Politics, Booze, Music, and Culture
The ISW is a site that you should add to your blogroll. They’re bringing important updates and analysis about the state of conflicts, broadly, in the middle east.
Start here, with a graphic that shows a current map of control of terrain in Iraq. Which, while we deal with ebola, mid-term political campaigns, a pugnacious Russia, and Peyton Manning’s weekly record chase, we might still want to spare a thought for Saddam’s former playground.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: one of the most important jobs of the informed citizenry is to push back against government excesses. All governments– indeed, all bureaucracies– are inclined to grow fat with power and reluctant to relinquish either the money that they collect or the control that collects around them. It is their nature.
That doesn’t mean that government is evil or only does evil, only that the balance of power should always tip in the favor of the citizens. Government employees and politicians should always be made to be aware that they serve at the whim and will of the people. Protect the people and serve them well, and be safe in your job; serve yourself and you’ll soon need to be looking for a new line of work.
Sadly, it’s damned hard to fire government employees (whose jobs are not only safe, but they have better benefits and pay than their civilian counterparts), and politicians at the national level enjoy retention rates that are ridiculously high (and approval rates that are similarly low).
Gnaw on that fact for a bit.
So, as citizens, we keep rewarding failure at the highest level with more pay, perks, power, and job security. The failures of the United States are not the fault of the political class; they are the fault of the citizenry that refuses to do its job. We have become a trivial people given to worry over irrelevant social policies while our economy continues to falter and the politicians become ever more powerful.
Which is a long-winded prologue to this story of why government, at every level, must be held accountable for their failures and citizens must be protected from their excesses.
Grand juries are supposed to protect us from false allegations, but the old saying that prosecutors could get a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich”reflects the reality that most fail on that front. Instead, as this study from the Cato Institute explains, they’re often used to harass and intimidate.
Read it all and remember: it’s your job to push back against the excesses of government. At every level.
Vote wisely in the upcoming elections.
Every year, Foreign Policy publishes their Fragile State Index (although it was previously called the Failed State Index). This is precisely what it sounds like: an analysis of the stability of nations around the world.
For anyone interested or concerned with global politics, this is must-read material. It’s an important view of where conflict and strife not only currently exists, but where it could rise and overwhelm nations and their neighbors. Beyond the numerical index, they always have editorial surrounding the rankings to give useful insight.
Highly recommended.
If laughter is the best medicine, then the whole goal of Obamacare must have been to kid us all the way to good health. Because the reality of the poorly conceived plan is absolutely hilarious!
In March 2010, Obamacare was about to be voted upon by the House of Representatives, and the Democrats were in the process of deciding whether to ignore public opinion at their peril. At that time, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that Obamacare would cost $938 billion over a decade and would reduce the number of uninsured people by 19 million as of 2014 (with a reduction of 1 million prior to 2014 and 18 million in 2014 alone). Unimpressed, the American people overwhelmingly opposed the intrusive overhaul — with 20 of 21 polls taken that month showing it to be unpopular, most of them by double digits. The Democrats willfully passed Obamacare anyway and lost 63 House seats that November.
Two years later, the Supreme Court declared Obamacare’s coercive Medicaid expansion to be unconstitutional as written, and the CBO adjusted its projection for the number of uninsured accordingly. Itprojected that Obamacare would reduce the number of uninsured by 14 million as of 2014 (2 million before 2014 and 12 million in 2014 alone), at a 10-year cost of $1.677 trillion — or $739 billion more than the 2010 projection. (This February, the CBO projected that Obamacare’s 10-year cost would eclipse $2 trillion.)
Bwahahahahahahahhahah—doh!
I think I pulled a muscle…
When I was around 8 years old, my parents took me to Disney World. My Disney vacation went thusly: we walked into the Magic Kingdom, my dad checked my watch, he gave me a bit of money for food and drink, and then we went our separate ways. We met back at the front of the park at the end of the day, and I had enjoyed a wonderful day. Aside from the fact that I don’t have much in the way of family memories from our family vacations, I had a great time. I lost count of the number of times I rode Pirates of the Caribbean and Magic Mountain. I probably enjoyed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea nearly as many times. When it rained, I found shelter, had a soda, and waited until I could start riding the rides again. By the time I was 9, I was a full time latch-key kid (and, just a few years later, having a handgun in the house saved me from a home intruder– but that’s a different story for another day). Does that constitute criminal behavior on my parents’ part? Did they deserve to be jailed for “abandoning” me? I certainly don’t believe so, but times have changed.
Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead.
Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park—a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking—two days in a row. There were swings, a “splash pad,” and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied.
The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl “abandoned” and proceeded to arrest the mother.
As I said: times have changed. Is the world that much more dangerous? Or are our children that much more vulnerable? Or have we just lost our sense of context and reasonableness? I actually don’t know the answer to that question, but it seems like an overreaction.
What my parents did with me, I wouldn’t do with my own kids, but it isn’t necessarily because I’d be worried about their safety. It’s because I would want to be sure that I had memories with my children.
Over at Commentary, a quick little article about President Obama’s failure on foreign policy. A tidbit:
Mr. Obama said that if elected his approach would be characterized by “smart diplomacy.” The result would be that he would “remake the world” and “heal the planet.” And during the first summer of his presidency, Mr. Obama said his policies would usher in a “new beginning” based on “mutual respect” with the Arab and Islamic world and “help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East.”
Some new dawn.
President Obama has not only not achieved what he said he would; the world may well be, as Senator John McCain put it this weekend, “in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime.” Mr. Obama’s role in this turmoil depends on the particular case we’re talking about, but it’s certainly the case that (a) his policies have amplified and accelerated some of the problems around the world while failing to mitigate others and (b) measured against his own standards, the president has failed miserably.
And it was all utterly predictable. That’s the hell of it.
I find that my commentary is becoming increasingly bitter. I don’t blame our president at all for following his own nature or for being precisely the politician that I fully expected he would be. No, I blame my fellow citizens for electing him twice to this position, and for leaving our nation open to him. While we debated the trivial (free contraceptives are, truly, trivial in comparison to our economy, the number of healthy Americans who remain jobless, and the dangers of an unsettled world political order), we elected a man who was a measurable failure as president. A failure in nearly every meaningful way.
I don’t think too many people will find this surprising:
Russia’s global image is increasingly negative, according to a nsurvey from the Pew Research Center.
What to take from this Reason article wherein we find that millenials are deeply cynical about government, believe it to be bloated and inefficient, and would like to see it spend less money while at the same time wanting access to free health care and a guaranteed “living wage?” Probably nothing earth-shatteringly huge, except that as long as someone else is footing the bill, we all want all of the “free” services that we can get.
“Would you like a Ferrari?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like a Ferrari even if it means that you’ll have to pay for it, heavily, for the rest of your life.”
“Well, when you ask that way…”
But when you’re convinced that someone else always owes more taxes (a misguided sense of “fairness”), then there is always someone else to pick up the tab. The conversation about green energy is similar.
“Would you like all energy to be generated through clean, renewable sources?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like all energy to be generated through clean, renewable sources even if it doubles your current energy bill?”
“Well, when you ask it that way…”
Of course, this ignores all sorts of subsidies and market-distorting realities that mean few of us know the actual cost of most of the staples in our lives (farm subsidies, energy subsidies, unequal tax and regulatory burdens on a variety of industries…) so what we actually pay for our energy, food, medical care, and Ferraris is anything but transparent. While transparency would be nice, what we have is such distortion that our supposedly free market is more like a pool where some bits are a tad murky and others are utterly opaque.
But here’s the thing: when it comes to politics, we usually stop at that first question and answer set. We rarely step back to truly understand the cost of our legislation and our expectations. Why would we imagine folks would make rational choices when they aren’t actually given enough information (or that information is so obscured as to be indecipherable) to choose rationally?
Firstly, our friend, Steve Green, is pointing out some of what I was mentioning below and then goes a few thoughts deeper on the subject in The Week the Wheels Came Off Obamacare.
The pols and pundits can argue and fingerpoint until they’re blue in the — finger? — but Obamacare’s numbers paint a bleak picture of broken promises and outright lies. After a full month, nearly 40,000 people have successfully signed up for health insurance at HealthCare.gov, out of an administration goal of over seven million by the end of March. At that rate, the administration will have met its goal sometime in the autumn — of 2028.
Mind you, the goal of Obamacare was to provide coverage for some 47,000,000 uninsured Americans. So take those 15 years and multiply them by about seven. You’re gonna need a bigger calculator.
Ignored in those dreary statistics is the fact that people are being dumped out of their current coverage and onto the nonfunctional exchanges faster than the exchanges can handle them. An estimated 1,500,000 have lost their coverage, up against those newly insured 40,000. The best guess is that seven or eight million more face the same fate.
And that’s just the first few paragraphs.
This little article dives into the numbers in Kentucky— and it’s dismal.
These notes serve to reinforce my belief that when the numbers start turning positive, the “newly covered” are going to be nothing of the sort. Folks stripped of coverage by government mandate will be the first, largest influx of Obamacare enrollees.
Firstly, from one of our longtime blogging friends, Trench Reynolds, here is a link to his entire healthcare category. His thoughts largely meet my own, but he has a more professional view of the subject.
Secondly, a blog post from Roger Fraley, a friend here in Colorado who we don’t get to see nearly as often as we’d like.
More thoughts later.