#1
I like that tea bag idea he had. The next time I get a letter in the mail soliciting money for the Republican Party I think I'll send them a tea bag instead of a check. I'd try it with the donks but I don't think they care.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/28/2013 17:30 Comments ||
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#2
Think McCain or Graham would notice?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/28/2013 17:30 Comments ||
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#3
What a great idea, Abu!
I get a lot of "we're all gonna die if you don't send money right NOW" letters. (I made some donations to people I like last election, and now everybody knows my name. And address. And phone number.)
I'm going to put "tea bags" on my shopping list right now. :-D
Posted by: Barbara ||
04/28/2013 18:54 Comments ||
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In the last two weeks, we've watched the spectacle of Obamacare's main author, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., call the law's implementation a "train wreck" just before he dashed for the exits by announcing his retirement from the Senate. A few days later, the country was outraged to learn that members of Congress were holding confidential talks to exempt themselves and their staffs from provisions of the law. Senate Democrats also made clear at the White House this week that they're worried about Obamacare's potential to wreck their chances in the 2014 congressional elections.
Now, with Obamacare on the books and headed for that train wreck, Democrats may finally have created a situation for themselves in which they will learn once and for all that they cannot repeal the laws of cause and effect or supply and demand.
#1
Democrats may finally have created a situation for themselves in which they will learn once and for all that they cannot repeal the laws of cause and effect or supply and demand.
Don't count on it too hard. Economic literacy may have something to do with governing, assuming a politician ever gets around to it, but it doesn't have anything to do with campaigning. Otherwise we'd be toasting President Romney, or even President Perry.
Even with an economy cratered, in splinters, with monetary gore dripping from the walls, the really important issues in life remain gay marriage, racism, a woman's right to choose, and whether the opponent's father-in-law's Uncle Gaylord was stopped for drunk driving in 1958.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/28/2013 10:47 Comments ||
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#2
We should have nationalized health care in 1916 when Teddy Roosevelt wanted to do it.
The only reason our health care system is such a wreck is the AMA. We could spend 100% of our nation's economy on health care and the AMA would still be bribing congress to let them get rich.
When the social scientists talk about wealth transfer to pay for health care for the poor, they don't understand the poor are not receiving the wealth transfer, it goes to the upper 0.1% of our economy, the doctors who earn on average 10 times the national average income or 20 times the poverty line.
The fiasco that is ObamaCare is the conundrum the Dems found themselves in with health care, they had to feed their two revenue streams, the AMA and the trial lawyers, who loathe each other, so they opened the spigot for the doctors with Medicare and opened the spigot for the lawyers by leaving tort reform out of the legislation. So the doctors get rich, the lawyers get rich and everyone else pays through the nose for health care. We would be far better off if we had either nationalized the beast in 1916 or not passed Medicare.
Medicare is the problem and federal regulations and half backed cost containment schemes have only made it worse. ObamaCare is the evolutionary dead end of the mess Congress and the AMA created.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
04/28/2013 12:21 Comments ||
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#3
The whole of Marxism is denying economic reality such as the time value of money and messing with price = demand/ supply can only lead to a shortage.
#5
Ah yes the tax rate and regulations. One of the drivers of our medical payment misery (health care is doing just fine) was the income tax rules that made paying higher salaries a lose lose proposition for the middle/upper classes.
How could employers raise their employees pay and NOT have it all end up in Washington? They found some benefits that wouldn't be taxed. Enter employee paid health insurance, BUT it also meant the exit of direct connection between patient and payment.
Put it in the smoker to cook low and slow and what you get is our current mess.
#6
Gee, Mr. Clinton, some doctor steal your girlfriend once? She's certainly better off with him than with you.
You do know, boy, that the AMA represents less than half of all physicians and surgeons, that it is a tiny ant of a lobbying force relative to those arrayed against it, that they have literally nothing to with how many seats are created in medical schools, and have fought most of the real reasons that medical care has gone up so much (the insurance industry, government, and the hospital corporation industry, to name three) on behalf of themselves and your sorry a$$ for decades?
Doctor's fees account for something like 18% of the total cost of health care. The insurance industry makes more than that.
And why, precisely, does it bother you so much that doctors make the salary they do? Ten of the best years of your life working for nothing or going into debt and a hard, stressful, risky career afterwards don't warrant their pay grade? I'm not a physician and I have no relatives who are but I have a lot of respect for 99% of them. I couldn't do it and based on your comment I'm 100% sure you couldn't either. Pathetic people like you have no idea of the commitment, work, and intellect needed to get there.
You do know that the envy you feel towards docs means you're going to hell when you die, right?
Using the government to make health care cheap by price fixing so that you can have more money to spend on stuff and status is thuggery. I'm sure you would object to someone doing that to your industry. Why is it OK to do it to someone else?
But the worst thing about nationalizing health care and paying doctros a pittance above the national salary average will be that plenty of the smartest college kids will simply opt for other fields than medicine.
Based on your unhinged rant I can imagine you with your daughter dying and keening in pain on her deathbed and saying to her, "Oh, honey, sorry, your mom and I voted for national health care so the guy who would have gone into medicine and found the cure for your disease did something else with his life. But look on the bright side.....your mom and I saved ten grand in premiums over the past five years!"
Pffft.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
04/28/2013 17:26 Comments ||
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#7
Doctor's fees account for something like 18% of the total cost of health care. The insurance industry makes more than that.
From what nether regions of your colon did you pull that stat?
While I agreed with most of your rant and none of BC's that is way off. Before you answer I do have a Risk Management major, background in actuary and spent many years negotiating contracts between providers and payors.
If you are talking about direct and acute patient care, your critique might be a fair one.
Once you figure in things like long-term care, elder care, counseling, psych care, all imaging and testing, malpractice, costs for things like ambulance/transport/law enforcement training, government mandated training for any of a numner of things, the money people spend on alternative care, gym memberships, etc., etc,. etc. - not to mention pharmaceuticals - in short if you calculate the cost of everything, every penny that is spent on health related goods and services - that 18% number holds up pretty well.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
04/28/2013 19:13 Comments ||
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#9
Beavis, 18% is pretty consistent with the fraction of the nominal charge for medical or lab tests that actually gets paid to the original providers, after the negotiated discounts to insurance companies and write-offs to the indigent are factored in. Actual doctor visits and hospital charges are not as low - more like 50%. Of course, like jewelry store prices, the nominal costs are jacked up so as to accommodate the discounts or sale prices, and only the uninsured who have assets have to pay list price. Additionally, I have it on good authority that remunerations to radiologists are down 30% (per study) over the last few years.
#10
The US per se is facing a "perfect storm" on not one but several nationwide catastrophes in various sectors, all of which are mainly self-induced although not to argue that external factors have no role or influence.
I like the Political Toon > OBITUARY = "HERE LIES THE GLOBAL SUPERPOWER USA. CAUSE OF DEATH -SUICIDE/SELF-SUICIDE".
* AL BUNDY = "I'M AN AMERICAN - I'M SORRY".
* 1990's CLINTONISM = "THE US MUST BE CONSTRAINED [restrained + detained] + CONTROLLED".
IIRC, also from 1990'S CLINTONISM = D *** NG IT, MY COUNTRY DEMANDS ITS GOD-GIVEN SECULAR ATHEIST RIGHT TO BE INVADED BY THE "ARROGANT FASCIST = LIMITED COMMUNIST MALE BRUTE USA"!
POST-2015 OWG-NWO = the US won't be able to go to war or produce anything widout other Nations' + Global Politiburo's consent.
The good news is the US won't be hurting peoples' feelings anymore after its forcibly stopped from saving them from their collective enemies.
#11
No mo and Glenmore i wasn't clear my issue was insurance carriers making more than 18%, G-d bless physicians but carriers don't come close to that figure. I've been the trenches for over 25 years and it ain't a pittance compared that.
#12
You do know, boy, that the AMA represents less than half of all physicians and surgeons, that it is a tiny ant of a lobbying force relative to those arrayed against it..
Where you around in the late 60s, early 70s? The Vietnam war was rolling. The military needed more doctors so they put together a medical school to generate more. Even as it was being completed the AMA intervened to shut it down, declaring it would never get certified. It was an economic threat to them to have the government churning out a significant number of physicians that would several years later be competing in the marketplace. It's called supply and demand, and they like other guilds intervened to protect their market share.
Thomas Friedman actually makes sense
AS police investigators peel away the layers of the Boston Marathon bombing, there are two aspects of this unfolding story to which I want to react: the mind-set of the alleged bombers and the role of the Internet in shaping it. Important news about both was contained in a single Washington Post article on Tuesday.
"The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews," The Post reported. The officials said, "Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev ... do not appear to have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization. Rather, the officials said, the evidence so far suggests they were 'self-radicalized' through Internet sites and U.S. actions in the Muslim world. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has specifically cited the U.S. war in Iraq, which ended in December 2011 with the removal of the last American forces, and the war in Afghanistan."
This is a popular meme among radical Muslim groups, and, to be sure, some Muslim youths were deeply angered by the U.S. interventions in the Middle East. The brothers Tsarnaev may have been among them.
But what in God's name does that have to do with planting a bomb at the Boston Marathon and blowing up innocent people? It is amazing to me how we've come to accept this non sequitur and how easily we've allowed radical Muslim groups and their apologists to get away with it.
That right there made me question whether Tom Friedman's doppelganger wrote this article...
A simple question: If you were upset with U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why didn't you go out and build a school in Afghanistan to strengthen that community or get an advanced degree to strengthen yourself or become a math teacher in the Muslim world to help its people be less vulnerable to foreign powers?
Or at least pick up a rifle and fight in Afghanistan. When we had our revolution we didn't set off bombs in London and Portsmouth, we fought the British on our home soil. And whatever atrocities the Patriots and Loyalists committed against each other (and there were quite a few), we didn't bomb women and children in third countries. If the Tsarnaev brothers had picked up AK's and marched off to Kandahar I would, at a base level, respect that, right up to the moment they got drone-zapped.
Dzhokhar claims the Tsarnaev brothers were so upset by something America did in a third country that they just had to go to Boylston Street and blow up people who had nothing to do with it (some of whom could have been Muslims), and too often we just nod our heads rather than asking: What kind of sick madness is this?
It's a double non sequitur when it comes from Muslim youths who lived and studied in America, where, if you're upset about something, you have many ways to express your opposition and have an impact -- from organizing demonstrations to publishing articles to running for office. In fact, an American guy named Barack, whose grandfather was a Muslim, did just that. And he's now president of the United States, a job he's used to unwind too early the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Moreover, some 70,000 people, most of them Muslims, have been killed by other Muslims in the Syrian civil war, which the U.S. had nothing to do with -- although many Muslims are now begging us to intervene to stop it. And every week innocent Muslims are blown up by Muslim suicide bombers in Pakistan and Iraq -- every week. Thousands of them have been maimed and killed in attacks so nihilistic that the bombers don't even bother to give their names or make demands. Yet this does not appear to have moved the brothers Tsarnaev one iota.
Why is that? We surely must not tar all of Islam in this. Having lived in the Muslim world, I know how unfair that would be.
About as unfair as tarring all of Christianity for the obscene acts of an abortion clinic bomber, but that hasn't stopped Andrew Sullivan, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Mother Jones...
But we must ask a question only Muslims can answer: What is going on in your community that a critical number of your youth believes that every American military action in the Middle East is intolerable and justifies a violent response, and everything Muslim extremists do to other Muslims is ignorable and calls for mostly silence?
As for the role that Web sites apparently played in the "self-radicalization" of the two Chechen brothers, it is yet another reminder that the Internet is a digital river that carries incredible sources of wisdom and hate along the same current. It's all there together. And our kids and citizens usually interact with this flow nakedly, with no supervision.
So more people are more directly exposed to more raw information and opinion every day from everywhere. As such, it is more important than ever that we build the internal software, the internal filters, into every citizen to sift out fact from fiction in this electronic torrent, which offers so much information that has never been touched by an editor, a censor or a libel lawyer.
Ah, there's the Tom we know and love -- the solution to the problem is more government and more bureaucracy. Always more government...
That's why, when the Internet first emerged and you had to connect via a modem, I used to urge that modems sold in America come with a warning label from the surgeon general, like cigarettes. It would read: "Attention: Judgment not included."
And that's why the faster, more accessible and ultramodern the Internet becomes, the more all the old-fashioned stuff matters: good judgment, respect for others who are different and basic values of right and wrong. Those you can't download. They have to be uploaded, the old-fashioned way, by parents around the dinner table, by caring but demanding teachers at school and by responsible spiritual leaders in a church, synagogue, temple or mosque. Somewhere, somehow, that did not happen, or stopped happening, with the brothers Tsarnaev.
#3
Steyn correctly notes that the left subverts language to prevent honest discussion - and unfortunately goes on to accept the terms of the debate.
Namely: what is all this business about "assimilating" immigrants? Used to be, immigrants came to the US prepared to integrate.
Immigrants are not the passive object of an active verb, in need of "being assimilated" by unknown actors. Immigrants are the actors, who can choose to engage in the act of integration, or they can choose not to. No one bears any responsibility for that decision, other than the immigrant in question.
It is doubly infuriating that these selfsame leftists are the ones who have diligently undermined and eroded the "melting pot" concept - a society into which immigrants integrate - and instead promoted "cultural diversity," group identities, balkanization, and tribalism. Not only placing the onus on others to do the job of assimilation, but also ensuring that it probably won't work.
3 dead and 250+ maimed and injured is but one predictable outcome of the successful replacement of the melting pot/integration model with the diversity/assimilation model. And they have the gall to blame the rest of us for not working hard enough to fix a problem we worked hard to prevent them from creating in the first place?
?!?!?! [Expletives deleted] So pissed, I hope this still makes sense.
#1
(It's also not clear why the Russians would warn the FBI about Tsarnaev's radical interests and then, apparently, not have done more to keep tabs on him while he was on his lengthy trip to Russia.)
The Russians did precisely what we asked them to do [conduct surveillance and report]. Do not spook him off target. Then after the incident in Boston, the Russians arrested 140 people suspected of having terrorist connections, for questioning.
#2
To accept the notion that our intelligence and law enforcement game [more than a decade after 9/11 and repeated warnings from foreign intelligence] is so bad, so bumbling that we simply missed two Chechen military age males, one prone to domestic violence, a radical, nut-case mother and dysfunctional family like tis one, is way, way beyond belief.
#3
Besoeker, beyond belief? Well then what's the alternative?
Could it be that the prevailing elite narrative precludes anything remotely effective for PC & political reasons? Could it be that doing anything that might upset CAIR et al is far more horrible than a few dead citizens?
Where are your priorities? More to the point, where are theirs?
#6
The "alternative"....? Your "prevailing elite narrative" is certainly a key component or enabler, but I strongly believe Nadal Hasan and these Chechnian monsters were being monitored for terrorist leads, contacts, and reporting. I'm not entirely certain the original 9/11 suicide jihadists were not being exploited similarly. In intelligence parlance, each of these people possessed key placement and access.
Shortly after the Fort Hood terrorist incident, US born terrorist [and coincidently, key Hasan confident] Anwar al-Awlaki was terminated via drone. Now that the brothers Tsarnaev have been neutralized, the Russians are conducting a broad terrorist sweep. Our own intelligence and law enforcement community appears to be conducting a similar effort, albeit more discreetly, right here at home.
Intelligence leads and access within the worldwide radical Islamic community are precious and few. To simply throw our hands into the air and say "well Leonard, it appears we've cocked this one again" [as COL Hunt suggested last evening on Fox], is unacceptable.
Forgive me for sounding like a broken record, but I wish someone in the congress or the media would turn to CIA Director John Brennan along with former Director Leon Panetta and ask.... ok, your time is up, what the fok was going on at Fort Hood, Benghazi, Boston, and elsewhere?
'I, of course, retired from CIA in 1987 and had moved on to working as a senior political scientist for RAND.' He said his son-in-law showed no interest in the agency or politics but spoke generally about his family in Chechnya.
He said any attempts to portray the relationship as a link between the security agency and the two terrorists was 'absurd'.
1. "Of course I retired from..." = 4 Pinocchios, possibly 5.
2. "Began working at RAND" = Where I helped shape policy.
3. "Saw no interest in the agency" = Declined or was deemed unacceptable [too dirty] for witting recruitment.
5. "Spoke generally about his family in Chechnya" = Possesses placement and access, likes to talk, continue long-term accessment.
#9
4. "any attempts to portray the relationship as a link between the security agency and the two terrorists was 'absurd" = No, the absurdity is there allegedly WERE NO LINKS !!!
#10
To simply throw our hands into the air and say "well Leonard, it appears we've cocked this one again" [as COL Hunt suggested last evening on Fox], is unacceptable.
It may also be that "it appears we've cocked this one again" is part of an 'acceptable level of losses' stratagem. Eggs will be broken, and all that.
Posted by: Barbara ||
04/28/2013 12:30 Comments ||
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#12
Yes, a cock-up. The "acceptable level of losses' stratagem".... entirely plausible, and sadly, beginning to look more so.
Well, quite honestly, if your job is source-reporting and dissemination, and your only source is arrested and taken out of circulation, you're out of a job and no longer productive. All too often, the game within the IC has been numbers, and reporting for the sake of reporting.
#13
The acceptable losses stratagem is understandable in certain cases like the bombing of England during the war to hide radars effectiveness.
In cases like this I have a hard time distinguishing betwee a valid intelligence reason and the prevailing PC narrative about the RoP and the politics of the left.
How many losses are acceptable to maintain a tenuous and possibly not unique lead to ....whom?
In which The Guardian's opinionisto (he is male), described as "a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group" waxes eloquent (like the New York Times, The Guardian demands eloquence) on that newspaper's twin hates: America and Joooooooos.
[Dawn] REGARDLESS of its success, for several years the army saw the defence of the country's territorial integrity as its primary job and didn't see itself as the guardian of its 'ideology'.
Even then a succession of military leaders demonstrated so much commitment to safeguarding the country's at best loosely defined 'ideological frontiers' that they may have done so at the expense of the territorial integrity and illusory sovereignty of the country.
Military ruler Gen Yahya Khan's information minister, the reputedly pro-Jamaat-e-Islami
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
04/28/2013 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#2
5 as well. I credit Rantburg U, but blame my short attention spa...Squirrel!
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/28/2013 11:47 Comments ||
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#3
"One of the worlds deadliest terrorist events was the 9/11 attack in New York, executed by Al Qaeda. But that was not the groups first successful attack on the US. What was?"
I answered "1993s World Trade Center bombing"
I for some reason thought that sheik was AlQ linked. Was he?
#4
I thought I knew my terrorism pretty well but I missed 8 also.
Perhaps it is because we don't talk much about the IRA or Sein Fein on this site anymore?
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
04/28/2013 12:38 Comments ||
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#5
I go to the quiz and it's talking about the Sicarii as one of the 'very first terrorist groups.'
They picked them so they could go with "See? The Juice _invented_ it! Haha! See?"
I suddenly don't want to see the rest of the list; I want to say "$%#K these assholes with a rusty antimatter chainsaw" and close the window, but I guess I'll go on and see how bad it is.
I guess they're counting the Cole as being 'successful' and the first WTC bombing (and the various embassy bombings in Africa) as not. In short, they're ignorant but they're the lecturers.
It's their job to ask the questions and our job to answer them. that's why Wosshisname Akin is newsworthy but some asshole doctor killing black women in Philadelphia isn't.
I wanna grab them by their throats and shout "the bombers didn't learn this shit in a madrassa, they learned this shit from you."
#7
We've become as a civilization the spiritual equivalent of Dr. Jenny McCarthy, who goes around telling the parents of autistic kids they were bad parents who caused the situation by vaccinating them.
The Tsarnaevs were never taught a foundation, a base. Not in the FSU and not here. So when Al Qaeda (which means 'foundation' and 'base') comes around to teach theirs, they don't have an immune system to deal with the situation.
#11
The USS Cole was not the first in part since the Embassy bombings in 1998 preceded that event and earlier there was Somali and 1993 World Trade Center which was mainly Ramzi Yousef's bomb and he was KSM's cousin (but back them it wasn't called al-qaeda.
Posted by: Jack Salami ||
04/28/2013 17:02 Comments ||
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#12
Some further thoughts: The FSU doesn't really have as good a mental vaccination program, but they have (for instance) Kadyrov who will allegedly extrajudicially kill your family if they're in Chechnya and you do something like this in Russia.
Also, we're killing people extrajudicially in Pakistan but we turn around and say there's no such thing as the networks/cells/etc and they're all lone wolves.
That we have to kill because the tooth fairy told us, apparently. Or maybe the Psi Corps.
Posted by: Bangkok Billy ||
04/28/2013 17:51 Comments ||
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#14
Six wrong but it was multiple choice. I made some good guesses. If you'd asked me to fill in the blanks it would have been ugly. Thanks to Rantburg for many of the ones that I really knew.
The one thing that really surprised me is that the IRA was never listed as a terrorist organization. Did the Kennedys have anything to do with that?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/28/2013 17:58 Comments ||
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#15
The first well known terrorist in history might well have been Catilina. At least he was perceived and treated so in ancient Rome.
A century before the sicarii
Posted by: European Conservative ||
04/28/2013 22:06 Comments ||
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#16
There were also the Cilician Pirates, and I'm surprised noone from Syracuse makes the grade.
#17
I was going to write a really big rant, but I'm reconsidering given the stuff I've been hearing about the wiretaps of Mama Tsarnaeva's conversations with her brood. I may have to take back some of what I said if what they're hinting at turns out to be true.
#1
Goff is, perhaps all unconsciously, communicating an idea that Ivy grads preferably Ivy law school grads are the people who are entitled to power.
As the thousands of students who took on thousands of dollars of debt found out when they graduated.
#2
Thus illustrating a key political law (it has a name, I just don't know it):
"Those who advocate central planning always, always envision themselves as the central planners."
The Ivy League grads expect to become apparatchiks and, in time, full-fledged members of the nomenklatura. They would never advocate for a system that would leave them outside of the power structure. Capitalism, in which anyone can move themselves up, is way too chancy and therefore must be pushed aside.
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/28/2013 11:37 Comments ||
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#3
Ahhh, self esteem gone rabid. My brother the prosecutor has beaten in court EVERY 'Ivy League' Law School graduate (60+) he has ever faced in both criminal and civil litigation and has fired more than a few for laziness and incompetence. One actually appealed his termination on the grounds that he graduated from Harvard Law and was fired by a lesser law school graduate with predictable rsults. Harvard Law now works for the DoJ in DC!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
In the last two weeks, we've watched the spectacle of Obamacare's main author, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., call the law's implementation a "train wreck" just before he dashed for the exits by announcing his retirement from the Senate. A few days later, the country was outraged to learn that members of Congress were holding confidential talks to exempt themselves and their staffs from provisions of the law. Senate Democrats also made clear at the White House this week that they're worried about Obamacare's potential to wreck their chances in the 2014 congressional elections.
