Category: News

Cradle-to-grave health insurance becomes more cost effective, yea, efficient, the closer the grave is to the cradle.

Build that into political law at your own risk.

Just kidding! If you’re building the laws, you have special exemptions.

Chances that President Obama will heed one of his most beloved senior advisors and give out a brand new house to everyone in the audience today in Mesa, Arizona: 1 in 2000.

It would ensure enthusiastic, bipartisan crowds (including a couple of Republican governors who might need somewhere to live after their next election) at all his stumps and it would keep the wife of a Republican state legislature from upstaging him again. Win-win!

From a Washington Times article entitled "‘Doom’ talk scored as ‘not presidential’", we have a former "senior aide" to George W. Bush showing that Republican professional political parasites can look like twits:

Brad Blakeman, a senior aide to Mr. Bush from 2001 to 2004, said the new president’s language is immature.

“It’s not presidential. An American leader needs to be hopeful and optimistic – and truthful. Everything he says is parsed; everything he says is searched for deep meaning. When he goes to ‘DefCon 5’ on the economy and says that we’re on the brink of catastrophe, it’s absolutely insane.”

As anyone whose life was changed by the 1983 film WarGames can tell you, the DEFCON scale goes from 5, the lowest which is used during normal peacetime conditions, to 1, which means the mountain is closed, brother.

Maybe professional political parasites should really stay away from the military talk since they don’t teach that so well at the Kennedy School of Government.

That is David Axelrod’s wife and kid on the cover of Parade magazine this week.

Congress has passed the new, $787 billion dollar stimulus bill.

Anyone else remember how, in the ancient history of a half decade, a $250 billion dollar transportation bill was a big deal?

Then came TARP at $700 billion (essentially, a number the then-Treasury Secretary made up. Now we have $787 billion.

Thus, the new floor is set. Next time, Congress will have to pass something even bigger. Which they probably will. And anything less than $787 billion dollars will seem as though Congress isn’t trying harder.

(At least one of these links seen on The Anchoress, where she’s gloomier than I am.)

Also read this for a summary of some of the things in the bill. At 1000 pages, nobody really knows what all is in it. Some lobbyists no doubt know the parts they wrote, but no one knows what is in the whole thing.

The two most e-mailed stories yesterday from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Click for full size

1. St. Louis Zoo elephant has deadly herpes strain
2. St. Louis keeps No. 1 for two STDs

Good:

• Bill increasing penalties for obscure governance.
• Midwives legalized.
• Bill making simultaneous legislative position and political consultancy business illegal.

Bad:

• Bill to allow students who don’t graduate chance to participate in graduation if they’re disabled. The disabled have more legal rights than the enabled, do they not? As a bonus, this bill has a girl’s name attached to it. A MfBJN rule of thumb: if a bill has a child’s name on it, it is a bad law rushed into the books for sentimental reasons.

AP helpfully kicks Bush again: Bush overpaid banks in bailout, watchdog says.

So, will Obama be at fault when the new stimulus plans, or will it be the dark nature of humanity rejecting or sinning against the perfection of Porktopia?

More relying on state health care programs: Growing enrollment poses funding challenges:

Enrollment in state health care programs such as BadgerCare Plus has increased by about 238,000 people – or 35% – in the past six years and is expected to rise as the economy continues to struggle.

Medicaid programs provide some level of health care to about 1 in 6 Wisconsin residents.

The state-federal program provides care to low-income families with children younger than 21, and to people who are elderly, or disabled and impoverished. It is one of the biggest programs in state government.

Enrollment reached 926,600 people last month, up from 688,500 in January 2003, when Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle took office.

How to fund the $5 billion-a-year program – which faces a deficit of about $1.4 billion through the next two-year budget – is one of the biggest long-term questions looming for the state.

Economics, she is a harsh mistress, is she not?

Allow me to propose the solution Wisconsin, and the United States, will pursue anyway: Legislative Magick. Don’t ask how it works; unless your a legislator/magician 14th/13th level, you wouldn’t understand.

It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD world. Or it would be, if only mutual destruction between two opponents in a nuclear war was assured. Also, if both opponents were rational. In our new world, neither is a given.

North Korea Scraps Military Accords With South Korea:

North Korea said it is scrapping all military and political agreements with South Korea, accusing the government in Seoul of pushing inter-Korean relations to “the brink of war.”

“All the agreed points concerning the issue of putting an end to the political and military confrontation between the north and south will be nullified,” the reunification committee in Pyongyang said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency today.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Kim Jong Il’s regime threatened “strong military steps” in response to South Korea’s confrontational policies and about two months after North Korea imposed border restrictions with South Korea.

The regime has repeatedly called South Korean President Lee Myung Bak a “traitor” and a “sycophant to the U.S.” It has demanded South Korea stop civic groups from launching balloons loaded with so-called propaganda leaflets criticizing Kim.

Sounds like a good on-the-job learning opportunity for President Obama, and perhaps a good chance for Hillary Clinton to dance and sip champagne with Kim Jong Il. No preconditions.

(Link seen on Ed Driscoll. Well, his site. Not literally on him.)

More bicyclist violence:

Three people were critically injured when a bicyclist rode by and opened fire, Kansas City police said.

How soon until we can just inter the two-wheeled menaces?

OPINION SHAPER: Health-care industry better as private enterprise

UPDATE: Another article lost to time.

Consider it a sequel of sorts to this post, but KSDK reports, with a basic understanding of the possessive form of it:

Metro could eliminate 28 of it’s 60 existing MetroBus routes. The transit company has listed 22 routes on it’s website that may be eliminated next spring.

The second phase of likely cuts, including all service outside Interstate 270, will take place in the summer of 2010.

What does that really mean?

We’ll have to vote down the tax increase that we already voted down in November on the Spring ballot and maybe one more time before Metro does whatever it deems necessary, noting that cutting highly paid consultants or senior admin staff won’t be necessary.

A good tax proposal doesn’t stay defeated for long:

The tax would finance an $80 million system which would allow members of police, fire and other emergency service agencies to talk to each other. The tax would raise about $15 million a year, Tim Fischesser, executive director of the St. Louis County Municipal League, estimated today. Currently, the county has a patchwork of radio systems using different frequencies. Often personnel from different agencies at an emergency site cannot talk to each other by radio.

On Nov. 4, voters defeated a 1.85-cent county use tax that included money for the radio system. The communications commission made its request for the 0.1-cent sales tax on Nov. 21. The county’s Blue Ribbon Commission on facilities needs discussed it this morning.

The shamble of bureaucracies is only slowed by the will of the people.

Commentary in the Washington Times entitled “Nostradamus Redux“:

Mr. Celente’s accurate forecasts include the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the 1997 Asian currency crash, the 2007 subprime mortgage scandal that he said would soon engulf the world at a time when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a macroeconomist and expert on the Great Depression, told us, “the worst is behind us.” In November 2007, Mr. Celente also told UPI a massive devaluation of the dollar was coming and that some Wall Street giants were headed for total collapse. He called it “The Panic of 2008.”

“Worse than the Great Depression,” Mr. Celente opined. Beginning with a sharp drop in standards of living, and continuing with an angry urban underclass that threatens a social order that allowed the mega-rich to continue living behind gated communities with summer escapades to luxurious homes on the French and Italian Rivieras or to bigger and better and more expensive boats from year to year.

This time, Mr. Celente’s Trends Research Institute, which the Los Angeles Times described as the Standard & Poor’s of pop culture, can see a tax rebellion in America by 2012, food riots, squatter rebellions, job marches and a culture that puts a higher premium on food on the table than gifts under the Christmas tree.

I really ought to stop talking about loading up on guns and liquor and start doing it.

Speaks on the economy:

(Link seen on Hot Air.)

You put money on the Iran/Israeli conflict as the next nuclear wars? Pakistan/India’s odds are increasing even as we speak.

MUMBAI DAY 3
Mumbai Attacks Highlight the Cancer That Is Pakistan