konane's Blog

Came in email, Snopes says letter is UNDETERMINED.  http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/boxer.asp

Video this letter responds to posted below.

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Jim Hill's letter to Barbara Boxer

Some of us witnessed the arrogance of Barbara Boxer (CA)  as she admonished a Brigadier General because he addressed her as "ma'am" and not "Senator" before a Senate hearing.

This letter is from a National Guard aviator and Captain for  Alaska  Airlines. I wonder what he would have said if he were really angry.  Long fly Alaska!

"You were so right on when you scolded the general on TV for using the term, "ma'am," instead of "Senator."  After all, in the military, "ma'am" is a term of respect when addressing a female of superior rank or position. The general was totally wrong.  You are not a person of superior rank or position. You are a member of one of the world's most corrupt organizations, the U.S. Senate, equalled only by the U.S.  House of Representatives.

Congress is a cesspool of liars, thieves, inside traders, traitors, drunks (one who killed a staffer, yet is still revered), criminals, and other low level swine who, as individuals (not all, but many), will do anything to enhance their lives, fortunes and power, all at the expense of the People of the United States and its Constitution, in order to be continually re-elected.  Many democrats even want American troops killed by releasing photographs. How many of you could honestly say, "We pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor"? None? One? Two?

Your reaction to the general shows several things. First is your abysmal ignorance of all things military. Your treatment of the general shows you to be an elitist of the worst kind. When the general entered the military (as most of us who served) he wrote the government a blank check, offering his life to protect your derriere, now safely and comfortably ensconced in a 20 thousand dollar leather chair, paid for by the general's taxes. You repaid him for this by humiliating him in front of millions.

Second is your puerile character, lack of sophistication, and arrogance which borders on the hubristic. This display of brattish behavior shows you to be a virago, termagant, harridan, nag, scold or shrew, unfit for your position, regardless of the support of the unwashed, uneducated masses who have made California  into the laughing stock of the nation.

What I am writing, Senator, are the same thoughts countless millions of Americans have toward Congress, but who lack the energy, ability or time to convey them. Under the democrats, some don't even have the 44 cents to buy the stamp. Regardless of their thoughts, most realize that politicians are pretty much the same, and will vote for the one who will bring home the most bacon, even if they do consider  how corrupt that person is.  Lord Acton (1834 - 1902) so aptly charged, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Unbeknownst to you and your colleagues, "Mr. Power" has had his way with all of you, and we are all the worse for it.

Finally Senator, I, too, have a title. It is "Right Wing Extremist Potential Terrorist Threat." It is not of my choosing, but was given to me by your Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. And you were offended by "ma'am"?

Have a fine day. Cheers!

Jim Hill
16808 - 103rd Avenue Court East
South Hill,  WA   98374 "

Please circulate this to remind every voter that the "cesspools" MUST be pumped out when we go to the polls in November, 2010. Honoring and respecting the voters is a thing of the past for many of those in our congress and senate. We need to vote their arrogant, self serving asses out of office if America is to get on the long road back from the devastation that these self serving cowards have brought upon us!

"We Are Not Sheeple

August 3, 2009
By Herman Cain

Souce HermanCain.com

"The government is not my shepherd, and I shall not surrender my liberties.

One of the most frequently asked questions I get from new listeners to my radio show is, “What can we do to stop this out-of-control spending and expansion of government by this administration and Congress?” My response is that we have to use the two weapons we have, our votes and our voices.

The power of the ballot box has not diminished. It has just been temporarily hijacked by liberals. Thomas Jefferson observed that “The American people won’t make a mistake, if they are given all of the facts.” The real facts about the Obama Administration and Congress are becoming frighteningly clearer every day. More people need to be prepared to cast some different votes in November 2010.

But we can voice our opposition to wrongheaded, anti-liberty and anti-free-market proposals now. We have to do it loudly, consistently, collectively and regularly. There are some moderate Democrats who are against these socialist policies, and they recognize that their congressional seats may not be bullet-proof in November 2010. They need to know that we are paying attention.

The slowdown of the “Cap and Trade and Tax and Kill” bill in the Senate is evidence that our voices and millions of others are having an impact. Further evidence is the president and Democratic leaders of Congress finally abandoning their attempt to ram “Health Care De-form” legislation down our throats before their August recess. But they have not abandoned their desire to confiscate the remainder of our health care system, along with many of our rights and liberties.

The administration, Democrats in Congress and the mainstream lapdog media want us to believe that we should just sit on the sidelines and let this power grab express go unchallenged. They want us to believe that passage of their health care Trojan Horse is a foregone conclusion, while they keep the public’s attention on silly distractions like a “beer summit”, a “cash for clunkers” giveaway and speeches by the president filled with empty and misleading promises.

They want us to believe that we are just sheeple.

Unfortunately, too many people are content to stay stuck in stupid land.

The mainstream media used to be the people’s watchdog of government abuse, misuse and intrusion into our lives. Many so-called professional journalists have surrendered to the intimidation of the administration, and many have just looked the other way from persistent congressional irresponsibility.

Not reading or understanding legislation before members vote for it, ignoring the financial disasters of Social Security and Medicare, and adding trillions of dollars of federal debt is irresponsibility of unmatched historic proportions.

But millions of us are not intimidated and will not look the other way when crooked members of Congress say one thing and do another.

We the people are now our own watchdogs.

Thankfully, people are realizing that they did not use their vote very wisely last November. Some people kept their votes at home and are having “stayed at home” remorse. Others are having voter’s remorse for having voted for President Obama and this Democrat-controlled Congress, even though they are not ready to admit it publicly.

Many members of Congress may not totally “see the light” yet from the heat of outspoken voters, but we are seeing some slowdown in the liberal express. But they must continue to feel the heat.

Sheeple may not care about tsunami government spending, and outrageous expansions of government into our lives. We the people do care.

We will not surrender our liberties!"

http://www.hermancain.com/news/press-opinion-080309.asp

Interesting opinion.

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"On May 15, a 25-year-old woman named Hilary Carpenter had an operation at the Colorado Orthopaedic and Surgical Hospital in Denver to replace a shunt valve in her brain. After the surgery, Carpenter experienced a severe headache and nausea. After consulting with a physician on duty, a registered nurse at the hospital administered Demerol, but the dosage was wrong, and Carpenter's heart stopped. In a scene that state investigators later described as "chaotic," hospital staff was unable to locate quickly the equipment needed to revive Carpenter. According to the investigators, there were only a few people on hand that day to deal with the crisis, and those present lacked training to handle such emergencies. Eventually the staff did something you wouldn't normally expect a hospital to do: They called 911. A paramedic team took Carpenter to a different hospital, where she died.

A July 17 news story about this incident in the Denver Post prompted an immediate outcry from Sens. Max Baucus of Montana and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Democratic chairman and ranking Republican member of the finance committee, then as now struggling to craft a bipartisan health reform bill. The occasion for their outrage was that the Colorado Orthopaedic and Surgical Hospital is one of about 230 hospitals in the United States that are owned by doctors, nearly all of them so-called "specialty hospitals" that steer clear of the seriously ill or uninsured. "Sen. Baucus and I have worked for years now to address the concerns that come with physician-owned hospitals," Grassley said, "including inherent conflicts of interests for physician-owners and, more importantly, patient safety. I remain concerned about the ability of these facilities to address emergency situations." The senators have written into their still-incomplete reform bill that any new doctor-owned hospitals will be barred from participating in Medicare and that existing doctor-owned hospitals must increase safety precautions. The House bill (which has finally won support from Blue Dog Democrats with what appear to be minor concessions) contains a similar provision.

Doctor-owned hospitals are the most conspicuous manifestation of a culture of entrepreneurship that's gone a long way toward creating today's health care crisis. Although traditional economic theory holds that competition drives prices down, in medicine competition had tended to drive prices up as doctors explored new avenues for profit, most typically through fee-for-service overuse of expensive technologies and procedures. It's easy to shrug at such things and say, "That's capitalism." But, in fact, market-driven medicine didn't exist a generation ago, because the American Medical Association didn't allow it. "I saw it happen before my own eyes," says Dr. Arnold Relman, 86, emeritus professor at Harvard Medical School and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Relman has written extensively (most recently in the New York Review of Books) about what he terms "the medical-industrial complex." Much of the blame for its creation, Relman believes, lies with the Supreme Court's 1975 decision in Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar.

Goldfarb doesn't get a lot of attention from the health-reform crowd, partly because (as its name suggests) it was a case involving lawyers, not doctors, and partly because it extended the reach of antitrust law, something usually favored by the same sort of Democrats who want to make health insurance universal.

Lewis H. Goldfarb was a homebuyer in Fairfax County, Va., who got mad when he couldn't find a title-search lawyer willing to charge less than 1 percent of the purchase price, the minimum recommended by the county's bar association and enforced by the state bar. Goldfarb maintained that the bar's imposition of a minimum fee constituted price fixing and violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Supreme Court agreed, and in a unanimous opinion (minus Justice Lewis Powell, who recused himself), Chief Justice Warren Burger concluded that law and other "learned professions" participated in "trade or commerce" as defined by the Sherman Act and therefore could not engage in "anticompetitive conduct."

Nowhere in the opinion did the words medicine or doctor appear, but the implications for health care were immediately obvious. Prior to Goldfarb, Relman explains, any notion that doctors or hospitals might seek to maximize profits was deemed a violation of professional ethics. AMA guidelines forbade doctors to advertise, to sell drugs, or to own a financial interest in any lab or machinery they used to perform tests. Medical doctors' sole source of income in the health arena was supposed to be the care of patients (or supervising the care of patients). "For the most part," Relman says, "those guidelines were followed."

After Goldfarb, the AMA's lawyers warned that such prohibitions risked being struck down in court as anti-competitive. So the AMA altered its message. Doctors could now have other sources of health care-related income, provided these money-making activities weren't harmful to patients and that patients knew about them. In 1982, the Supreme Court followed up on Goldfarb by striking down not a minimum fee but a maximum fee imposed by Arizona's Maricopa County Medical Society. Federal regulations were imposed to ban a few particularly egregious types of physician self-dealing.

But in general, especially after Ronald Reagan became president, there was a paradigm shift. Where once government had sought to police the health care sector mainly to protect patients, now it sought to police it mainly to protect a competitive health care marketplace. A thriving health care bazaar, it was assumed, would serve patients' interests. This is the theory that bequeathed us doctor-owned hospitals, the endless churning of marginally valuable medical tests, and dermatologists' waiting rooms where patients are bombarded with video infomercials in which their very own doctors market skin creams and facelifts. "The same investors who started Kentucky Fried Chicken," Relman complains, "started the Hospital Corporation of America!" (The common link is Jack Massey.)

The failure of market-driven medicine was foretold by Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow in a 1963 paper ("Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care") that is widely credited with inventing the discipline of health care economics. (In 1963, the health care sector was so sleepy financially and so dominated by nonprofit do-gooders that economists saw little reason to study it.) There were several factors making it difficult to impose a market model on medicine, Arrow wrote. Demand for services was "irregular and unpredictable," and the buyer was physically vulnerable. Judging the value of the product (i.e., medical treatment) entailed a degree of uncertainty "perhaps more intense … than in any other important commodity," which was compounded by the presumption of an extreme asymmetry between the doctor's knowledge and the patient's. Complicating matters even further, the patient didn't pay; his insurance company did. The doctor "acts as a controlling agent on behalf of the insurance companies," making sure the patient didn't overuse his services, but only up to a point; "the physicians themselves are not under any control and it may be convenient for them or pleasing to their patients to prescribe more expensive medication, private nurses, more frequent treatments, and other marginal variations of care."

In an online interview last week with Conor Clarke of the Atlantic, Arrow (now 87) said that "the basic analysis hasn't changed," but "[s]ome specifics have changed." Arrow explained that in his 1963 paper he emphasized that market forces were supplemented by

professional commitments to provide a service, to engage in services that aren't self-serving. Standards of caring decided by non-economic actors. And one problem we have now is an erosion of professional standards. In a way there is more emphasis on markets and self-aggrandizement in the context of health care, and that has led to some of the problems we have today.

I'm no economist, but what I think Arrow is saying here is that health care today conforms a little better to standard economic theory than it did in 1963, but that the invisible hand's gain has been medicine's loss. Goldfarb isn't the only reason for the change, but it's a major one.

Relman believes that the health reform bill, if it passes, won't do much to solve the problem, because it does almost nothing to inhibit medical entrepreneurship. "The idea that health care is a legitimate arena for investment is monstrous," Relman says. "Things are going to have to get a lot worse and the costs are going to have to become absolutely intolerable, and then people will finally begin to realize that the system we have doesn't work right." Part of that change, Relman says, should come from the Supreme Court. If Congress outlawed for-profit medicine, perhaps "the Supreme Court would be willing to take another look at this." The Supreme Court? Where the Chicago school is king? Relman's answer skirts thrillingly close to violating the Hippocratic oath. "Where there's death, my friend, there's always hope."

[Update, July 30: In today's New York Times, Kevin Sack and David Herszenhorn report on an energetic lobbying effort by the doctor-owned Doctors Hospital at Renaissance in Edinburg, Texas, that helps explain why existing doctor-owned hospitals (as opposed to future ones) would be permitted to continue participating in Medicare under the House and Senate bills. Suffice it to say that traditional market economics, while not easily applied to health care (a point explored further by Alec MacGillis in today's Washington Post), apply all too well to the legislative process. The Doctors Hospital at Renaissance is not a specialty hospital, but it was criticized for wasteful spending in Atul Gawande's much-cited New Yorker piece about excessive Medicare spending in McAllen, Texas, which is next door to Edinburg. ("[I]t has a reputation," Gawande wrote, "for aggressively recruiting high-volume physicians to become investors and send patients there. Physicians who do so receive not only their fee for whatever service they provide but also a percentage of the hospital's profits from the tests, surgery, or other care patients are given.") Overall, the Washington Post (citing figures from the Center For Responsive Politics) reports that the health care sector is spending close to $1.5 million a day to influence health reform.]"

http://www.slate.com/id/2223841/?from=rss

Agree with him, they all should be in prison, every single one of them.

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Source  MarketTicker.org

"Wednesday, August 12. 2009

Karl Denninger    08:55

"Warned You: Pensions

"I warned about this in the 2008 "Look Ahead", and then several times during 2008: Nobody cared.

Now, CALPERs chief actuary is finally speaking up:

Ron Seeling, the CalPERS chief actuary, described the process used to “smooth” the rate increases that will be imposed on the 1,500 local government agencies in CalPERS in 2011 in the wake of the stock market crash.

Instead of a rate increase of 4 to 20 percent of pay, the smoothing will reduce the rate hike to a more manageable 0.5 to 2 percent of pay.

“I don’t want to sugarcoat anything,” Seeling said as he neared the end of his comments. “We are facing decades without significant turnarounds in assets, decades of — what I, my personal words, nobody else’s — unsustainable pension costs of between 25 percent of pay for a miscellaneous plan and 40 to 50 percent of pay for a safety plan (police and firefighters) … unsustainable pension costs. We’ve got to find some other solutions.”

Oh, but he DID sugarcoat it. 

See, the problem here is that these pension managers bought into the hype too.  They even bought into real estate developments - buying into the "everything goes up 10% a year forever."

Never mind that an actuary has as his primary job understanding the long-term impact (and possibility) of compounding and exponential growth.  That is what an actuary does!

It is particularly galling to hear pension actuaries spout off about how there's a "problem" with the sustainability of their funds.  Where were they a year, two years, five years ago?  Where were they when the pension fund bought into the real estate hype?  When it bought into stocks trading near all-time highs?  When The Fed and others in policy roles were making decisions that would drive down bond yields?

Silent, that's where. 

These people should be in prison.  All of them. 

But they won't be, and you will be the one who takes it on the chin. 

Again.

No, folks, it will not be "ok" in your retirement.  CALPERs is not the only fund like this in serious trouble - in point of fact, essentially all of them are.  These funds and the entities that sponsor them have all made promises with their mouth that were predicated on investment returns (and growth) that were absolutely impossible, on a mathematical basis, to be sustained.

The fun in this regard is just getting started; I tried to get people interested (especially union folks who could raise hell quite effectively) last year on this matter, but nobody wanted to listen when the sun was still out (spring and early summer), even though there were ominous clouds gathering on the horizon.

Now, a year later, its too late.  The tsunami is now clearly visible and curling over, its moving at 70mph, and you can run - at best, and for a short while - at 15mph.

Got life vest?"

http://market-ticker.org/archives/1321-Warned-You-Pensions.html

Everyone has an opinion, and while I'm not ready to say I agree with Webster Tarpley, I find them interesting enough to let the listener decide.  He projects an entirely different end result than I had ever considered.

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Interesting, worth the listen.  Article below.

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"Understanding Subversion

by J. R. Nyquist

Weekly Column Published: 04.17.2009

Source FinancialSense.com

"Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB officer who defected nearly three decades ago. In 1985 he gave an interview that can be viewed online. What he said is worth hearing.  According to Bezmenonv, “Only about 15 percent of [the KGBs] time, money and manpower was spent on espionage as such. The other 85 percent was a slow process [of] … ideological subversion or active measures … or psychological warfare. What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that in spite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves….”

Bezmenov referred to “a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages, the first one being demoralization….” Here we find a generational process, which takes from 15 to 20 years. To understand the concept of demoralization, let us turn to Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War, Chapter 7: “The secret to motivating people and maintaining their morale is to get them to think less about themselves and more about the group.” In military affairs an army is demoralized the instant the individual soldier thinks only of himself. At that moment, the soldiers begin to run from the battle and the army dissolves. There is no resistance possible when each soldier looks only to his own safety.

If you want to lead a strong army or build a strong nation, you want your people to develop group cohesion or “togetherness.” According to Greene, “That is when you start thinking about morale – about finding a way to motivate your troops and forge them into a group.” In terms of warfare, motivation is not about rewards and punishments. You have to make people feel the worthiness of their cause, and you must give them a sense of belonging to the army or nation that they are defending. As Greene explains, “They soon begin to link their own success to the group’s; their own interests and the larger interests coincide. In this kind of army, people know that selfish behavior will disgrace them in the eyes of their companions. They become attuned to a kind of group conscience.” And as it happens, this conscience is contagious. It is also very powerful.

Therefore, it may be said that the “demoralization” of a country is a process of encouraging shameful behavior, of encouraging desertion and the abandonment of the national cause and the nation itself. When Yuri Bezmenov says that the first stage in “ideological subversion” is demoralization, he is talking about a very sophisticated strategy. He is talking about a program for destroying the cohesion and spirit of a nation. In basic terms, an effective program of subversion ridicules or discounts the moral ideals from which a nation draws its strength. It is also useful to promote hedonism and self-absorption; to encourage anti-war sentiments and recreational drug use; or give money to Hollywood producers through intermediaries on the condition that they put more sex and violence in American movies.

According to Bezmenov the KGB of the USSR pumped Communist ideology into three generations of American students. The universities and schools were infiltrated, the curriculum was changed, and a disguised form of enemy thinking was taught to American children. “In other words,” says Bezmenov, “Marxism-Leninism ideology [was] pumped into the soft heads of … American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism – American patriotism. The result … you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli, in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind, even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black. You still cannot change the basic perception and logic of behavior…. In other words … the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible.”

According to Bezmenov, the American educational system has indoctrinated many students with Communist ideology – under the guise of feminism, peace studies, various ethnic studies or general “social science.” To counteract this, we need a new educational program that inculcates common sense and patriotism, teaching the value of a unique American cause – in opposition to socialism.

If anyone should doubt the testimony of Bezmenov, I should like to end this article by quoting a former general of the Soviet Bloc intelligence services, Ion Pacepa. Last year Pacepa gave the following statement to interviewer Robert Buchar: “The whole foreign policy of the Soviet Bloc states, indeed its whole economic and military might, revolved around the larger Soviet objective of destroying America from within through the use of lies. The Soviets saw disinformation as a vital tool in the dialectical advance of world Communism. KGB priority number one was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol John Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation.”

Copyright © 2009 Jeffrey R. Nyquist
Global Analysis Archive

http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2009/0417.html

I don't shop Whole Foods so not promoting them.  This plan is being attacked and Whole Foods is being boycotted by those objecting to the CEO's statement.  I believe a wise administration would be looking at what works well such as is suggested below.

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"The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

AUGUST 12, 2009 

By JOHN MACKEY

Source Wall Stree Journal Opinion 

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out
of other people’s money.”

    —Margaret Thatcher

"With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people’s money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us.

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone:

• Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees’ Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.

Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan’s costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.

• Equalize the tax laws so that that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.

• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.

• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor’s visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?

• Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.

• Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are currently waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment, according to a report last month in Investor’s Business Daily. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million.

At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an “intrinsic right to health care”? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.

Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.

Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.

Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.

Health-care reform is very important. Whatever reforms are enacted it is essential that they be financially responsible, and that we have the freedom to choose doctors and the health-care services that best suit our own unique set of lifestyle choices. We are all responsible for our own lives and our own health. We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health. Doing so will enrich our lives and will help create a vibrant and sustainable American society.

—Mr. Mackey is co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html

Spam issue.

"Climate Change Measure Should Be Set Aside, U.S. Senators Say

By Daniel Whitten and Simon Lomax

Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate should abandon efforts to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions this year and concentrate on a narrower bill to require use of renewable energy, four Democratic lawmakers say.

“The problem of doing both of them together is that it becomes too big of a lift,” Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in an interview last week. “I see the cap-and-trade being a real problem.”

The resistance by Lincoln and her Senate colleagues undercuts President Barack Obama’s effort to win passage of legislation that would cap carbon dioxide emissions and establish a market for trading pollution allowances, said Peter Molinaro, the head of government affairs for Midland, Michigan- based Dow Chemical Co., which supports the measure.

“Doing these energy provisions by themselves might make it more difficult to move the cap-and-trade legislation,” said Molinaro, who is based in Washington. “In this town if you split two measures, usually the second thing never gets done.”

The House passed cap-and-trade legislation in June.

Leaders of the Democratic-controlled Senate say they are sticking with their plan to combine a version of that bill with a separate measure mandating energy efficiency and the use of renewable sources such as solar and wind power. The legislation also provides for an extension of offshore oil and gas drilling in certain areas, broadening its support.

Reid’s Comment

“I don’t think we are going to take to the Senate floor a bill stripped of climate provisions,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, told reporters in Las Vegas on Aug. 11.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee passed the renewable-energy legislation, 15-8, in June. Reid has set a deadline of Sept 28 for committees to complete work on climate- change provisions.

Ben Nelson of Nebraska and North Dakota Senators Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan joined Lincoln in suggesting that the climate measure be put off.

“We should separate the energy bill from the climate bill,” Conrad told reporters this month. ‘It needs to be done as soon as we can get it done,” he said, referring to the energy legislation.

Climate legislation would require 60 votes in the Senate. Most Republicans have said they oppose the cap-and-trade measure, and at least 15 of the Senate’s 60-member Democratic majority have said the House-passed version would hurt the economy and needs to be revamped to win their support.

‘Wishful Thinking’

“At some point, they are going to take a hard vote count,” said Michael McKenna, president of MWR Strategies, a Washington consulting firm. “I think cap-and-trade has a one- in-three chance, but at some point they are going to want to pass something,” he said of the Senate leadership.

Some Democrats want to avoid voting on a measure that would force companies to get pollution permits, said Daniel Weiss, an energy and climate specialist for the Center for American Progress, a Washington public policy group that advises Democrats and supports a cap-and-trade system.

“There is a lot of wishful thinking on the part of some senators,” Weiss said in an interview. “They want to do what is easy, not what is needed.”

The Senate remains under pressure to pass a cap-and-trade bill because failure to act would leave regulation in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency, which has asserted its right to do so under the Clean Air Act, said Kevin Book, a Washington analyst with Clearview Energy Partners, an energy consulting firm. Senate action to head off the EPA is the most likely outcome, he said.

“The second school of thought holds that Senate progress towards climate change legislation is already irretrievably mired in parochial conflicts,” Book said in an Aug. 12 memo to clients. That may lead the Senate to pass stand-alone energy legislation as a way to “achieve climate change objectives without a cap-and-trade program.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ah3CTKEw4HQc

Sidebar comment:  From the 1961 Operation Coffee Cup Campaign against Socialized Medicine as proposed by the Democrats, then a private citizen Ronald Reagan Speaks out against socialized medicine. There is no video because this was an LP sent out by the American Medical Association

Scary.  Media ran interference on this but her demeanor speaks for itself.

No telling what the 'emergency call' was all about.

This rant pretty well expresses my disgust with Republican inaction, willful neglegence, lip service which has brought us to the crisis we're living through presently.  Other than name there is really no difference in the two main parties. 

Posting an excerpt only plus link due to very plain language used to express his disgust, so be warned before you click.

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http://market-ticker.org/categories/1-Politics