Shut the F***er down

Democrats threaten to shut the State of Indiana down instead of pass a budget that they don't agree with.

I say bring it on.

As we saw with the Sanford incident, people really think that life on earth required the government to run every aspect of their lives. The truth is very different.

Things will run smoothly without state government. People will go to Illinois to gamble. Or better yet, save their money. What else do you need the government to do for you?

This will be an educational experience.

Democrats hate America, 6/30/2009 edition

Democrats are much more likely to drive foreign cars. So much for their support of unions.

Blue-staters on each coast, from Los Angeles to Seattle and from Boston to the District, are the most likely to drive foreign cars. Domestic brands have their highest levels of market share in the mostly conservative interior of the country.

In some blue states - where a Democrat has won at least three of the last four presidential contests - foreign cars have as much as 60 percent of the market, as measured by vehicle registrations. It is mostly in red states - Republican strongholds - where domestic cars have 74 percent of the market or more.

This pattern holds in 36 states and the District.

The three politically purple states - those that have evenly split the last four elections - strongly prefer domestic cars.

Be careful with that party label, though - and check out the union label.

Its true that liberal Democrats are the least likely group to consider an American car, according to a recent Gallup poll. And conservative Republicans clearly prefer domestic cars. But one species turns the car-buying political spectrum inside out: conservative Democrats. The commitment of this group to buy American cars is so strong that conservative Republicans look downright bicoastal by comparison.

You can argue that GM, Ford, and Chrysler have nothing to do with America. I disagree. America is mom, apple pie, and a Chevy Impala. America is a full size, quad cab pickup truck, or a Chevy Tahoe towing a man toy.

Says the guy who drives a Saab. Hey, I'm a sucker for a turbo. At least it WAS owned by GM.

The economic costs of encouraging home ownership

I've talked before about how the US is overinvested in housing, and how government policies like the GSAs and the mortgage interest deduction are responsible. Buzzcut the Dictator would get rid of both.

Here is a Fed study on the subject.

Over time, we would be a much richer country if we didn't subsidize home ownership.

Is it the sanctimony, not the hypocrisy?

Commenter "Doug" says that Sanford's sin was sanctimony, not hypocrisy.

I guess he means that Sanford lead the charge to get Clinton impeached. Payback is a bitch.

Of course, we ALL know that the real reason Clinton was impeached was that he lied under oath in a sexual harassment deposition by Paula Jones. Clinton has a history of abusing women whom he has power over. He's a grade A scumbag. Lewinsky was just a little more... receptive... than the other women he abused, but what he did with her was still abusive.

Back to Sanford. The real issue, in my mind, is that certain people are Schadenfreude-ing him because of his previous positions on family values.

Should anyone doubt that Sanford was right that cheating, no fault divorce, and out of wedlock childbirths are destroying America, here's an introduction.

BTW, my parents just got divorced after 35 years of marriage. So the issue is a little raw with me. I'm just thankful that they lasted as long as they did. Even so, dealing with them now as singles is... upsetting. I can imagine how the Sanford kids feel.

Sanford is a hypocrite. Get over it.

Listening to some, it would seem that the worst thing about Sanford's affair is that he's a "family values conservative". Thus, because he strayed, he's a hypocrite.

In modern America, the only thing worse than being judgemental is being a hypocrite.

If Sanford were a libertine liberal like Bill Clinton, this affair would be a non-issue.

The problem with that is, family values are the biggest issue of our time.

The vast majority of our social problems are the results of bad behavior in violation of family values. Divorce and out of wedlock births lead to poverty. Show me someone who is poor, and I'll show you someone who is likely to be divorced (or never married) and have children out of wedlock.

Sanford has shown an incredible amount of bad judgement and disappointed us all, but we should not be surprised. We're all sinners. That doesn't mean that we should all just accept sin, or worse, encourage it.

Sadly, we as a country are not prepared to talk about the societal chaos that libertine ism is causing. Divorce is a non-issue. Out of wedlock births are skyrocketing, and no one cares, as long as you're not a hypocrite about it.

How would you ration health care

In a comment on another blog, talking about my favorite subject, something brilliant was said:

A hypothesis:

If you ask: should medical services be rationed by the a government board, or be left to consumer choice? More people will pick the latter.

But if you ask: should medical services be rationed by medical need as judged by a government board, or by the market? More people will pick the former.

These two are for practical purposes identical, of course. It's all in the phrasing.

Rationing is coming. We simply cannot afford the healthcare system that we have now, especially Medicare and Medicaid. How should health care be rationed?

My preferred plan (taxing employer paid health insurance premiums and Medicare as income, promoting high deductible catastrophic health insurance) uses the free market to ration care. Individuals spending their own money largely determine what they are willing to pay for themselves. Only on the high end, for very sick people with very severe illnesses, would we have to rely on "experts" to determine care.

In almost every other case, Obamacare will need to become an HMO on sterioids in order to ration care. I don't think that that will fly in America, and instead health care will continue on the road to bankruptcy.

Lake County Assessments Drop 15%

Read this article and tell me exactly what they did to get a 15% assessment drop.

It seems to me that assessments should be (are?) a separate issue from the homestead exemption. Why would increasing the HE result in decreased assessments?

You've got your assessment, from which you subtract your exemptions, to which you multiply your tax rate, which results in your property tax owed. Right? Isn't this article mixing these things up?

Would you prefer a 4 day a week, 10 hour per day job?

Interesting letter to the editor in the Times. The building trades that work at BP's Whiting Refinery agreed to go to a 4 day, 10 hours per day workweek.

BP did this because they were not getting enough work done in 8 hours. There's a lot of staging of work that occurs no matter how long or short the day is, as well as breaks, lunch, etc. The trades are more productive in 10 hours than in 8, even if they lose the work on the 5th day.

Some trades like the change, some don't. I've seen ironworkers protesting on Indianapolis Blvd. in front of the plant.

Myself, I would have mixed feelings about it. No doubt, having three day weekends all the time would be awesome. I almost forget I have a job on the Monday evening of a three day weekend. It is very relaxing.

But I'm not an early riser, and you almost have to get in at 6AM on 4-10's. Otherwise you're getting out of work way too late for things like little league games and other kid related stuff.

Finally, being sallaried, I often already put in 10s. It might not be that many more hours of work, in return for an extra day off. That's pretty cool.

I don't know how I'd feel if this applied to me. I sympathize with the trades, but on the other hand wonder if a lot of the guys like it.

Obama hammered on jobs from the left

Interesting take here.

One recent example comes from a new report issued my old colleagues at the liberal-leaning New America Foundation called "Not Out of the Woods: A Report on the Jobless Recovery Underway." It amounts to a blistering, if largely unintentional, critique of the administration's policies, providing a sobering antidote to manufactured euphoria peddled by both presidential spin-meisters and some Wall Streeters.

The report baldly assets that the president's programs are simply not sufficient to make up for a "huge job creation deficit" that is getting worse by the day. It estimates the country needs to generate 125,000 or more new jobs a month just to keep pace with population growth--something few see happening for at least several years.

Even with little immediate hope for such employment gains, the report does cite government and private-sector projections of upward of 10% unemployment well into next year. More worrisome still, the authors assert that the administration's current program is unlikely to create a return to a "normal" level of joblessness--to between 4% and 5%--until after the president's first term.

...

Hindery is no conservative. He was an adviser to John Edwards and, more recently, to the president himself. Yet his prognosis is grimmer than the ones offered by most right-wingers. He calculates that the real unemployment rate in the country last month was not 9.3%, which is the figure that was reported, but rather closer to an alarming 16.8%. By that measure, more than 30 million people are effectively out of work. That's nearly one-fifth of the labor force.

What Obama did to GM and especially Chrysler, while essentially allowing the financial companies to get away scott free (well, except for Lehman) is a big part of this. Indiana has unemployment well above 10%, largely because Chrysler and its suppliers are shedding so many jobs.

The only way to grow out of this recession is to improve the returns to work and investment. Get rid of the top two or three income tax rates, get rid of the corporate tax, etc. etc. Forget the stimulus, it isn't working, it can't work.

We came roaring out of the '83 recession because of all the tax cuts. We can do it again.

Stimulus is about rewarding Democrat interest groups, not creating jobs

This is good:

* Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men.
* Last November, President Obama proposed a stimulus plan that emphasized "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects with lots of money going to sectors like construction and manufacturing.
* A consortium of feminist groups complained that the stimulus was skewed toward creating jobs for men and launched a lobbying effort to add more spending on sectors like health care and education where women predominate.
* Obama complied, so much so that the now-infamous Jan. 10th report on the stimulus (the one with the way-off projections of how the stimulus package would affect the unemployment rate) concluded that the stimulus bill "skews job creation somewhat towards women."

The feminist groups were delighted with the results. Sommers writes:

... It is now four months since the bill was signed into law. A recent Associated Press story reports: "Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over 'Shovel-ready' Projects." A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services. According to Chris Whately, director of the Council of State Governments, "We all talked about 'shovel-ready' since September and assumed it was a whole lot of paving and building when, in fact, that's not the case." At the same time, the Labor Department's latest (June 5) employment report shows unemployment rates of 8 percent for women and 10.5 percent for men. "Unprecedented" is what Harvard economist Greg Mankiw called the new 2.5 percentage-point gender gap. "It's the highest male-female jobless rate gap in the history of BLS [Labor Department] data back to 1948," said Mark Perry.

There is great room for debate over the effectiveness of government stimulus programs, and over how much impact a focused "shovel-ready" spending program would have achieved by now. What is not debatable is that changes in the American economy and workforce are favoring service sectors where women are abundant and that the current severe contraction is centered on sectors where men, especially working-class men, predominate. That an emergency economic recovery program should be designed with gender in mind is itself remarkable. That, in current circumstances, it should be designed to "skew" employment further towards women is disturbing and ominous.

The stimulus package was "skewed" to shower money on Democratic interest groups and constituencies in order to secure their support (or at least mute their opposition) for Obama's more controversial proposals. "Job creation" was always incidental to that broader goal.

The stimulus is the biggest risk that Obama has taken, and he has taken a WHOLE LOT. He has defended it in terms of "jobs saved or created". But since the stimulus, the unemployment rate has gone a hell of a lot higher than he said it would go IF THE STIMULUS WERE NOT PASSED! He is really, really vulnerable on the issue of jobs, and how this economy is simply not creating them.

I think that this is the issue that he's going to be beated over the head with in 2010, along with the frightening size of the deficit. The question is, can all these political payoffs to Democrat interest groups provide the cushion he needs to keep winning?

Come on, men! It's time to start voting Republican again.

Not much state and local commentary

I haven't been commenting on much happening in Indy or locally.

The legislature is in session, so our liberty is at risk, but I haven't been inspired to say anything. As of this morning, I haven't seen anything that would raise taxes in Lake County. That's good.

Locally, Gary laid off 100 employees. I was on vacation, and did not see it in the paper last week.

Mayor McCheese of Hammond is trying to eliminate the City Court. Good move, it would save a couple million dollars. Lake County would pick up the cases. Consolidation at the county level moves one step closer to reality.

The Lake Central High School referendum went down in flames. NO $95M RENOVATION FOR YOU! The plan was stupid anyway, that high school is waaaaay too big. If they need more room, they should build a new high school and split it up. Nothing good comes out of a high school with upwards of 4000 kids. Hell, Munster is too big at 1500 kids.

I heard that Crown Point just built a new high school for $35M, so why wouldn't you just build new? It makes no sense.

Other than that... I've got nothing. Obama is much more interesting to me.

The method of Obama's BS artistry

The president claims that we must pass a government-run health insurance program — possibly the most wide-ranging and intricate government undertaking in decades — yesterday or a "ticking time bomb" will explode.

If all this terrifying talk sounds familiar, it might be because the president applies the same fear-infused vocabulary to nearly all his hard-to-defend policy positions. You'll remember the stimulus plan had to be passed without a second's delay or we would see 8.7 percent unemployment. We're almost at 10.

A commonly utilized Obama strawman states that "the cost of inaction" is unacceptable. "Action," naturally, translates into whatever policy Obama happens to be peddling at the time.

Obama is such a clown, worthy of mockery, if only people would look. There's real humor there. I mean, apply his stock words to, say, choosing a Happy Meal at McDonald's. That would be frickin hillarious.

Alas, sources of satire like SNL are too busy kissing Obama's ass to find anything to mock. They had some mojo for a minute there, with their skits about Hillary answering Obama's phonecalls at 3 AM, but have been strangely absent since.

Obama is ignoring North Korea to our peril

From Charles Krauthamer:

…What I think is remarkable is that even though over the last 16 years in the Clinton and the Bush administrations we did not succeed in stopping, although we slightly slowed the nuclear program, look what's happened in the six months of the quote, unquote, "smart diplomacy" of the Obama administration?



Long-range missile tests, the explosion of a nuclear weapon probably a third the size of Hiroshima, the declaration that the plutonium the Bush administration had frozen will be weaponized entirely, the entire stock, and the declaration that the uranium program which the Bush administration talked about, which Democrats had said was an invention of the Bush administration, the uranium enrichment is going to start up. All of that and the seizure of two Americans.

Did you get all that? Let me list them:

1) Long-range missile tests,

2)the explosion of a nuclear weapon probably a third the size of Hiroshima,

3) the declaration that the plutonium the Bush administration had frozen will be weaponized entirely, the entire stock,

4) The declaration that the uranium program which the Bush administration talked about, which Democrats had said was an invention of the Bush administration, the uranium enrichment is going to start up.

5) The seizure of two Americans

#5 is particularly egregious. It is outrageous that they could capture, try, convict, and jail two of our journalists. What the hell is Obama doing about that?

Obama should remember HMOs

Obama's obsession with private sector health care costs should give us pause. We should remember the example of Health Maintenance Organizations, which were sold to people on the basis that they would save people money while improving their health by eliminating wasteful procedures and overuse of services (sound familiar).

HMOs worked. Health care inflation was zero from 1993 to 2000, at which point lawmakers had outlawed many of the practices that HMOs used to save money (like forcing you to get a referal from a primary doctor before you could see a specialist) and inflation reignited.

People came to really, really hate HMOs. They hated HMOs because the HMOs decided what care the patient could get, not the patient himself, nor the doctor. Doctors would recommend care, and HMOs would deny the claim. This was cause for a near revolution. HMOs were pillioried as putting "profits before people".

Now, how exactly is Obamacare any different than an HMO? Except that, with an HMO, if you don't like the service, you have an alternative. Once Obamacare bankrupts all the health care insurers (which it will, how can you compete with the government?), there will be no alternative.

Personally, I've been in one HMO or another since 1996. I've never had a problem with them, and have enjoyed their cheap prices relative to the alternatives.

Obama the BS artist on healthcare

Obama is a BS artist of almost unrivaled ability (perhaps Bill Clinton can give him some competition, but no one else). And we can see it most with regards to his health care proposal.

Obama's meme is that PRIVATE SECTOR health care costs too much, and thus must be reformed.

Meanwhile, Medicare and Medicaid are ripe for reform, and are quickly bankrupting the country. But he makes no mention of them.

And, as usual, the mainstream media (Rush now calls them the government media) is silent, or worse, is trying to take out anyone who stands in Obama's way.

Quite frankly, we solved the cost issue in the 1990s. We had 4 or 5 years of zero health care inflation, thanks to HMOs. People hated them, because they told you what care you could and could not have. And people revolted as a result. Politicians, in particular, made a lot of hay about HMOs, and passed laws gutting them. Soon after, health care inflation re-ignited.

The only way to lower health care costs is to ration care. We could ration it the way we ration everything else: by consumers deciding what they want to spend their own hard earned money on. Or we can have a bureacrat ration care.

With HMOs, it was a private sector bureacrat rationing care. With Obama, no doubt, it will be a government employee. In the end, does it really make a difference? People will revolt if someone other than their doctor tells them what healthcare they can have.

More than likely, Obama will ram socialized medicine down our throats, he will fail to get ANY cost savings, and our entire health care system will be as out of control as Medicare and Medicaid. We'll go bankrupt even faster than we already are.

Academic paper explains the state of the GOP

An anonymous commenter linked to this analysis in the Washington Post showing doom and gloom for the GOP.

In response, I found this paper:

"The Effects of the George W. Bush Presidency on Partisan Attitudes" by Gary C. Jacobson, Presidential Studies Quarterly, April 2009, p 170ff.

ABSTRACT
Evidence from the eight years of the George W. Bush administration confirms that the public standing of the president's party rises and falls in concert with popular evaluations of his job performance. Reactions to the president affect the favorability ratings of his party, party identification measured individually and at the aggregate level—particularly among younger voters—as well as the party's electoral performance. Bush's second term, which provoked the longest period of low and downward-trending approval ratings on record, thus inflicted considerable damage on the Republican Party's image, popular support, and electoral fortunes.

The GOP's state is a result of one and only one thing: George W. Bush's disastorous second term, and specifically Katrina and Iraq.

As the memories of those two events fade, and as Obama has his own troubles, the state of the GOP will improve.

Lake County GOP finds some online Mojo

I'm flabbergasted to find that the Lake County GOP is on Facebook, and is actually USING IT PRODUCTIVELY! I'm actually getting timely notices of what is going on. Unbelievable.

They also have a new website: http://www.thelakecountygop.com/

All very encouraging.

Tax capped municipalities resort to user fees

Not surprising.

I totally support substituting fees for property taxes. It SHOULD cost something for mortgage companies to inquire about the title on a house at the County Recorder. It SHOULD cost something to get into the community pool.

Now, we can argue about the amount of the fee, but the principle that government services should cost the direct user, and not all be paid out of property taxes, is sound.

George Will is ripping off Buzzcut

I said it before him: environmentalism, especially concern about one's personal carbon footprint, has more in common with a religion than science. It is but one replacement for religion amongst the atheists. Humans are hardwired for belief, and even hard nosed atheists are looking for something to fill the void that religion has historically filled. In the past, it was socialism, or communism. Today, it's environmentalism.

Anyway, here is Will. His arguments are... awesome. Specifically, the soft totalitarianism of those, like the New York Times media critic, who think that even making fun of global warming should be beyond the pale. That's a brilliant observation.

And I'm Tivoing "The Goodes". I love Mike Judge. "Beavis and Butthead" is up there with South Park as the best satire of all time.

Paying more for health care out of your own pocket will solve the cost problem

Here's a little known fact:

In 1960, 50 percent of personal health-care spending was paid for by patients out of pocket. Today, that figure is about 10 percent. We will never again see a patient-centered system as long as someone else is paying the bills.

I was responding to an op-ed by someone claiming that the reason that today's doctors are more beholden to insurance companies is because the doctors are greedier. Before they would print the letter, the Post called me and asked for sources for my figures. I had forgotten where I had seen the 50 percent figure. The more recent 10 percent figure comes from the Cato book Healthy Competition, by Michael Cannon and Michael Tanner.

Fortunately, I was able to Google my way to this book, which has it. It also points out that for the narrower category of physicians' services, out-of-pocket payments accounted for 62 percent of spending in 1960. It seems almost almost foreign to be paying that much of your own medical bills. Kind of like listening to music by playing 45's.

Health care cost inflation was not a concern in 1960. Certainly, having consumers pay for most of their health care spending out of their own pocket would have a major impact on costs. Routine health care could be as cheap as any other service we pay for, like a night at McDonald's or Applebee's.

Mitch Daniels continues to woo Buzzcut

At this rate, Mitch will eclipse Newt Gingrich on my favorites list in about a month.

From the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, which held the 2009 Bradley Symposium, on the topic of "Making Conservatism Credible Again,", Mitch said:

Emerson once wrote that in every polity there tends to be a party of memory and a party of hope. We must be, as we have been on our better days, a party of hope. Someone once said that conservatism is a Democracy including the dead. At least in my state the dead are a reliable Democratic constituency so I don't spend much time campaigning to them. Let me just say that's a wonderful phrase when it expresses our reverence for tradition, our understanding and commitment to fundamental, timeless principles. But in terms of making our beliefs credible, successful and credible in this country, our sights must be forward to the future. ... In my view, we must, with respect to other Americans, direct ourselves to the young people this country. When we're speaking to them, we are speaking to their parents and grandparents who want the best for them. But I think that it is a starting point for our recovery that we examine every issue and present every issue in terms of its implications for those who will soon inherit leadership of this country.

On the expanding scope of government:

When I step back even from the shock of current events and ask myself again ... 'Are Americans suddenly predisposed to forfeit hard-fought and hard-earned liberties that have proven themselves over and over again?' I don't see it. I can make the opposite case. The best educated people ever on the planet possessed of technology that we've never seen before – George Gilder has been writing brilliantly about this for twenty plus years – still possess a healthy American suspicion of bigness in all it's forms: big business, labor and government. ... I think such a people are less likely and not more likely than ever before to be herded by omniscient leaders into mass transit, smaller cars, labor unions or homogenized health care. I think those who are trying to squeeze Americans coercively into these boxes are the ones who are pushing water up hill.

On the need to connect with average Americans:

We must not only assert, but assert with credibility, that we understand what is going on in the lives of everyday people. Empathy is going to get a bad name here for a while if it's going to be transported to the world of rule of law and jurisprudence, but empathy – which is what Adam Smith was talking about in the Theory of Moral Sentiments – is what distinguishes our species from the others. The ability to put oneself in the place and to feel deeply about the concerns, hopes, dreams and fears of other people is something that must visibly be a part of what we do. I like meetings like this – been to a lot of them. One of my friends described such things as “The leisure of the theory class.” Well, there's a place for that. But if we are to become credible, if we are to achieve leadership through popular consent, we're going to have to earn it. ... People who wear the uniform I do politically have a very special burden, which is not shared by our opposition. You can be a silver-spoon, blue-blood, wind-surfing, coastal elite – but if you wear the Democratic label you are presumed to be connected and empathetic and to understand the problems of everyday people. Well, it's unfair, it's untrue, but it's reality and it's a reality we must deal with.

On the need for fiscal conservatism:

We must recover the fiscal high ground and it's available to us. I tell you with certainty, concern about debt and deficit has not gone out of style – quite the contrary. Many Americans are more conscious of it today than they have been in a long time because they recognize it in their lives or the lives of a neighbor, or some business they were associated with, where people borrowed too much, spent too much, saved too little and are paying the consequences. We are seeing savings rates rise in America. That's a conservative virtue, don't forget. And I do believe that the terrifying deficits we are staring at, proposed by this administration — the threat that poses to every young person in this country presents an opening. But let's face it: as a group of like-minded people, as a party, a lot credibility has been forfeited on that score in recent years. I think it will only return if we are prepared to engage in some grown-up conversation. I'm not a seasoned office holder, I've only ever run for or held one office and it's the last one I'm going to hold, but I think I've got, after four-and-a-half years, enough evidence to say you can talk to Americans as adults. You don't have to be afraid to do that.

I do think that Mitch talks to us as adults. That's tough for a lot of people to take, Democrats to a one.

Weird Obama comment

This joker just can help himself.

As President Obama prepared to leave Washington to fly to the Middle East, he conducted several television and radio interviews at the White House to frame the goals for a five-day trip, including the highly-anticipated speech Thursday at Cairo University in Egypt. In an interview with Laura Haim on Canal Plus, a French television station, Mr. Obama noted that the United States also could be considered as “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” ...

The president said the United States and other parts of the Western world “have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam.... And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world,” Mr. Obama said. “And so there’s got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.”

That's just bizarre. First of all, Mulsims make up maybe 1% of our population, being very generous, and most of them aren't American citizens. Secondly, regardless of population, being a "Muslim country" means something like sharia law and whatnot. Even if there were a majority of Americans who were Muslim, we wouldn't be a Muslim country.

Obama screws Chrysler, Hummer, GM, etc. etc. etc.

Rumor is that GM is selling Hummer to a Chinese company. That's got me seeing red (pun intended, those Commie bastards!).

What is the purpose of selling Chrysler to an Italian company and Hummer to a Chinese one? How does that save American autoworker jobs?

And then there's the rumor that GM cut a deal with the UAW to build a small car in the US, instead of importing that very same car from a Chinese factory, where it is already tooled and being built.

None of this makes any sense. Obama is shooting from the hip, trying to satisfy as many interest groups as he can, even though those interests are not in any way aligned.

GM is screwed. Their strategy, as flawed as some think it was, had a certain logic to it. Their Korean and Chinese units designed and made small cars. Their German unit was responsible for design of midsized cars, which were produced in local markets all over the world. Australia was responsible for the big rear wheel drive cars, which were built over there. And the US was responsible for trucks and SUVs.

Now what is GM's strategy? They no longer own their German unit that designed all their midsize cars! How can they be viable without that?

Obama has set GM up to fail, and they sold Chrysler out. And my dream Hummer is going to be produced by Communists.

Oh, and Roger Penske wants to buy Saturn and have them sell Korean cars. AAARGH!

The history of health insurance in America

My contention is that what most people think of as "health insurance" is no such thing. What they really want is to have all the health services that they and their doctor want paid for by someone else.

How did we get into this situation? This article gives the history of health insurance in America, as well as interesting results for direct purchase health insurance.

Bottom line is that there are a lot of myths about non-employer provided, non-government provided, individually purchased health insurance. My belief is that high deductible, directly purchased health insurnace, paid for with after tax money, would solve most of the problems with health care in this country, but that it would be extremely umpopular because people have such unrealistic expectations when it comes to health care spending.

Proper response to Dr. Tiller's murder

It's weird that just last week, commenter "Doug" was here taunting us pro-lifers that, if we really believed that abortion is murder, we should be killing abortion doctors. And now notorious abortion doc George Tiller has been killed, at his church no less.

In light of recent events, I don't think that my response to Doug was strong enough. My answer was a political one, not one based on right and wrong. But I've found the response that I should have made here:

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him. We are a nation of laws. Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence. Rightly or wrongly, George Tilller was acquitted by a jury of his peers. "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord." For the sake of justice and right, the perpetrator of this evil deed must be prosecuted, convicted, and punished. By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller's life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life. Let our "weapons" in the fight to defend the lives of abortion's tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.