Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their jobs done.
Peter Drucker
Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act Clears House 228-196: Thumbs UP!
The House, on a largely party-line vote (a half-dozen members of each party voted the other way), passed the most significant abortion reform legislation in decades, with a 20-week ban, basically a point scientists agree by which the preborn child feels pain. Congresswoman Foxx (R-NC) delivers a particularly poignant statement below. It is unlikely that the Senate controlled by pro-abortion choice Democrats would ever allow a vote, the President whom blocked the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act would almost surely veto it if it did pass, and there are more than enough Democrats in either chamber to sustain the veto. At minimum, it does put House Democrats on the line heading into next year's mid-term election.
You would think that in the aftermath of the Gosnell atrocities that Democrats would be ashamed of defending the cruel and unusual executions of babies with functioning nervous systems (including by dismemberment). But instead you get the same knee-jerk ideological feminist demagoguery. Here's a sample by that NY piece of work Jerrold Nadler: "“Here we go again .Every single year we have to go through the same nonsense with the same morally presumptuous, morally arrogant attitude that we know better. "We know better than women and their doctors. We know better about their health care. We know better about their moral choices in very personal decisions." Never mind that 20 weeks is well past the midpoint of an average pregnancy. We, of course, are not talking about personal surgery like a tubal ligation; this involves killing a baby functionally dependent on his or her mother. Babies after birth are still dependent on constant care; parents face obligations which constrain their freedom to do other things.
If you want to see real Statist intervention in private family planning decisions, consider China:
Recent reports from the Guangdong province show coercion in China’s infamous one-child policy is once again on the rise. Women in the southern city of Huizhou, which has a population of 4 million, are being targeted for sterilization. Those who have one child are being forced to wear IUDs. Those who have two children are subject to tubal ligation. Those who bear an “illegal” child are being denied all government services. This means life without access to schools, hospitals, retirement benefits, etc.
Ask Me If I Trust Obama's Judgment on Anything...
Politics make for strange bedfellows. Consider the fact that Al Qaeda affiliates were or are linked to the US/Obama-backed Libya and Syrian resistance movements respectively. So here's Obama at his elitist, condescending best explaining a mere journalist like Charlie Rose isn't qualified to question his seat-of-the-pants, convoluted, red line drawing policy on Syria:
What I’m saying is, that if you haven’t been in the Situation Room, poring through intelligence and meeting directly with our military folks and asking, what are all our options, and examining what are all the consequences, and understanding that for example, if you set up a no-fly zone, that you may not be actually solving the problem on the zone," he said. "Or if you set up a humanitarian corridor, are you in fact committed not only to stopping aircraft from going that corridor, but also missiles? And if so, does that mean that you then have to take out the armaments in Damascus and are you prepared then to bomb Damascus? And what happens if there’s civilian casualties. And have we mapped all of the chemical weapons facilities inside of Syria to make sure that we don’t drop a bomb on a chemical weapons facility that ends up then dispersing chemical weapons and killing civilians, which is exactly what we’re trying to prevent. Unless you’ve been involved in those conversations, then it’s kind of hard for you to understand that the complexity of the situation and how we have to not rush into one more war in the Middle East. And we've got --Methinks we have another narcissistic watch moment: Charlie, the world is complex. Don't ask me direct questions about foreign policy because there are no simple answers. Watch me core dump a whole bunch of unnecessary details and dazzle you with my super-intelligence to cope with it all.
Cut the crap, Obama; it's so damn predictable. I'm sick and tired of your defensiveness, your incessant excuses and explanations. You should expect tough questions; it comes with the job. Filibustering an interview with constant whining about how hard your job is, to paraphrase Shania Twain, doesn't impress me much. If you're not up to the job, resign.
The Romney Massachusetts Health Care "Reform"
I think as a matter of politics Romney's reforms were tactically brilliant, dealing with a legislature nearly 90% Democrat, facing a threatened Bush Administration cutoff of certain Medicaid funding which would blow the state budget wide open. Certainly Romney's solution is vastly superior to the Statist single-payer or public option solution progressives sought. Romney did argue during last year's campaign his reforms wouldn't necessarily work for other states, many of which, say, Texas, have a larger percentage of uninsured. But in reality Romney did promote his plan as a model for reform in other states.
Avik Roy has written a good piece here, explaining how Massachusetts had all but killed the individual healh insurance market in a 1996 "reform" basically including community rating (i.e., younger insured pay about the same as older, although older policyholders have higher expenses), guaranteed issue/preexisting condition coverage, etc. This led to a vicious cycle of higher individual premiums, as people could defer coverage until they were sick and younger/healthier people balked at higher rates subsidizing the healthcare of other people. Whereas the RomneyCare mandate did alleviate some of the moral hazards introduced with the 1996 law, the ObamaCare regulated markets will essentially impose some of the same dysfunctional morally hazardous cost-shifting policies on more market-oriented states, resulting in higher premiums, less competition, etc.
Romney has sought to scapegoat his reform on so-called free loaders being a leading cost driver, but as Roy points out while uncompensated care has been reduced, state healthcare spending has tripled, and Massachusetts policies are among the costliest in the nation.
Now, granted, trying to repeal dysfunctional, market-distorting regulations through a heavily Democratic state legislature is easier said than done. But it boggles my mind how Democrats thought--hey, the solution to health care in America is to emulate the state where premium costs are among the highest in the nation and state healthcare expenditures have tripled. Anyone with reasonably decent analysis skills should start out asking whether bad public policy had contributed to or resulted in Romney's freeloader problem, whether the concept of insurance had been perverted by public policy that included ordinary health expenses instead of just catastrophic risks, whether regulations constituted barriers of entry to insurers, etc.
ObamaCare is a megalomaniac delusion and unsustainable. I think that just like all other government healthcare programs, costs will quickly blow way past budget.
Political Cartoon
Good spoof of Obama's tortuous legalistic hair-splitting
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| Courtesy of Robert Ariail and Townhall |
The Beatles, "P.S. I Love You"
