Rebane's Ruminations
November 2026
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930  

ARCHIVES


OUR LINKS


YubaNet
White House Blog
Watts Up With That?
The Union
Sierra Thread
RL “Bob” Crabb
Barry Pruett Blog

  • George Rebane

    ‘Underneath every stack of government regulations lies a policeman’s gun.’  Anonymous

    Here’s a short puzzle –

    What will be specified in the IRS tax code, cost your family between $750 and $3,800 annually, is paid to the IRS, and for failure to pay will draw punishments of fines and jail time from a federal court, and yet is NOT a tax?

    ObamaChange

    Our Fearless Liar told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that this was not a tax, but a mandated fee that people who failed to buy health insurance would be forced to pay under ObamaCare.  He didn’t say that if you resist, they will kill you. 

    This tax was pronounced to be “not a tax” by a hubris laden leader who is taking the country beyond his promised “fundamental transformational change”.  His sonorous lies have now become a continuous torrent that daily soothes the many who remain in the terminal thrall of hopeful change.

    More truth about the Canadian one-payer healthcare system is bubbling to the surface, in spite of the full court propaganda press that the Left has mounted to extol the virtues of the healthcare heaven just north of the border.  There the rationing of all significant medical services has gotten so bad that even lower middle-class people are driving to the United States for treatments that range from timely tumor removals to surgeries that re-enable productive lives.

    But perhaps the most telling and verifiable symptom of Canada’s dysfunctional system is the emergence of the ‘private option’ that Team Obama says doesn’t work in America.  From today’s WSJ –

    Hoping to capitalize on patients who might otherwise go to the U.S. for speedier care, a network of technically illegal private clinics and surgical centers has sprung up in British Columbia, echoing a trend in Quebec. In October, the courts will be asked to decide whether the budding system should be sanctioned. More than 70 private health providers in British Columbia now schedule simple surgeries and tests such as MRIs with waits as short as a week or two, compared with the months it takes for a public surgical suite to become available for nonessential operations.

    A former Canadian healthcare professional sums it up nicely, “What we have in Canada is access to a government, state-mandated wait list.”

    Oh yes, almost all progressives will claim that no one will actually kill you for not paying ObamaCare’s opt-out tribute – that is just another bunch of libertarian hyperbole.  They will even go so far as to point out that your death at the hands of the local SWAT team came about because you used force to resist arrest, and not because you didn’t pay the mandated fee which you knew to be unconstitutional.  They will argue that your stated willingness to risk all against encroaching state tyranny was the product of a typical right-wing extremist brain that maintains insane notions about our Constitution.  All today’s proper thinkers know that the Constitution permits the government to mandate how you spend your healthcare dollars, and the subsequent use of deadly force to eliminate those who resist.

    It is these compassionate, sensitive, inclusive, and soft-headed people who don’t know how government must needs work, and why our Founders wrote the Constitution, not as an enabling document for the increase of government, but as a prescription for constraining the state from trampling individual liberties.

  • George Rebane

    I keep thinking that it can’t get worse.  Today I got an email from a reader that detailed just a small part of the horrors of this bill – the part describing how the feds are going to get into our pants on how we must live in and dispose of our private residences.  It sounded like a bunch of hyper-ventilation from the Right.  But I decided to check it out anyway.

    WaxmanMarkey

    The email detailed how the federal government will require the retrofitting of all private residences in order to qualify them for resale.  It claimed that one year after becoming law, this monstrosity will require all houses to start conforming to an escalating set of energy codes before they can be sold or rented.  Houses would be regularly inspected by a new state level bureaucracy and receive a “label” that is similar to a car license plate which must be displayed for all to see.  The label will also have the energy efficiency score of your house on it.

    Well, that sounds like a new full employment act for another legion of double dummies.  I could not conceive that, in addition to all the other horrors that are in HR2454 (aka Waxman-Markey), that Congress would also include such blatant provisions to remove more liberties from American citizens.  This would go beyond the slow creep of incrementalism designed to make us into a coddled, controlled, and compliant population that the socialists have been working on for decades.  HR 2454 would be a quantum leap.

    So I went to the government site where the latest version of HR2454 is posted and read the relevant sections (Nothing is easy about getting to a bill in Congress.  Go to this site, and then on the left side of the page click on ‘full text on Thomas’.  From there click on the most recent HR 2454 which gets you to the hyperlinked table of contents.  Click on Sections 202, 204, and 304 to read the text.  Courage!).  And there it was, as advertised.  I read it again and then came to some new conclusions.

    Rush Limbaugh and his ilk on the media have probably been co-opted by the Left.  Given the reality, for years these guys have been soft-soaping the advances of collectivists.  If they had really wanted to get the message across, they’d have had us with our pitchforks and torches out in the town squares ripping up cobblestones for barricades and singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.  But they have so downplayed our loss of liberties, and what’s yet to come, that we are now numb as we listen to their daily screeds.  Don’t believe me?  Just look at yourself.  You’ll just shrug this off – ‘what can I do?’ – and go about your business, never noticing that it gets conducted within an ever tightening circle.  You probably didn’t even read the goddam sections that I pointed out.

  • George Rebane

    The very liberal truthout.com is definitely worth a read as we attempt to understand the sparse reasoning behind their collectivist nostrums.  The latest edition contains an article – Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy – on how to create two million “green jobs” by four economists(??) from the leftwing Political Economy Research Institute.  They claim that a “$100 billion investment” by the government will put all these additional people to work on a track to solid green.

    GreenJobs

    The study reported in this article was prepared “under commission by the Center for American Progress and released by a coalition of labor and environmental groups. The authors are Robert Pollin, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz, and Helen Scharber of PERI.”  Now you know that if a conservative policy analysis outfit did such a study that was sponsored by any wealth creating or condoning enterprise, the left would claim that the results were prima facie biased because of the sponsorship.  There is no need here to make a counter claim against the professed PERI study, its results are simply ludicrous as they stand.

    Most people know that a government can print money and put ANY NUMBER of people to work doing ANYTHING – but only for a while.  There is nothing market sustainable in the green jobs that PERI has discovered, and the inevitable result will be an economic collapse as has occurred with so many socialist and communist state-sponsored enterprises during the last century.  It is hard to imagine who else besides “a coalition of labor and environmental groups” would sponsor such studies from PERI, save perhaps Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez.

    Just ask yourself one simple question – ‘The feds are already printing and spending trillions of dollars in their economic recovery programs, if the PERI study has any credibility, why stop with a $100 billion “investment”, why not take one of those new trillions and create ten million new green jobs and completely wipe out unemployment, then we would be off on a rip-roaring start to a new age of squeaky clean green?’

  • George Rebane

    IslamonCapitol

    The past week is now folded into the pages of history.  Iran pre-empted Obama’s revelation that it had another major facility for producing nuclear materials for “peaceful uses”.  In response, our National Naif assembled his counterparts from Britain and France to dutifully scribble yet one more line in the sand, while the imams in Teheran worry about getting double hernias from laughing their butts off.

    Our progressives applauded this stroke of brilliant coalition building against Iran – an ability, they claim, evaded Bush2.  At the same time Israel is putting finishing touches on its plan take out as much of Iran’s WMD capability as it can with its F-15s and F-16s, while working feverishly to complete its Jericho3 long range missile that can reach all parts of Iran.  Meanwhile, the price of oil and gold yawned.  I feel safer already.

    (more…)

  • George Rebane

    – Advanced, cheaper solar panels rival fossil-fuel electricity;
    – Human made crises coming faster than we can deal with them;
    – Orwellian public monitoring system developed by EU;
    – Nanotube springs as energy storage devices may replace batteries;
    – New omni-flu vaccine, ‘one dab’ll do ya’.
    – The future of human enhancement from Nick Bostrom

    FutureHuman

    New breakthroughs in solar panels promise to start providing electricity at costs competing with fossil fuel powered generators (here).  The advent of such unexpected technological developments in all fields is the prime reason why we should never allow government to become the gatekeeper to innovation in any field.  Today we have governments that more than ever seek to lay their cold, dead hands on human creativity.

    In the meantime, there are people who point out that worldwide man-made crises are multiplying faster than our ability to deal with them.  Here is a report on how some scientists are calling for greater global control of everything we do so that life on earth can achieve some grand social engineering goals held by certain people.  My concern is that these scientists may be the intellectual descendants of the ones that had similar aims in the 1920s and 30s.  They seem to have skipped the technical courses teaching that central control of complex systems doesn’t work very well.

    (more…)

  • George Rebane

    Lemmings

    First Fibber and Nobel Al are still telling everyone within earshot that Waxman-Markey is going to be a big boost to the economy as taxes and fees are slapped on every imagined and imaginable emission of CO2 into the atmosphere.  I mean, like aren’t we excited about all the green jobs coming to a neighborhood near you.  Here in Nevada County the local green cheerleader troupe already has their uniforms, and is practicing their routine.  These folks are more convinced than the tragic-comic Cargo Cult that carbon footprints can be reduced by hauling stuff sixty miles into the mountains, working on it, and then hauling it back down the mountain to the markets.

    And for letting him stay four more years, Helicopter Ben will make sure that the dollars keep raining down to make all this “sustainable” once those cap n’ tax spigots are opened.

    So, just as everything is shaping up for the final big push through Congress, Harvard professor, Robert Stavins, writes (here) in today’s WSJ –

    … The move to greener power doesn’t have to be completed immediately, and it doesn’t have to be painful. The right transition plan will increase consumers’ bills gradually and modestly, and allow companies to make gradual, well-timed moves. …

    Well, that admission is at least a start, but I’m not sure that anything will bend the True Believers from their march to the cliff.  Even Stavins, like all the other Waxman-Markey proponents, glosses over and avoids the economic and technical facts related to curbing carbon emissions to achieve the stated goals.  Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute reminds us of the realities here.

  • George Rebane

    HusbandChair

    This is actually a little nudge toward economic recovery during hard times (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, Obama’s Nudge Czar).  This weekend Jo Ann and I are celebrating the evening we first met fifty years ago as sorority/fraternity pledges at UCLA.  What happened there and afterwards is another story, but yesterday we decided to go to town and check out Nevada City’s ‘Sidewalk Sale’.  I think she had it all planned, because pretty soon we wound up in one of our fine jewelry stores on Broad Street.

    As she started inspecting all the great looking inventory, most of it made right there by the owner/jeweler, my mind wandered quickly – my body followed.  Soon I had gawked at ‘everything’ in the store, and was studying the wall hangings for the third time, and then looked at my watch, and then I thought about just dragging her out of the store.  I was bored.

    Now, heads-up merchants know this little scenario, and have provided a cost-effective remedy that will keep the wayward husband from screwing up the likelihood of a sale.  They put in a comfortable armchair or two, and some even have within reach a few appropriate magazines – oh, you know, past issues of ‘Guns and Grenades’, ‘Popular Mechanics’, ‘Broads and Boobs’ (aka Victoria’s Secret catalog or its moral equivalent), … .  And before you know it, she comes back with ‘How does this look on me?’ or better, ‘Honey, look what I bought.’

    (more…)

3 comments on The Language of ObamaCare