Political Digest August 25 2009

Bay State health insurance premiums highest in country
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/08/22/bay_state_health_insurance_premiums_highest_in_country/
When something is cheap, people use more of it. Basic Economics. Free healthcare is very cheap.

Explaining the Town-Hall Protests
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204884404574362333085067364.html
Excerpt: Why are they so angry? The reasons are manifold, but the single biggest reason is the arrogance of our elected officials in Washington. Think about it. For the past seven months a small group of politicians has been meeting behind-closed-doors with powerful special interests to decide whether you will be able to keep your current insurance, where you will be directed to get new insurance and at what price, what fines you and your employer will have to pay if you don't conform, and how they're going to get your doctor to change the way he or she practices medicine. In the process, they never asked you what you thought about anything. If you are not mad about this, odds are you don't understand the situation. Remember, according to a Fox News poll conducted last month, 84% of Americans rate the quality of their insurance as "excellent" or "good." When they voted for Mr. Obama for president, they thought "universal care" meant helping some unfortunate Americans obtain insurance they cannot otherwise afford. Not once did candidate Obama say he was going to make changes that affected them and their health care. In fact, he promised the opposite.

The Competition Cure
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970203550604574360923109310680.html
Excerpt: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius routinely calls for more choice and competition in health care. In his weekly address this past weekend, President Obama raised the issue directly: "The source of a lot of these fears about government-run health care is confusion over what's called the public option. This is one idea among many to provide more competition and choice, especially in the many places around the country where just one insurer thoroughly dominates the marketplace." We take it this refers to a state in which one insurer holds most of the business. It is no secret that this page is all for competition in the marketplace. If indeed that's the goal, allow us to suggest a path to it that will be a lot easier than erecting the impossible dream of a public option: Let insurance companies sell health-care policies across state lines.

Union Car Czar Poised to Dictate America's Manufacturing Policy
http://www.nrtw.org/en/blog/union-car-czar-poised-dictate-manufacturing-p08212009
Excerpt: The Obama Administration may elevate Ron Bloom, head of the government's auto task force, to a job that would set U.S. manufacturing policy more broadly, people familiar with the matter said. Bloom's responsibilities at the new position? They're extensive, to say the least. As the chief policy maker on manufacturing, Bloom would be charged with reviewing U.S. competitiveness in the global economy. His job would likely encompass trade, taxes and other economic issues . . .

Town Hall Meeting with U.S. Congressman Brian Baird
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rRE5UK6NQU
Marine vet at Congressman’s Town Hall meeting.

Health Care and Infant Mortality: The Real Story
http://townhall.com/columnists/SteveChapman/2009/08/23/health_care_and_infant_mortality_the_real_story
Excerpt: African-American babies are far more likely to die than white ones, which is often taken as evidence that poverty and lack of health insurance are to blame. That's entirely plausible until you notice another racial/ethnic gap: Hispanics of Mexican or Central or South American ancestry not only do consistently better than blacks on infant mortality, they do better than whites. Social disadvantage doesn't explain very much.

What's with Obama's Obsession: Body Parts?
http://townhall.com/columnists/KevinMcCullough/2009/08/23/whats_with_obamas_obsession_body_parts
Excerpt: In speech after speech on the need for the federalizing control of a national health care system President Obama has taken to insulting the wrong people--physicians--but beyond that he has turned them into orated illustrations of terror.

Barack Obama’s Administration Kills a Military Fly Over
http://www.redstate.com/erick/2009/08/21/barack-obamas-administration-kills-a-military-fly-over/
Excerpt: For 42 years, the God and Country Rally in Idaho has started its rally with a military fly over. The God and Country Rally is a non-denominational rally that supports American soldiers. For 42 years the Pentagon has carried out the military fly over. Not any more. In Barack Obama’s America, the military is no longer allowed to do such things if the group requesting the fly over is Christian oriented.

Our Veterans deserve better than Obama's VA 'Death Book' directive.
http://www.examiner.com/x-9100-Boston-Conservative-Independent-Examiner~y2009m8d21-Our-Veterans-deserve-better-than-Obamas-VA-Death-Book-directive
Where death is a viable option!

Interesting GW video
http://ceiondemand.org/2009/07/17/policy-peril-global-warming/

Taliban cuts off index fingers of two women who voted
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/027307.php
More of the values BO says we share with Islam.

Obamacare-Point and Counterpoint
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/obamacarepoint_and_counterpoin.html
Excerpt: By Frank S. Rosenbloom, M.D. Mr. Obama has gone back on the campaign trail to try to sell his health care reform to the nation. Mostly hand-picked, sympathetic attendees have been showing up to his town hall meetings. He continues to make the same points regarding health care reform, which need to be addressed specifically. I hope to address more in future articles.

Another Promise Broken -- in Record Time
http://townhall.com/columnists/PaulGreenberg/2009/08/21/another_promise_broken_--_in_record_time
Excerpt: The outstanding example of this cynical manipulation of justice is how a case against the New Black Panthers, which the Department of Justice described as a "black super-racist organization," has been quickly and quietly shelved with minimal attention to the law and the Constitution.

Muslim smugglers hid heroin in Koran -- watch for the international riots
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/027300.php
Excerpt: Remember Newsweek's spurious "Koran in the toilet" story, and the outrage and murder it touched off? There is almost certainly going to be no similar outcry from Muslims about this story -- which provides yet more evidence of the fact that that outrage was trumped up in the first place, politically motivated, and designed to try to intimidate the West into making various concessions. This incident has no such potential value, and thus will drop into the memory hole with no jihadists noting or remembering it.

The Puzzling War on the Elderly
http://www.john-goodman-blog.com/the-puzzling-war-on-the-elderly/#more-4816
There are a group of private health plans that are ostensibly doing everything President Obama says he wants to accomplish with health reform:
--They provide subsidized coverage to low- and moderate-income people who could otherwise not afford it.
--They control costs better than conventional insurance by eliminating unnecessary care.
--They provide higher quality care.
--They have no pre-existing condition limitations and some plans actually specialize in attracting and caring for patients with multiple illnesses.
--They provide an annual choice of plans.
--They even compete against a public plan.
So what does President Obama think about these plans? He wants to get rid of them, or at least cut them way back. So do many Democrats in Congress.

Quote
"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism.... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers."--English writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)