ED DRISCOLL ON L.A.’s New Crack Epidemic, And “Bloomberg Syndrome.”
Archive for 2013
February 8, 2013
POLITICAL WIRE: Ohio Poll Worker Admits To Voting Twice. Wonder who she voted for?
ROLL CALL: Inhofe Sees “Cover Up” In Benghazi.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: British Hospital Carnage a Window into US Future.
The scandal surrounds a recent hospital report’s findings that Stafford Hospital in Staffordshire ignored even the most basic standards of treatment to disastrous, and disgusting, effect. . . .
As the piece goes on to explain, the hospital’s actions sprung from its single-minded pursuit of cost control. It drastically reduced its operating budget in hopes of qualifying for foundation-trust status, a legal category that would grant it more freedom from central government control. It’s a textbook case of how structural incentives in government-dominated health care systems can lead to terrible outcomes.
Blue model partisans claim that the American health care system is one of the worst in the world in terms of bang for the buck. Many single-payer systems are indeed cheaper than ours, but this is only half the story, and this new report suggests that the other half of the story—quality of care—isn’t always as rosy as official metrics show.
Expect problems like this to crop up in the U.S. as Obamacare moves us further down the road of wonk-based health care, with well-intentioned, top-down reforms that sow chaos across a complex system.
Related: Obamacare Fail: CBO Predicts Drops in Health Coverage.
When Obama took to the stump for health care reform, one promise came through loud and clear: “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.” That promise is officially about to be broken, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Millions of employees will soon be dropped from health insurance coverage as new provisions of the law go into effect. . . . The CBO also projected that 5 million fewer people will gain health insurance coverage over the next decade than originally expected.
Expiration date, reached.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student Loans to Cost at Least $35 Billion More Than Expected.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Why Are The Feds Loading Up On So Much Ammo? “According to one estimate, just since last spring DHS has stockpiled more than 1.6 billion bullets, mainly .40 caliber and 9mm. That’s sufficient firepower to shoot every American about five times. Including illegal immigrants. To provide some perspective, experts estimate that at the peak of the Iraq war American troops were firing around 5.5 million rounds per month. At that rate, DHS is armed now for a 24-year Iraq war.”
UPDATE: Reader Glenn Perreira writes:
Can the delicious irony of this be any better/worse?
At a time when many politicians are telling gun owners “you don’t need all those bullets” in regards to magazines, the government are spending taxpayer dollars to hoard bullets sufficient for 24 year war in Iraq.
Strange days…
I’ll bet they’re not using 7-round magazines, either.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Introverted Kids Need to Learn to Speak Up at School.
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Building Toys.
Also, today only: Invicta Watch Sets for Men and Women, $59.99 (91% off).
CALPERS CORRUPTION: The Pension Fund That Ate California. “How could a financially troubled former union leader occupy such a powerful position at the giant retirement system, which manages roughly $230 billion in assets? The answer lies in CalPERS’s three-decade-long transformation from a prudently managed steward of workers’ pensions into a highly politicized advocate for special interests. Unlike most government pension funds, CalPERS has become an outright lobbyist for higher member benefits, including a huge pension increase that is now consuming California state and local budgets.”
LUCIAN BEBCHUK: Don’t Make Poison Pills More Deadly.
BENGHAZI: The Empty Chair In Practice.
Do you remember when Clint Eastwood did his empty chair bit at the GOP convention? The left berated him as an old senile weirdo.
Then came the Denver Debate and the New Yorker Cover, conservatives laughed and liberals panicked.
While some thought it a joke and some thought it a farce the true meaning of the empty chair was never clearer than it was at the Benghazi hearings. . . . The story is that on 9/11 during an attack on Americans in Benghazi (including a person he knew personally) the President of the United States was disinterested.
Indeed.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, EVIL GREEDY PEOPLE WOULD BE LITERALLY TAKING FOOD FROM THE MOUTHS OF STARVING KIDS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! LAUSD, other California school districts use cafeteria funds meant for poor to cover other expenses, report says. “Squeezed by historic funding shortfalls, school districts across the state in recent years have been illegally dipping into cafeteria funds meant to provide meals to poor students to pay other school expenses, according to a report released Wednesday by a state department.”
ROLL CALL: Menendez Can’t Escape Mounting Reports.
The allegations against Sen. Robert Menendez may have started with unsubstantiated stories about trysts with prostitutes, but questions about the lawmaker’s conduct have reached the point where they’re not focused on sex.
A slow drip of national news reports about the New Jersey Democrat and his ties to Florida ophthalmologist and political donor Salomon Melgen have put his office on the defensive over an assortment of issues including a port contract in the Dominican Republic and a possible intervention in a Medicare billing dispute involving the doctor.
Menendez tried to move forward with his normal agenda Thursday, holding a morning roundtable discussion with Hispanic media outlets about immigration through the Senate Democratic Hispanic Task Force, of which he is chairman.
Even there, however, Menendez was pulled off-topic and denied he exerted improper influence to help Melgen in the Medicare dispute.
Related: Ya think? Menendez-Univision links may have influenced positive media coverage. “Turns out, there’s more (or less, actually) concerning Univision and Menendez: Univision Communications Inc. is a member of an organization called the United States-Spain Council, of which Menendez is an honorary chair. The council’s president: Menendez’s former aide, Pedro Pablo Permuy.”
ED MORRISSEY: How Obama Lost His Edge Over the GOP on Spending.
SEN. MIKE LEE: Obama drone strike white paper threatens due process.
JAMES TARANTO: Insurance as Punishment: The latest assault on the Second Amendment.
If you can’t force people to do what you want, force them to buy insurance: That seems to be the strategy of the liberal left in the Obama era. We refer not only to the ObamaCare health-insurance mandate but to the latest bright idea under consideration in mostly Democrat-dominated state capitals. . . .
“Gun-insurance mandates won’t solve illegal gun possession or illegal gun use, and no form of regulation will bring an end to gun violence,” writes political scientist H.L. Pohlman in a Hartford Courant op-ed. Yet strangely, Pohlman is a proponent of the idea. . . .
In Pohlman’s account of the virtuous incentives his insurance scheme would purportedly establish, he leaves out the most obvious: By burdening gun owners with an additional cost, it would encourage some to give up guns altogether. We suspect that the real goal here is to deter gun ownership or, failing that, to punish law-abiding gun owners. As for criminals, we doubt any of them will ever hesitate to use a gun because it is uninsured.
They’re pushing these kinds of ideas because they’re losing the main argument.
NICK GILLESPIE ON THE PRESS’S DRONE COVERAGE: You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way Journalists Blow.
Remember back in what was it – 2006 or thereabouts – when left-leaning critics of President Bush couldn’t stop talking about how nothing was more red, white, and blue than good old-fashioned American dissent? Why, our very country was founded by an act of dissent, didn’t you know! So back when Vice President Dick Cheney – routinely likened to Darth Vader and Voldemort – was running things, the very air was filled with cries of “not in our name” and all that, because it was so damned important that the United States not contravene its basic principles even in the name of self defense!
Those were good times, friends, and they stopped pretty much the minute that liberals and Democrats took control of the federal government. The antiwar movement disappeared once it became clear that Barack Obama wasn’t going to shut down Gitmo or stop bombing places or give a rat’s ass about that constitutional stuff he used to teach in law school.
But cheer up, because things can always get worse, as the last few days have demonstrated.
It’s like it was all just cheap partisan hackery all along.
February 7, 2013
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Having Sex In Public Could Help Your Marriage. Unless it lands you on some sort of list . . . .
SO I GUESS THIS MEANS THAT Lena Dunham is a virgin?
MICHAEL LEDEEN: Iran: The War Within and Without. “As I keep asking, if you wanted to design a policy to favor the success of our enemies and the despair of our friends (not just in the Middle East), how would your policy differ from what we’ve got now?”
READER BILL RICKORDS EMAILS: “So where are the calls for SPLC to take down its Kill Map?”
WHICH COLLEGE MAJORS PAY THE BEST? Engineering Now Trumps Business. “This is not surprising since the supply of these graduates is low, but the demand for them is high.”
REPORT: Baby Boomers’ Health Worse Than Their Parents. Their parents had fewer vices.