On The Right Side
Page 24
And to make matters worse, you aren’t going to be able to blame the Bush/Cheney administration for all this anymore. People will just laugh at you. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.
Liberals Must Begin To Wake Up
One of the hard parts of traveling is finding the time to write my column. I have to admit, I’m a news junkie, and USA Today and some of the local papers just don’t cut it.
I was talking to our Tennessee real estate broker and asked him where I could find some New York papers and he just laughed. I wasn’t expecting that response, and it made me think twice about relocating in Winchester.
Anyway, this column will touch on a variety of topics. First up, the Senate confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor.
Everyone knows she will be confirmed. The script went exactly as planned. Sonia ran away from the tough questions, was evasive on the others, and the senators strutted and preened for the cameras.
I was looking forward to seeing Al Franken look foolish, and I wasn’t disappointed. The failed host of the failed liberal talk station, Air America Radio, had a deep intellectual discussion with the judge about Perry Mason. Way to go Al. Way to go Minnesota.
Finally, there was Arlen Specter. What an embarrassment! He stuttered, stammered and was pretty much incoherent during his time of questioning. I’m so glad he finally, officially, switched parties.
The top five oldest senators are Democrats, with the young Arlen No. 5 at 79. Now, the age is ok, but don’t these guys have anything else to do besides acting foolishly?
Robert Byrd, the undistinguished senator from West Virginia and past Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops (where do these clowns come up with these titles?) of the KKK, leads everyone in age, 91, and incompetence.
Even scarier is the fact that as president pro tempore of the Senate, he is third in line of presidential succession. That makes an all-star succession lineup of Biden, Pelosi and Byrd, in that order, to replace Obama if anything happens to him.
Anyway, Sonia will be confirmed, and I hope she will be less left-of-center than David Souter was. If there is anything positive to result from these proceedings, I guess that’s the best I can come up with.
Now, when are the worshipers of Barack “The Pied Piper” Obama going to admit they made a mistake? All I want his followers to do is question his lies, distortions and dangerous policies.
You simply cannot justify his “cap and trade” boondoggle where the increased taxes are going to fall directly on the 95 percent of working families he promised would not see a penny in new taxes under his reign.
In addition to further increasing unemployment and significantly decreasing economic output, he is placing an annual burden of between $700 and $2,200 on these families.
How can you justify the $787 billion stimulus bill that is stimulating nothing but the special interests that supported him? $400 billion of the package was classified as pure pork, $200 billion went to special interests, and only 7.7 percent has been expended.
Remember how important it was to rush this bill through Congress? People, the economy will recover from the recession as it has with all previous ones. If anything, the stimulus package is seriously slowing this from happening.
How can you fans justify the socialized health care proposal that is going to further bankrupt the country with its $1.5 trillion cost (Congressional Budget Office)? He is trying desperately to get this farce through Congress before the 2010 congressional campaigns begin, hoping that people will forget how their congressperson voted. Not gonna happen.
And finally, please explain to me your silence relating to Obama’s$3.6 trillion
fiscal 2010 budget that will result in an unheard of $1.26 trillion deficit.
You libs and Dems have got to stop following this failure like lemmings following each other off the cliff. You can’t act like parrots and keep repeating “it’s Bush’s fault” over and over again.
Sorry guys, people with common sense don’t buy that blather anymore. Just because Barack keeps repeating this mantra doesn’t mean you have to behave like zombies and follow along.
I want to thank all those who responded to my column of four weeks ago. It was the most popular column since I began writing. As usual, I got some crazies who responded, but they were by far the minority (121 to 6).
I even had one delusional fellow who simply made up his own facts. His best one was that Barack still had a 70 percent approval rating! I think his research is limited to the White House press releases. All the independent polls have Barack with a 51 percent to 57 percent approval rating, and slipping daily.
Thank heavens for the independent voters. They will (if they haven’t already)
see the light.
Politicians Should Lead By Example
It’s hard to follow what is happening in the U.S. being here in Romania, but it is quite easy to see that politicians are having a heck of a time trying to sell the idea of “Obamacare” to their constituents.
They have no idea what is even in the bill since they haven’t read it. Whenever asked a specific question, they mumble something incoherent and try to move to another topic as quickly as possible.
Many of those people who have read it say we should be scared of what the bill includes. And these same politicians are going to vote on something representing one- sixth of our economy and affecting nearly every U.S. citizen? It might have worked with the cap and trade bamboozle, but not this time.
Obama himself is in full campaign mode, armed with his teleprompter, charm and rhetorical excesses, and telling everyone that opponents of the bill are lying and using scare tactics to defeat his proposal.
Excuse me, Barack. What is a pathological liar doing calling other people liars? Your image comes to mind when that old saying, “you can tell he’s lying whenever his lips are moving” is used.
Scare tactics being unfairly used? Excuse me once again, Barack. You have used scare tactics (the Chicken Little, sky-is-falling strategy) to get legislation passed ever since you entered office.
Sorry, Obama, you’re like the little shepherd boy who cried wolf once too often. More and more people every day are simply beginning to ignore you. It’s too bad you didn’t show your true colors while you were still running for office. The country wouldn’t be in anywhere near the perilous position you have put us in.
Ok Barack, lead by example.Will you be the first to sign up for your
government run (don’t even bother to try to label it anything else) health care plan?
Will you promise not to receive special treatment and allow your loved ones to jump to the front of the line in an emergency? If not, explain to me why your loved ones are any more important than mine? How about you Kennedy, Kerry, Byrd, Dodd, Pelosi? I pose the same question to all of you. We all know you’ll “think about it” or ignore the question altogether. We know your answer and your actions will be poles apart.
It might be time for normal citizens to take off their gloves and get serious. I don’t really care how big some people want our government to become. Neither do I care how much of a nanny state some want. There are certain lines a government should not step over. One of those lines is determining who gets medical treatment and who doesn’t.
Another is having them put a value on our economic worth. And the final line is allowing politicians and bureaucrats determine who will live and who will die.
Does the government really think that I, and millions of others like me, will stand idly by and allow you to prevent my wife or my sons from receiving a medicine or a procedure that exists and that would prolong their lives? It just isn’t going to happen.
There most certainly will be serious consequences as a result. Do some of you people want to have your parents, grandparents, people who have lived a long and honest, law-abiding life, be told that they aren’t worth the cost of being kept alive? Think about it from a personal perspective before you answer.
Personally, I would consider it to be the same
as an attack on the lives of my loved ones. How would you expect me, or others to respond?
I think it is time for these elitist politicians, on both sides of the aisle, to realize that we citizens (and not illegal aliens) are important more than just at re-election time.
We are the most important people in their political careers all of the time. They were elected to speak and act on our behalf, not to think they know better than we do about what is best or be swayed (paid?) by special interests when they go against what the majority of their constituents want.
Be very careful Mr. Politician, Mr. Bureaucrat, Mr. Obama. There are political consequences.
Taxes OK If They Are Used Well
Radu Cristea is a very good Romanian friend from Cluj-Napoca and has been indispensable in the work I am doing there. It would have been almost impossible for me to have accomplished anything without his advice and unselfish assistance.
Radu is a successful entrepreneur and small businessman and has his finger on the pulse of everyday Romanian life
I asked him to write something for me that reflects his opinion on taxes and public health care in his country. After making massive cuts to his original article, this is what he came up with. I hope you enjoy it.
I’m not upset for paying taxes. I don’t have a problem that taxation is so high for small businesses – even though small and medium sized companies are the engine that moves the economy forward.
I mean, after all, we do need a strong national revenue. If a company is taxed, it pays a part of its income or profits to the government so the government can pay for public services such as education, health care, military and police.
Paying all these taxes would not bother me at all if the money would go to the right places, where it’s needed the most. However, finding out about overpriced acquisitions for government contracts delivered to certain politicians through companies owned by their wives, sons or relatives deeply disturbs me.
Seeing the poor quality of the centralized health care system and the low remuneration that doctors get also deeply disturbs me. I see the government wasting money like crazy, and this drives me nuts.
Now, as I said, the government collects taxes and then distributes the funds to all public services, including health care. The Romanian health care system has been in existence since 1700, and it has had many an unsung hero since. During the 1828 plague in Bucharest, 21 out of 26 died of plague whilst administering treatment for the disease.
Today, I can frankly say that the health care system is ill, very ill, and will probably die soon unless urgent measures are taken. Despite the high taxation, health care is dangerously underfunded, which causes problems.
Hospitals owe money to medical suppliers and make partial payment to laboratories so they can survive. The Romanian Association of Medical Product Suppliers even threatens to cut deliveries to several hospitals in the country. Despite the suppliers’ sympathy for the problems of the Romanian health system, they are ready to turn off the switch.
On a personal level, even though I’m entitled, as a taxpayer, to free medical care, I would still have my wife give birth in a private clinic and gladly pay for that. It’s not that the doctors in the state’s health care system aren’t great professionals. It is just that health care is generally poor by European standards.
Underpaid doctors have the tendency to either accept or even request certain financial benefits from their patients. For example, my friend who is eight-months pregnant has already made an appointment to give birth at a private clinic, but not before checking out a regular, government-funded hospital.
She found that in the state hospital she would have to bring a lot of things – including aspirin and a piece of cloth that the doctors would use to wipe the baby right after birth.
Besides this and the poor look of the hospital, she also found out that she should grease the squeaky wheels of the system by giving 500 Euros to the doctor and another 200 or so to the nurses that would deliver her child into the world.
Why the bribe? So they can take better care of her and the baby.
Now, on the other hand, the fee at the private clinic she is going to is 1,000 Euros. The clinic looks much nicer and has better equipment. The staff is great, and all she needs to bring are just clothes for the newborn baby. She will be paying the private clinic’s fee because it’s the better choice.
Could you imagine for a second how frustrating this is? I mean you pay for medical care with your taxes all your life; but when you need to benefit from that money, you find out that you need to pull more money out of your pocket just to be treated normally.
Centralized health care doesn’t work. In a private health care system, you have
choices you can make on your own money.
When you pay revenue to the government and it decides how the funds are distributed to health care, you have no control over your money. You can’t make decisions on how that money is being spent.
Despite my belief that everyone should have access to health care, I do believe that private, independent health care is the best.
Don’t Let The Truth Get In The Way
I had to wait to write this column until Obama’s ego was assuaged by giving yet another prime time campaign speech. He wanted bipartisanship yet continually scolded Republicans and conservatives.
Yes, Joe Wilson was right, Obama doesn’t let facts get in the way, and he has no problem telling untruths in order to advance what he wants. We should be used to this by now.
Yes, in many ways he is enjoyable to watch. He has all the moves down pat. He is a great reader of the teleprompter, he does have charisma, and he still thinks these skills are going to get him anything he wants.
Fortunately, ordinary people who got fooled once are starting to see right through him. Just take a look at his plunging approval ratings and his soaring disapproval scores. But yet he plods on. As is his typical style, great rhetoric but no substance.
But, almost everyone, except for Obama, the main stream media (who are becoming more irrelevant each day), and the liberal left wing of the Democrat Party realizes that a change of such magnitude should be taken slowly, cautiously, and in phases.
He has pretty much used up his political capital and should have thought of this before he wasted it on his failed stimulus bill and his soon-to-fail cap- and-trade legislation.
The Republicans have a lot of good advice for you, but you haven’t been bothered to listen to them at all since last April or May. Please define bipartisanship for me once more Barack. Here’s some advice for you.
Baby steps, Barack, baby steps. An outline first and then I’ll expand.
1.Tort reform. I know you are in the front pocket of those ambulance chasing malpractice trial lawyers, but you have to give more than lip service to it. You don’t think it is a little laughable to appoint your Health and Human Services secretary to run trial tests, on a small scale, in several states when for many years she was the director of the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association? Only you could not see the irony in that. Also, start to show our medical professionals the respect they deserve. They are not a commodity but dedicated individuals who you consistently accuse of lining their pockets with profits from unnecessary tests and procedures. You know that is simply not true Barack, and I am going to hammer you hard on that one in a later column.
2.Medicare and Medicaid waste and fraud. Why don’t you prove that the government is up to taking care of this problem before you try to convince us that the government can be a beacon of efficiency on a much grander scale? I can’t wait to see how you are going to get $544 billion of savings out of this program. You never seem to be able or willing to tell us the specifics.
3.Stop lying about the number of uninsured. You know that 46 or 47 million individuals involuntarily without insurance coverage is blatantly not true. Why do you need 1000 plus pages of legalese to cover the more accurate figure of 10 to 15 million truly uninsured? Darn those facts, huh, Barack?
5.Stop lying about not funding illegal aliens or abortions. If this was true, as you say it is, why did your radical Democrat leadership disallow very plain, clear cut amendments to make this certain?
6.Stop lying about a single-payer system that is not government run. This is what you have preferred all along and have called for it repeatedly, even well before you campaigned. Your bait and switch, smoke and mirror tricks aren’t going to hide this one.
7.Finally, there are plenty of ways to use our tax code to provide deductions and credits so that it will be easier and less costly for individuals to provide for their own insurance coverage IF they want it.
So Barack, it looks like I’m going to have a lot of fun these next few columns. I promise I will only use facts to back myself up.
I thought at one time Jimmy Carter was going down in history as the worst president ever and that you were simply going to be “Carter lite.” I think I got it wrong. Jimmy is going to end up as “Barack lite.” For the sake of the country let’s hope your history is limited to 4 years.
Malpractice Tort Reform Needed Now
In my last column I listed many ways that would allow Congress to move slowly, cautiously, and responsibly in trying to implement some kind of health care reform. I’ll try to use the next one or two columns to expand on those possibilities.
First, nothing gets off the ground unless Congress and Obama make a serious attempt at medical malpractice tort reform. We are talking about billions of dollars saved annually and very easy to implement.