Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Have we tired sufficiently of the ruling class on Mount Olympus, er, Capitol Hill? Instead of citizen legislators who go to Washington as a public service, they go to wrap themselves in power and dictate to the rest of us what is good for us, but that we are too dim to know better. Their key objective every two, four, or six years is to get reelected so that they don’t have to return to dwell among the unwashed mortals. Had enough?
The families of the victims in the Tuscon shooting are experiencing agony which cannot be described in words. To understand it, it must be lived. To lose a child, a spouse, a sibling, a friend, neighbor or loved one to such a senseless tragedy leaves one in shock and despair. A feeling of vulnerability envelopes them. In an instant their worlds are turned upside down, and every day they will have to find a way to get through it, to learn how to cope without their loved one. I know. It happened to me.
Did you ever watch a business, celebrity, or government agency find itself in the middle of a media frenzy that it thinks will soon blow over and instead it only gets worse? In a way, I feel sorry for TSA Administrator John Pistole, but after listening to him try to defend what they are doing, a head slap is the more appropriate reaction. What are these idiots thinking?
As President Obama said while campaigning to be President of the United States, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig!” How true. Yesterday President Obama reached for the lipstick to dab on four proposals suggested by the Republicans to the massive pig of a health care proposal clinging to life. The four proposals are:
The pig smiled. She thought she looked beautiful. Just don’t try to put a bikini on her because, as President Obama famously said, she’s still a pig. Let’s look at the President’s magnanimous attempt at bipartisanship in detail.
1) Undercover Medical Professionals to Uncover Fraud
It is estimated that somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion is lost or stolen each year from Medicare and Medicaid. This program has been in place for 40 years. If those numbers are consistent over that period, that’s $4 TRILLION. Gone. Stolen from you and me. How much better shape would we be in if we had that money back? That’s government efficiency for you.
The President of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer in the country. The amount of Medicaid and Medicare losses each year are four times the entire budget of the Department of Justice. How’s this for a proposal? Create a Medicare/Medicaid fraud unit within the FBI and fund it so that we can stop these losses. If you stop the fraud, it’s free money. What you save in fraud should more than pay for the FBI funding. Why take medical professionals and give them law enforcement duties. Are you going to ask police to operate on you? Mr. President it’s your job to enforce the laws and prevent this widespread fraud. You don’t need a new act of Congress. Just Do It!
2) Tort Reform –No; “Demonstrations of Alternatives” — Yes
Trial lawyers are one of the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party. Do you think such “Demonstrations of Alternatives” will amount to anything other than hush money? “Shut up , we’re looking into tort reform.” The counter argument is that Americans have a right to their day in court when they have been injured. True enough, and I am reluctant to arbitrarily limit their awards through a fixed dollar limit. I would take aim squarely at the lawyers.
John Edwards, one-time Senator and presidential candidate, was involved in about 63 cases as a personal injury attorney and amassed a fortune of about $70 million. In one particular case, he stood before the jury and took on the persona of a child in the womb crying out for oxygen to appeal to the emotions of the jury and win the case. Oddly enough he voted against a ban on partial birth abortion. Gee, in the once case it’s a child who can actually speak while still in the womb! But on the other hand it is just a mass of tissue at birth that can be disposed of with the trash. We have learned a lot about the moral character of John Edwards. He is the poster boy for the old joke, “How do you know a lawyer is lying? His lips are moving.”
Here is a simple solution to tort reform. Fixed fees for attorneys and loser pays. The lawyers should set their hourly rate and bill according to hours worked, not how much they can squeeze out of the jury. The award should be for the benefit of the injured party, not the lawyer. The second part is to prevent frivolous lawsuits. The loser pays the legal fees of the winner. The argument here will be that the tables will be turned and no one will sue corporations for damages because of the risk of paying their legal fees. Right now lawyers are running a lottery fishing for lawsuits of any kind because they know that most corporations will settle for less than it would cost to defend the suit, even if they know they are right. All customers of that corporation pay more for their products (e.g., drugs, medical devices) and the lawyer gets rich. I am sure that if such a proposal as this gets passed a new market for “legal fee insurance” will open up where a plaintiff with a strong case can buy insurance to cover the cost of the other sides legal fees if they do lose.
3) Increasing Doctor Reimbursement for Medicare
So much for bending the cost curve down. The real way to curtail spending on health care is to eliminate 3rd party payers. (see It can be done).
4) Increase Health Savings Accounts
These plans exist today, however, they are not all available across state lines (see It can be done). I had such a plan in New York while employed by a company, but when I went out on my own I could not buy the same plan in New York State. We don’t need ObamaCare, we just need states to allow these plans to exist within their borders or allow individuals to buy across state lines.
The Pig Lives!
Three of the four Republican proposals that President Obama likes don’t cost anything. But he $1 trillion to $2 trillion health care catastrophe is still alive and until we slay that beast and start over we will go from a serious health care problem to a fiscal crisis and end up with both. If you don’t believe me, read how the model for ObamaCare is working in Massachusetts.
When you are waiting for someone an hour can seem like a long time, but when you really want to accomplish something an hour is really not that long. Here are some things you can’t do in an hour:
However there are some things that you can accomplish in less than an hour, such as:
That’s right #10 was completed in 50 minutes before the FBI decided to read him his Miranda rights and put him into the criminal justice system. You will probably not be surprised to find out that he soon had a lawyer who advised him to stop speaking to the FBI. So now if they want him to divulge any information they will have to go the plea bargain route up to and including setting him free. Aren’t you glad we got rid of Bush and Cheney? I mean, seriously, don’t you feel safer?
What Did He Know?
Does anyone believe what the Obama administration is telling us that they got everything they could out of this 23 year old novice in 50 minutes. The kid was definitely talking, so why stop him? He just got back from Yemen and probably had a wealth of information to give up. He belongs in Guantanamo. Are we not, as Obama finally admitted, at war? Or are we at war, but just not with this guy? (And by the way, Obama has been in office a year now so why hasn’t he captured Osama bin Laden? During the campaign he snorted that McCain wouldn’t even follow him to his cave, as if Obama had the address).
Regardless of your position on “enhanced interrogation techniques” and let’s just say you put those aside. You want to keep this guy where you can interrogate him again and again. Where you can work to gain his trust, and where you can corroborate other information you find until he has been in your custody so long his information is stale and no longer of use. Here’s a little secret for the Obama administration… it takes longer than 50 minutes.
An Embarrassment of Incompetence
Close on the heels of Janet Napolitano’s blundering at the helm of the Department of Homeland Security we have this astonishing exchange between Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, as reported in the Washington Examiner by Byron York:
On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace asked White House spokesman Robert Gibbs whether President Obama was informed of the decision to read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights before or after it was done. Gibbs avoided the question, saying, “That decision was made by the Justice Department and the FBI, with experienced FBI interrogators.” Gibbs stressed that “Abdulmutallab was interrogated and valuable intelligence was gotten as a result of that interrogation.”
Wallace pressed. “But we now find out he was interrogated for 50 minutes,” he said to Gibbs. “When they came back, he was read his Miranda rights and he clammed up.”
“No,” Gibbs answered. “Again, he was interrogated. Valuable intelligence was gotten based on those interrogations. And I think the Department of Justice and the — made the right decision, as did those FBI agents.”
“Let me just press one last question,” Wallace said. “You really don’t think that if you’d interrogated him longer that you might have gotten more information, since we now know that Al Qaeda in Yemen — ”
“Well, FBI interrogators believe they got valuable intelligence and were able to get all that they could out of him,” Gibbs said.
“All they could?” Wallace asked.
“Yeah,” Gibbs said.”
Sometimes I wonder if this is all a bad dream and I will wake up at some point, in a cold sweat, comforted in knowing that it was just that. With the enhanced interrogation techniques, aka waterboarding, that was used on exactly three very bad men, and yielded 60% of what we learned about Al Qaeda, we are now Mirandizing terrorists on the battlefield. For those who never got a sufficient dose of crime dramas on TV here is how the Miranda rights start:
“You have the right to remain silent…”
Say no more. That is all you have to know. From using a technique to compel these murderous fiends to give up information about their likeminded associates, we have moved to telling them it is their right not to say anything. Here’s my advice… steer clear of tall or government buildings.
How 9/11 Happened
This is exactly how 9/11 happened. The Clinton Administration treated terrorism as a law and order issue rather than a war on our way of life. They constructed walls between the FBI and CIA forbidding them to share information. What the CIA learned about the terrorists before 9/11 they couldn’t tell the FBI and vice versa. As a result we got blindsided.
It is interesting to note that in putting together the 9/11 Commission to investigate how it all happened and what we could do to prevent it happening again, Jamie Gorelick, the individual who constructed this barrier in her role in the Clinton White House, was added to the Commission panel when she should have been testifying before it. (Later, without any financial background she was appointed Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae, made millions during her tenure, and Fannie Mae’s actions led to the current financial debacle).
What more will the Obama Administration do to weaken our defenses?
Don't Anyone Dare Say Government Caused This Mess
You can never solve a problem if you do not face up to the full scope of the problem. In listening to President Obama, and reading liberal columnists like Maureen Dowd, in the description of what caused the current economic calamity, the government is always given a pass.
We are in an economic morass because of the eight years of failed Bush policies, greed on Wall Street, tax breaks for the rich, etc. Government’s culpability which, I believe, is really the gravamen of our economic problems is never mentioned at all. Democrats and Liberals don’t dare point to Democrats and liberal policies as having anything to do with the collapsing economy. That is why they always say that this is the worst economy since the Great Depression, as they also said when Clinton ran for President. They don’t dare say it is the worst economy since Jimmy Carter, since that would remind the American people that the Democrats screwed up that one as well.
Unmentionable Causes of the Current Economic Mess
So we have homeowners, who should have never qualified for a mortgage, about to receive bailouts from all the responsible people who took mortgages they could afford, when they could afford them. Do you ever hear about any of this cast of characters mentioned by President Obama or the main stream media? No. It wasn’t the government actively pushing social policy on those people least able to handle it. It was greedy banks and unscrupulous lenders, trying to avoid being branded racists, who took advantage of these poor ignorant people. Perhaps if the government hadn’t destroyed our education system, these people might have read what they were about to sign.
How Do you Solve Only Half a Problem?
As these characters are never mentioned as having a role in the problem, how can you ever hope to fix the problem if these bad actors are still going about their business doing what caused the crisis and blaming everyone else. President Obama demonstrates his inexperience more profoundly every day, seemingly making things up as he goes along. That is not leadership and what we need now in times of crisis is leadership. Obama has never shown the courage or willingness to take on his own party. Without rooting out these characters and really fixing the whole problem, it will only happen again down the road.
What we need now is a leader. Someone who actually has experience running the executive branch of a state. Someone who is not afraid to take on the entrenched power of their own party and has succeeded in doing so. Is there anyone out there who fits that bill? Gee, that sounds like Sarah Palin.
