Due to the arrogance of the mayor (fuhrer) and city council of Round Rock, a boycott of local restaurants is in order. I feel quite comfortable in this boycott, as there are no cuisines represented in Round Rock that are not represented in Austin, hence there's no real risk of deprivation. However, Austin is also somewhat of a people's republic, and hell-bent on turning the Capital of Texas into a disease-riddled economic wasteland, so I am supporting Austin purely out of a desire to not support Round Rock. C'est la vie. Life is full of difficult choices.
Why hasn't that helmet-head retreated to Jackson county yet?
I guess at some level I've always known he was a closet Democrat, but only now has it become crystal clear. He is a Democratic operative sent to infiltrate the Republican party in an attempt to destroy it...
"In our opinion, "Chester" was at his best back when he was a cheerleader at Ol' Miss, and it has been downhill ever since. Lott has a long history of pandering to the Demos. To be generous, Lott is a liability for the Republican Party and has no place in the leadership of the Republican renaissance. Given his pantywaist record of leadership, if the Democrats had a lick of sense, they would do everything they can do to keep Lott right where he is.
"
"Regardless, Trent Lott only does two things well, freeze-dry his hair and say stupid things. He mishandled impeachment, mishandled the 1998 elections, mishandled power-sharing with the Democrats after the 2000 election and mishandled Jim Jeffords straight into the Democratic Party.
One reason so many conservatives are denouncing Lott is that he's never given conservatives much reason to trust him or care about him. He's a deal-cutter who seems to stand for nothing except massive amounts of pork to his home state and, occasionally, sticking up for Jim Crow.
Already, many conservatives assume that Tom Daschle's muted support for Lott was paid for with some political concession. If incoming House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (or other Southerners like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey et al) made a similar gaffe, conservatives would have bled in defense of the guy -- not only because he isn't racist, but because Delay stands for more than process and pork. But while DeLay stands for principle, Lott stands for little. And what he does stand for, we don't need.
"
Perhaps his little comment is more of the same meaningless drivel, from a career politician who is no stranger to drivel, or perhaps it is what everyone says it is. The fact that his utterance at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party was actually a repeat performance of the same comment at Strom's 80th birthday party lends some credibility to the idea that Senator Lott supports state-enforced segregation. This would put him in the same category as many of the people who are now criticizing him, such as Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who share the belief that the law should not be colorblind. Whatever Sen. Lott's beliefs, he should take this opportunity to resign. Someone who has been in office as long as he has should be able to speak exclusively in non-controversial soundbytes. But the real reason he should resign is because he is just like a Democrat, and not too terribly far removed from an ultra-liberal Democrat. His little birthday speech lends credence to his Democrat (or Dixiecrat) tendencies. While he may be (usually) better spoken, and there's no question that he has better hair, he is still a big-government Beltway politician, completely out of touch with his constituents and quite possibly with reality in general. He should take one for his former team, the Republican party, and go back to Jackson county.
8:48 PM
Monday, December 09, 2002 From the People's Republic of San Francisco
The following are the most offensive excerpts from a highly offensive and idiotic commentary. Such inability to think rationally would be disappointing even coming from a particularly obnoxious toddler, but I shudder to think this little diatribe was actually penned by an adult.
"Once admired as a laboratory for managed health care, California -- always the nation's trendsetter -- now confronts a health-care system on the verge of collapse -- not only for the poor, but for the middle class and wealthy as well."
Since the wise and venerable social engineers of California have now conceded that their little managed care experiment is a gross failure, while costing countless lives and obscene amounts of ill-gotten monies, are these same compassionate individuals now going to admit they didn't think things through, and stop meddling with people's lives and health? Of course not! They must unleash another harebrained scheme, but this time, they must think BIGGER. Naturally, socialized medicine is the proposed solution. Read on.
"If you're among the 6 million uninsured Californians, you already know that getting medical attention is a nightmare. In Los Angeles, where the number of uninsured residents is soaring, the county's public clinics and hospitals are nearly bankrupt. Emergency rooms are so overcrowded they turn away 40 percent of incoming ambulances.
Finding a doctor is the new nightmare faced by California's working families "blessed" with medical insurance. Forty-two percent of California's private doctors -- deeply dissatisfied with inadequate fees, meddlesome interventions in medical decisions and an avalanche of paperwork -- are now unwilling to accept new HMO patients. Meanwhile, we who have health coverage are paying more for health plans that change with infuriating regularity, forcing us to find, once again, a new doctor. "
Is Ms. Rosen actually suggesting these problems would be fixed by socializing medicine? The problem with medicine today is that it is becoming increasingly socialized, with patients having fewer choices and physicians answering to government regulators or insurers rather than patients. Will California's private physicians be willing to even continue practicing medicine under "universal coverage"? Inadequate fees, meddlesome interventions, and avalanches of paperwork are inextricably intertwined with anything government is involved with. What type of coercion will the Golden State use to prevent physicians and other skilled healthcare workers from finding other uses for their time?
"One of the dirty little secrets of our free-market health system is that most private hospitals have adopted the same just-in-time inventory system used by manufacturers who compete in the global economy. This means there are just enough intensive care unit (ICU) beds for an average Tuesday morning. But a dangerous shortage exists on New Year's Eve and heaven help us if an epidemic breaks out or an earthquake strikes."
And this would change if government took over? Has Ms. Rosen ever been to a Post Office during the holiday season, or on a Monday, for that matter? Or to a Department of Motor Vehicles? Government is absolutely unabashedly useless when it comes to properly allocating resources and anticipating demand.
And now for the really good part:
"But how can a budget-strapped California afford the estimated $15 billion it would cost to insure all residents? Clearly, the state cannot do it alone. It's a national problem. But the right question is, how dare we not provide medical care -- embraced by other industrialized nations as a basic human right -- to everyone in our society? "
It really determines how loosely you define medical care. Sure, low-quality, overpriced, health-threatening medical care is provided to all, but is that really a good thing? The poor are no better off under such a system, as they would still be forced into the same government-run clinics. Furthermore, the poor would have their chances of leaving poverty significantly reduced, due to overtaxation of people that might otherwise be able to provide poor people with meaningful work. The middle class would see the quality of their healthcare decline, but be powerless to do anything about it. The approximately 5% of Americans considered rich might fare better, as they'd be able to bribe physicians to care for them privately, but even the ultra-rich would suffer from the deterioration of large hospital equipment that no individual physician would have, as well as from the abrupt halt in medical research and innovation.
I find it difficult to stomach the fact that Ms. Rosen is obviously aware of socialized medicine in other countries, yet still thinks it's a good idea. Do not read any further without reading this article first.
A good example of socialized medicine at its finest, and perhaps the reason one cannot walk down the halls of a major US hospital without seeing wealthy foreign patients, who for some reason choose to come here .
"We are a wealthy nation. But we feel poor because politicians in Washington have transferred the nation's wealth to the rich and poured $429 billion into a ballooning defense budget. End tax cuts for the very wealthy, resurrect the estate tax, return the country to the progressive tax system of the 1950s and we could afford universal health care. A single-payer system, moreover, would end the obscene salaries paid to CEOs of medical insurance companies that extract huge profits by underserving patients and underpaying doctors. The billions saved could be used for the delivery of health services."
1. Only an idiot could look at the numbers (which I will provide in a later posting) and believe that the nation's wealth has been "transferred" to the rich. Perhaps someone could explain the mechanism by which politicians have done this.
2. The "very wealthy" are taxed at a significantly higher rate than those who are not so "very wealthy." These few individuals are very much in need of tax relief, but are still paying far more than their fair share of the tax burden.
3. The obscene salaries paid to medical insurance executives are a direct result of meddling by CA liberals and their comrades elsewhere. The free market would not pay undeserving salaries to anyone for any significant amount of time. Hatred of CEOs should not be used as justification for destroying Americans' health.
4. Defense is one of the very few legitimate functions of the federal government. It is the only thing the federal government should consistently spend huge sums on. The federal government has no constitutional authority to provide health services. Furthermore, the federal government has a long track record of destroying that which it swoops in to "save."
"As we decide, the whole nation is watching."
If I had the conscience of a left-wing social engineer/do-gooder, I might advocate CA's (and only CA's!) foray into socialized medicine, because the resulting unmitigated failure would serve as an example to the rest of the country on what not to do. However, I cannot advocate mass-maiming and murder disguised as caring. So I guess I wouldn't make a very good Communist.
