The left is all up in arms because Ted Cruz and his wife are Christians and that affects their world view. The BO spokesman response to some comments:
Thomas Jefferson envisioned a wall of separation between Church and State. Ted Cruz envisions that wall being torn down entirely. He’s not judging, he just thinks people who disagree are wrong and bad.
How many times have we listened to BO pontificate about how anyone questioning Climate Change, his give nukes to Iran deal, his "red line", his JV team, his "you can keep your healthcare ..." ... my fingers are tired ... were "wrong, bad, misguided, partisan, foolish, lying, racist, etc" ???
So the almighty BO stands up and judges everyone on the basis if his worshipful intellect or intestinal gas, that is a thing of beauty, but if anyone wants to use Judeao-Christian values that are thousands of years old and are the entire basis for Western civilization, THAT is somehow against a letter that Jefferson sent to a Baptist church!
At least they didn't try to claim it is in the Constitution, THAT would be RICH, considering that they have shredded that so bad it basically doesn't exist!
You may be thinking "Onion", but no, this is government reality.
A former Minnesota bar owner and manager are each being charged with a felony for running “Spotted Cow” beer out of Wisconsin and selling it at their restaurant, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday.
While there is humor to this story of beer-smuggling and a sense of state pride with New Glarus Brewery’s “Only in Wisconsin” sales stance, this is also a story of just how screwed up the alcohol wholesale market is. Since the repeal of prohibition most states have operated what is called a “Three-Tier Alcohol Distribution System.” Wisconsin is no different.
The REAL bottom line is "taxes and fees". The government makes A LOT of money from alcohol ... MN is #13 highest, WI is #40 ... bit of differential there!
I am a BIG believer in "States Rights" -- that one of the BIGGEST things our founders wanted to enable is the chance to have "50" (their number was less) separate laboratories of "what works and what doesn't" inside a very limited federal system.
SO ... I believe that states SHOULD be able to do different things. "Felony" sounds like wacko enforcement to me for CERTAIN ... make the punishment fit the crime. FINE them enough so it is cheaper for them to obey the law than not.
I believe states ought to have the right to regulate things like alcohol, drugs, commerce, etc in very different manners within their borders, and obviously, that means that there will be these kinds of issues. I consider that a reasonable price to pay to allow people to have choices beyond "leaving the country".
Oh, and BTW, you MIGHT look at that chart and assume liquor prices are cheaper in WI. You would not be wrong ... a case of Leinies runs like $13 a lot of places.
If you are not offended by the F word, and things that are "inappropriate" you might also check this out ... I'm embarrassed to find it funny, but it DOES have a good deal to say about WI. (you may want to enjoy it with a Brandy Old-Fashioned).
This is really big news in physics. Yet ANOTHER area that Einstein and his General Theory of Relativity have been proven right!
I like their little "story" that they introduce the detection with because unlike pseudo science like AGW, it puts this into context. Billions of years since the event, over 100 years in the making, false alarms, failures, big investments, and finally ...
Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again.
The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. Marco Drago, a thirty-two-year-old Italian postdoctoral student and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp—a faint whooping from low to high. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.
The biggest IMMEDIATE effect is just yet another confirmation of General Relativity as correct. The hope is that this is a new way of seeing the universe that we have now just barely established as "possible". Gravity waves are ripples in the actual fabric of the universe -- spacetime! All the other electromagnetic radiation -- light, radio, infrared, gamma, x-ray, etc travel through space. We now have a form of wave that might "illuminate" even dark matter.
We don't really know how gravity waves might be "used" -- but we now are pretty certain that they do exist! It MIGHT be that like telescopes, radio telescopes, etc gravity waves will in the future be one of the major ways that we observe the universe.
If we were still a nation that was able to understand enough to self-govern, this is a story that ALL ought read and at least have the tradeoffs explained. In a conservative or engineering universe, EVERYTHING has a cost, and there are ALWAYS tradeoffs. When you vote in socialism you give up your ability to have any control in trying to make life better for those you hold most dear -- in my case, my granddaughter, but you can pick your own. You "outsource" your power and responsibility.
In a "liberal" or utopian universe, "all things are possible" -- perfection is always one more program, tax, regulation, law or "blue ribbon committee" away. The only thing really holding up nirvana are those damned reactionary conservatives!
“It was painful,” said Dr. Yoram Unguru, an oncologist at the Children’s Hospital at Sinai in Baltimore and a faculty member at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. “We kept coming back to wow, we’ve got that tragic choice: two kids in front of you, you only have enough for one. How do you choose?”
The article makes it clear that we are ALREADY at "triage" for even critical drugs for children in medicine. We have regulated, "negotiated", "optimized", drug manufacture to the point where profit margins are razor thin (at best). Before the move to socialized medicine got it's first purchase in the US with the advent of Medicare in the '60s, the rest of the world could do socialized medicine and have the US as a "market driven backup". That backup is on life support at best now.
The canary is dead folks. (they used to use a canary in coal mines ... if the canary died, it was time to make like a priest and get the flock out of there!).
We have had AMPLE warnings on how socialized anything works. East / West Germany, USSR vs US, current Venezuela, current N vs S Korea. The US was the huge "backstop" that allowed Japan and Europe to go socialist without having to "go gulag". When "regulation" fails to produce what is required, shortages result, and there is no market operating anywhere, then the ONLY choice is "forced labor". The government must FORCE some company to produce the drug at some stated price (to start) ... but after a bit, why should they pay them anything? FORCE them to produce what has been declared as "required" by the centralized power. We KNOW how that "works" ... it doesn't.
When you see critical drugs being rationed for children HERE, then you have NO EXCUSE to not realize that the effects of socialism are not changed by some magic of being applied in this area of N America!
In recent years, shortages of all sorts of drugs — anesthetics, painkillers,antibiotics, cancer treatments — have become the new normal in American medicine. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists currently lists inadequate supplies of more than 150 drugs and therapeutics, for reasons ranging from manufacturing problems to federal safety crackdowns to drugmakers abandoning low-profit products. But while such shortages have periodically drawn attention, the rationing that results from them has been largely hidden from patients and the public.
The NY Times naturally LOVES socialism, they are not going to go ALL the way to making the connection for you, but that paragraph does pretty well. The next one adds a bit more ... "economic incentives" ... we are still more fascist than socialist, so those are still involved. Why not just FORCE them to produce what is required? That would get us to "real socialism", which is basically communism. Remember gas lines? Carter was going to "control the price" -- which naturally controls the SUPPLY as well!
Many drugs are made by only one manufacturer, so production or safety problems at a single plant can have big effects. For another company to begin making the products and getting them approved by regulators requires the right combination of manufacturing capabilities and economic incentives.
So, when socialism produces shortages, as it always does, then what is needed is "fairer / more expert / "enlightened" allocation of the now scarce resource. Oh, and they "advised" it ought to be "made public". Potentially, while there is still enough private pharmaceutical industry left to blame things on, that might be a political winner, but when the last vestige of that is gone and we all KNOW that it is the government making all these production / rationing decisions? Hillary's e-mails are WAY more "public" than that information will be then!
The effort, led by Dr. Unguru, the Baltimore oncologist, recommended that the drugs be rationed based on the ability to save lives or years of life, including curability of a child’s cancer and the importance of the drug in improving the chances. It also recommended that children participating in clinical research should not get priority over those who are not, because of concerns about coercing families into trials. The group also advised that allocation decisions be public.
"The banality of evil" rears it's head again -- THIS is how socialism works! "The vagaries of distribution" indeed! Profit is the price paid for supply meeting demand! Regulate that away and numbers coursing their way through an endless myriad of bureaucratic "clearing houses", "agencies", "offices" and "czars" are supposed to match supply to demand, but never do. Eventually, those "numbers" are people, and they are dispensed with using the same cold logic and pseudo "efficiency" as mere numbers.
The vagaries in distribution and inconsistencies in rationing have led to calls for change. Doctors and others have suggested the creation of a clearinghouse of scarce drugs and voluntary sharing to promote equitable access for patients. Others argue that there should be a registry of patients given nonstandard treatments so the results can be tracked.
Dr. Lurie, the federal health official in charge of emergency preparedness and response, said that the government was working to encourage hospitals to conserve and substitute drugs to avoid a crisis and trying to fill gaps in manufacturing. Steps taken by the Food and Drug Administration have also helped reduce the number of shortages, she said.
IF any Sanders supporters have read this far, I'm sure they are saying, "yeah, sure ... and "capitalism", "freedom", etc are PERFECT!
NO, THEY ARE NOT! That is precisely the point -- they admit that they are NOT PERFECT, but at least they don't institutionalize evil! They KNOW and admit that. The market doesn't have to "wait 4 years to make a change" and you get to "vote" (by buying and selling) typically many times a day!
David Brooks is a smart guy -- I've read a couple of his books, some of his articles are quite good. His world view is however left / statist / "liberal" / "progressive" ... whatever you want to call it.
From, "Ideas Have Consequences" -- "It is easy to be blind to the significance of a change because it is remote in time and abstract in character. Those who have not discovered that world view is the most important thing about a man, as about the men composing a culture, should consider the train of circumstances which have with perfect logic proceeded from this".
One of the more dangerous things of our current largely left wing media is using a "liberal in conservative clothing" as a "stalking horse". Brooks fills this role A LOT. He is on NPR weekly as the supposed "flip side" of EJ Dionne of the WaPo -- in reality, a classic case of covering "both the left and the FAR left"!
People are lulled to believe that they have heard a "reasonable conservative view", when actually they have heard another left wing view dressed up as being conservative.
Both the Vox article and the column are factually useless, but useful as an excellent example of just how deeply the left wing bias is embedded in our media. A sample ...
Despite his self-identification as a conservative, David Brooks has long been considered the Obama White House's favorite columnist, becoming a regular at off-the-record events and dinners. Even when he's criticized the administration he's stayed in its good graces. In 2009, when he criticized Obama's spending plans, the White House sent him a chart debunking his claims on which Obama himself wrote, "Dear Comrade Brooks."
So it's perhaps unsurprising to see Brooks return the favor in his column Tuesday, titled,"I Miss Obama." Brooks contrasts the president's restrained, cerebral demeanor (one of "good manners") with that of the 2016 presidential field and finds his potential successors lacking:
BO is no doubt well aware how useful it is to have someone well known nationally as a "conservative" as cover for his radicalism. Perhaps David will be signing on to BS (Bernie Sanders) soon and get over missing BO! Posted By Blogger to Moose Tracks at 2/10/2016 01:33:00 PM
NPR abuzz today with the evils of "Citizens United" ... Hillary, Bernie and Jeb have all come out saying it should be overturned. Of course Hillary and Jeb are two of the major beneficiaries of money made legal by the ruling ... as was BO.
It's the drunk being in favor of prohibition ... because, well, making stuff illegal is guaranteed to get rid of the problem! (see drugs)
Somehow, the left never seems to worry about money "going the other way". The "Chicago Way" (and the Mob way) is to "reward your friends and punish your enemies". This is why we were supposed to have LIMITED government, separation of powers and rule of law. Because when the government gets to be a huge player and is unregulated, "who watches the watchers"?
Well, if you have an R involved, the "adversarial press" -- but BS, Hilly, Sharpton and NPR are all on the same team!
Does anyone think Al is NOT "shopping the highest bidder" -- what will each of them promise him personally and "his people"? I suspect for 99% of people, that is like asking if he is breathing. OF COURSE he is seeing what he can get for himself and his "interests" -- a few of them are likely organizations that he has his fingers in the till of.
No concern at all -- this is just how things work in "The Party" and their media arm. Why would anyone care?
This will get a LOT less coverage than the "97% of Scientist agree" on AGW!
Surveys and Science are like "Lutherans and eelpout" .. Huh? If 100% of scientists think that space is expanding at a fixed rate (which they pretty much did) and data shows that it is expanding at an accelerating rate, then, until the next data, 100% of scientists were WRONG! Pretty much all of them thought that space was Static as well prior to Edwin Hubble showing it was expanding!
Science is driven by data, surveys are driven by opinion.
It's probably WORSE for AGW that what the survey shows. Experiments have now been done where you put the survey taker in a PET scanner which is pretty much a lie detector that actually works! Ask people a question like "Blacks are inherently better basketball players than whites", which 90%+ will answer NO!!! Because they have been socialized to KNOW that is what they SHOUD answer, but nearly all of them (including blacks) are LYING!
No doubt a goodly number of climate related scientists are NOT going to answer this one in the socially acceptable "wrong way" ... even though is was supposed to be anonymous, many could lose their jobs for being a "denier".
The electrical power exec at the meeting I was at this AM was VERY uncomfortable with AGW being questioned in the room, and made basically a "statement of faith" that "they had children, cared about the planet, and this was a settled area in the industry that was not useful to discuss!".
Well, actually he HATES HIM ... but in my book, that is a STRONG endorsement of the guy! If Bill Moyers hates your guts, you have to be a pretty decent sort.
I covered a little Moyers here ... he is a very noxious sanctimonious lefty that thinks BO isn't quite far enough left. He probably doesn't think BS is either ... I'm sure he would find a way to get left of MARX!
If you are a Christian, Moyers hates you. If you are a Christian and win a political office, you ought to be stamped out by any means possible!
Craves POWER? Dear God ... if Moyers had his way, I'd be suffering some medieval torture for questioning his eminence's holy writ!
I happened to be at a meeting this AM which had an electric power industry executive at it.
They pointed out:
They invested 10's of millions of dollars removing 90% of the emissions from their coal plants under the assurance that would suffice for decades. They borrowed money and set rates based on those promises. Now they are being told that is not good enough and they have to close the coal fired plants.
Every utility has to have a plan that shows how they can cover 110% of known peak demand (that is why new peaks are EXPENSIVE). 8% of solar capacity and 14% of wind capacity can be counted in that plan. So 22% renewable, 78% standard. Those coal plants MUST be replaced with natural gas turbines -- that is the ONLY way to keep the grid running.
Our grid is becoming more vulnerable. Less local generation, more power coming from longer and longer distances.
Solar doesn't work at night, it works less on cloudy days. The wind varies -- thus the 22%. Batteries are a LONG way from being an assist.
NPR was pretty dejected this AM about 5 members of the SCOTUS still not willing to go full dictatorial powers to the president. They feel it is a "national emergency" ... like a war ... this is the biggest problem of our time! No time to be hanging on tired old words in tired old documents, LET THE PRESIDENT ACT!
Why are nations pretty much required to end up as centrally run dictatorships without rule of law limiting government?
See the problem above on investment in "clean coal" and what happens when that investment is suddenly declared "not good enough" in a shorter time than was assured. Private business MUST make ENFORCEABLE contracts and make decisions on that basis! With rule of law, so must government -- but not now (at least not until a justice dies or they manage to turn one).
Why do we see reductions in investment, innovation and growth? How hard is it to see that maintaining any rule of law on this issue is one heartbeat away from being overturned?
The left cares NOTHING for "precedence" -- in fact they HATE IT! One SCOTUS justice dies, BO appoints another, and dictatorship wins on this issue!
Why would anyone invest in making existing energy sources cleaner or innovations that are "less than perfect" (whatever that is ... non-polluting, risk free, cheap, invisible, safe .... theoretical solutions can be VERY good!)
If we lived in a country with a written and REAL Constitution and separation of powers, we would not be having this discussion! ... but that is no longer where we live.
Ran into this in a waiting room -- sometimes it is good to see what good old bias and hatred for W looked like in the "good old days" of 2007, especially when we get to hear now how great a president BO really has been and how any "decent people" ought to be thinking they will miss him dearly! This article was MILD compared to MANY, but it is the ubiquity of throwing in a couple of gratuitous shots at poor old W when there was no earthly reason he had to be mentioned if the article was REALLY about "presidents in general".
To say nothing of the incumbent (W in 2007), of whom, perhaps, the less said the better.
Hardy har har.
Who will be on them? Why, Presidents, of course—all of them, in the order they served, scoundrels and heroes alike. Someday, like a bad penny, a George W. Bush dollar will turn up. Heads you lose.
What was the purpose of this column? Well, strangely, in 2008, the New Yorker was really sick of "presidents". Hmm ... Wonder if there was something more specific about that "sickness" ...
Here is the question thus raised: at this chastening juncture in our repub-lic’s history, wouldn’t everyone welcome a moratorium on Presidential glorifi-cation? Isn’t the United States a little too President-ridden, much as post-medieval Spain was a little too priest-ridden? Our capital city groans under the weight of obelisks, equestrian statues, and grandiose temples fit for the gods but devoted to the winners of Presidential elections. “Presidential historians” populate the greenrooms of our cable-news networks. Presidential suites sit atop Vegas hotels. Presidential libraries gobble up ever-growing swathes of urban and, as the unhappy faculty of Southern Methodist University recently learned, campus real estate. Time to throttle down.
Color me skeptical, but my "strong guess" is that when it comes to honoring BO, it will be time to "Throttle Up"! Can you even IMAGINE the New Yorker being concerned about the location or the cost of his presidential library? I REALLY think it ought to go at Cornell because there are only a couple of people that remember him being there -- won't it be great when only a couple of people remember having been president?
I don't have to listen to the slime-ball, I don't have to read what spews from his lips, but it is hard to un-see pictures. If Bill Cosby raped any women, at least they don't need to see him on TV all the time wagging his finger like the sanctimonious weasel Slick!
If I were better at video effects, I'd have Chuck Norris walk in, grab the finger, put "The Stain" on his knees and then just break it off ... show it to him and say "apology accepted".
For "realism", Chuck could disarm a couple SS guys on the way in and let them live because "they were just doing their duty -- but so was he!"
The wide ranging book by Antonio Damasio takes a shot at explaining the "there, there" of being human --- consciousness.
One of his definition shots is: "Consciousness as we commonly think of it, from it's basic levels to its most complex, is the unified mental pattern that brings together the object and the self".
Another is: "...the presence of you is the feeling of what happens when your being is modified by the act of apprehending something. The presence never quits, from the moment of awakening to the moment sleep begins. The presence must be there or there is no you."
We all pretty much echo SCOTUS Potter Stewart with the "I know it when I see it" relative to obscenity in his case, but relative to consciousness here. I'm fairly sure one of the marks of autism (which Damasio doesn't mention) is that many autistic people can't recognize others as conscious, and sometimes the consciousness of autistic people is compared to being possibly similar to that of some animals. (One of the people making this comparison was Temple Grandin, a PHD who is autistic ...)
He talks of two kinds of consciousness "core and extended". Core is "the feeling", extended is all your biography, knowledge, and creativity. Your "higher functions". The core consciousness seems to be largely a brain stem phenomenon heavily connected to your emotions and "body loop" (mental image of your body / connection to body).
I really like how he uses real known mental conditions to talk about specifically what brain injuries will affect core and extended consciousness and how. I believe in "spirit", and also believe that consciousness (especially core) is where "matter meets spirit". My personal view is that we will eventually find some "quantum biological effects", possibly in a specific area of the brain stem that are the link to the non-physical.
Back to the book ... "Life needs a boundary. I believe that life and consciousness , when they eventually appeared in evolution, were first and foremost about life, and the life urge within a boundary. To a great extent they still are."
"The life urge"? -- pretty close to "The Force" of Star Wars fame, or even "the animating spirit".
My reading seems to be getting feverish here, and I'm behind in blogging what I've read lately -- "the creative urge" seems to be driving me. Where might that come from? Same place as the "life urge" I'd guess, or as I'm also in Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra", perhaps "the will to power" has a similar origin?
"Time Reborn" was about figuring out "what's out there" ... but the "mechanism" (if you are a strict materialist) that we are using (running on?) to theorize, develop equations, run experiments, etc is human consciousness ... "the feeling of knowing" ... "the life urge".
Sit in a quiet place, Relax and take a couple deep breaths. Now, focus ONLY on your breathing -- gently. It's not a contest, there is no "right or wrong". You will likely have "intruding thoughts" -- you may actually get frustrated. What is getting in the way of YOU, and your attempt at simple relaxed focus on your breath is your mind -- your "ego". Your "busy brain" -- the Zen folks call it your monkey-brain.
My view is that the "you" that is observing your breathing is "core consciousness", and the distractions are coming from your "extended consciousness". I believe that the connection to the infinite is from your core consciousness -- and that the extended is what wants to take over the ship and convince you that you and everything "out there" is a bunch of "stuff" ... and so are you. If it can't succeed in convincing you, it will work very hard to distract.
I'm definitely of two minds on this issue! ;-)
It's a worthy book -- it is well reviewed and has a lot of secular accolades. I sometimes look at books like this and the "Time Reborn" book as a NY Street game of "hide the spirit" -- see, no spirit under this shell ... switch, switch ... oh, "life force"? "emergent"? "Principle of Sufficient Reason"? ... nah, "Pay no attention to that spirit behind the curtain"!
Mostly just posting to have these charts in one place for future reference.
This has been well covered in this Blog, but sometimes a little repetition is good, a little repetition is good ... Marco Rubio ;-)
Young Earth Creationists tend to put the age of the earth at 6-10K years.
Compared to them, our current warmists are like fruit flies compared to elephants! In order to reach their "scientific conclusions", they restrict their data to AT MOST 155-160 years (1860 to now), and in many cases MUCH less ... like "since 1979" for satellite data.
The linked article is short and has three excellent charts to give a little perspective. A scientist would take 160 years of climate data next to 100's of thousands of years ( I find the "billions" to be spurious, no real climate data available on those ranges) is far MORE laughable than your typical scientist likes to consider Young Earth Creation!
They want to show a "trend" on a couple hundred year scale when they have data from thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years to answer for?
Here is the last 10K years of climate data, in GENERAL it has been getting warmer, seas have been rising and C02 levels have been getting higher that whole time. That is what it means to be in one of the 5 "interglacials" in the last 500K years. If you wanted to point out something "scientific" rather than political, the fact that the peaks of warmth seem to be getting lower and the length of the cold periods getting longer MIGHT give a bit of a pause if you also looked at the 500K data.
The following chart is the last 500K data of Vostok data ... the fact that the last 10K shows that while it HAS been getting warmer since the "little ice age", we are only in a "warm period" relative to that cool period ... which is why "climate scientists" talk "avg temp vs baseline" ... the "baseline" is 1981 - 2010. (Gee, I wonder why they picked THAT?)
At least Young Earth Creationists COMPLETELY admit that they are acting with religion in mind -- but hey, at least it is an OLD religion! The Climate Faith is at best only been holding worship services since 1980!
Remember the "Vote No!" campaign on the marriage amendment in MN? We were assured over and over that "Nobody has any plans to make gay "marriage" legal in MN, that is simply a lie created by fearful and bigoted people".
They made gay "marriage" legal the year after the amendment failed. One of the advantages that evil has is that there are NO RESTRICTIONS on the methods you can use to win -- when there is no such thing as truth, what would a lie be?
Similarly, BOcare was "not socialized medicine", and "If you liked your healthcare, you could keep it". What it is is WEALTH TRANSFER!
Here we have a quote from this fine article:
As for the notion that voters can’t see that paying $1,000 in taxes beats paying $5,000 in health insurance premiums, it is an insult to the American people.
Note, this is AFTER those of us who managed to work long and hard to get some tiny chance of few years of a decent retirement have ALREADY suffered INCREASES in healthcare costs on the order of $5-$10K!!!! BOcare has already increased our out of pocket costs by 5-10 TIMES, although a lot of that is due to it sitting in accounts as "pre-spent". Having been or currently being a "maker" vs a "taker" in the US is like being a Christian in a country that recently went Islamic -- you are getting a lot of raw deals, but there isn't any choice, and it only looks to get worse in the future.
"American people" for Salon are the 50-60% of Americans that already pay at most $1K in taxes TOTAL. In fact, the bottom 40% of the country already gets more than HALF of their income FROM the government!
So where do we go from here?
Twenty years on, Hillary still sees the world through the rose-colored glasses of that ’90s consensus. Not Bernie. He sees that in 2016 rising tides don’t even lift most boats, that growth comes at a steep price when it comes at all, and that new technology cost more jobs than it creates. He understands that when jobs flow to countries with weak governments and low wages, the American middle class can’t get a raise. He sees that public-private partnership meant pay-to-play politics, and that the whole system runs not on innovation but corruption. My guess is the middle class sees what he sees and wants what he wants: a revolution. If he can continue to drive the debate, they may get one.
Ah, "Revolution" ... ah, to WHAT?
Well, the Reagan - 2006 growth wasn't good enough! The "consensus" in the '90s wasn't right. Technology isn't the answer. "Public-private partnership" doesn't work. SO??
Well, it would seem to me that the "only choice" that folks like Salon can see is complete Socialism ... or Fascism. Either government takeover of the means of production, or leave the capital ostensively in the hands of "private", but completely regulate it and 100% state what salaries, benefits, "profits", etc are. So much for "partnerships" -- it would seem that FORCE is the "only answer".
Why is it again that anyone is supposed to somehow "trust" the left? They avow no morals, they claim that truth does not even exist.
Pretty much everything in this country seems to be heading to be as fecund as a gay "marriage"!
I wrote on this back in 2013 ... we have a lot of people LEAVING the US. While the people entering tend to be poor with a high demand for public services, low education and a high risk for criminal activity, the ones leaving are the inverse -- wealthy, healthy, with a lot of skills.
But, they are being robbed by an entity called "The US Government", and it will tax them as long as they have citizenship -- they don't even have to live here.
So, they are renouncing their citizenship in record numbers.
One could call it "The BO effect" -- people that have an option are voting with their feet.
