-runs of CSI, then you're a politics junkie like me. But you need to admit to yourself that there is little actual meaning of any national import in tonight's results. All politics is local, and we get to see a few isolated examples of the local struggle playing out without the big contextual backdrop of nation-wide contests. Enjoy it. But don't read too much into it, because there really isn't all that much there.