Wonderboy Grasps At Straws In The BP Oil Mess

Wonderboy has begun to look more and more like a tyrant concerning the BP Gulf Coast oil rig disaster.

Last week, he crossed the line between government and private industry, demanding that BP cease spending money on public image ads, and fuming over the company's payment of dividends to its shareholders.

Funny, but I thought private sector, publicly-held companies answered to their shareholders, not the federal government. That shareholders retained management to run the company for them, not for the whims of the president of the US.

Later that evening, on Fox News, a guest noted how much the federal government has spent on pamphlets mailed to seniors lying about new medical care coverage and declining costs of said coverage. The cost of that mailing dwarfed BP's image-related ad spending. The guest noted that the money for these pointless mailings was deficit spending, since the government has spent far beyond any incoming revenues this year.

I guess it depends on who is doing the spending whether or not it's deemed wasteful, eh?

Then, yesterday morning, I caught repeated clips of the First Rookie on a network morning program claiming he'd been down to the Gulf, worrying over the rig and its spewing oil, way before any "talking heads were onto it."

Really? I think that's an outright lie. If memory serves, the first governmental employees sent down to the Gulf were lawyers from DOJ. The rig fire and resulting oil fountain were news well before Wonderboy flew down in his natty dress to stand on a beach and whine about the incident.

It's not like nobody else noticed, until he discovered the oil leaking from the sea bottom.

This guy just can't stop himself from crossing boundaries, threatening and intimidating private sector companies, or just plain lying, can he?

How The Left Lies

The Wall Street Journal carried an interesting editorial this weekend by Edward Epstein describing how economist Paul Krugman wrote a baldfaced lie concerning the government's suit against Goldman Sachs.

According to Epstein, Krugman asserted a false claim that the SEC accused Goldman of particular actions involving the Abacus CDOs which simply were not in the complaint. Specifically, Epstein wrote,

"On April 18, Paul Krugman stated in his New York Times column that "the S.E.C. is charging that Goldman created and marketed securities that were deliberately designed to fail, so that an important client could make money off that failure. That's what I would call looting." In fact, the SEC complaint never alleges that Goldman deliberately designed any securities to fail."

Epstein's editorial makes the point that much of the liberal press' rants regarding the SEC suit against Goldman have been purely to stoke misguided public ire in order to drive passage of the recent House and Senate financial regulatory bills.

On that score, Epstein wrote,

"The passage of this bill did not occur in a vacuum. The administration carefully laid the groundwork by inculcating public fear that the great financial houses betray investors by rigging securities to fail. Exhibit A" the SEC's recent fraud case against Goldman Sachs."

How right Mr. Epstein is. How long it will take for the truth to eventually win out, and these mistaken bills to be repealed or substantially rewritten, is anybody's guess. But, in the meantime, don't expect a robust economic recovery.

That would probably require a healthy US capital market and financial sector, which will be a challenge given the government's apparent desire to cripple both.

Barney Frank's Lie Caught On Video

Here are two videos which conclusively prove Barney Frank is lying about his longtime support for government-assisted housing finance.

The first video, as noted, is from several years ago.



This next video is from last week. I actually saw the interview in which Frank lied. This clip includes a key portion of the same video as shown above.



Thanks to technology, scum like Barny Frank can no longer lie with absolute impunity. Rather than having to sift through a paper trail years old, you can now just search YouTube and catch the bastard in the act on video.

WellPoint's Angela Braly Refutes Wonderboy's Lies

Thank God someone finally called Wonderboy on his bald-faced lies about health care in the US.

Angela Braly, CEO of WellPoint, a much-maligned health insurer, wrote a letter to our First Rookie over the weekend explicitly refuting his lies concerning WellPoint's actions towards women with breast cancer.

Wonderboy accused the firm, though not explicitly by name, in a radio address,

"when we found out that an insurance company was systematically dropping the coverage of women diagnosed with breast cancer, my administration called on them to put an end to this practice immediately."

Braly shot back, in her letter,

"I was disappointed to hear you repeat false information regarding WellPoint's coverage of breast cancer...To be absolutely clear: despite your claims, WellPoint does not single out women with breast cancer for rescission. Period."

Additionally, Braly requested to meet with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. This request has gone unmet and unanswered. Perhaps Sebelius is busy finding more lies to give to Wonderboy to tell the American people in his many public appearances.

As WellPoint notes, health insurance, being, well, insurance, is heavily regulated at the state level. There really isn't, and historically has not been a major role for the federal government in private health insurance.

Thus, presidential scapegoating is way over the top. Plenty of state regulatory commissions- 50, in fact....or 57, if you count the number of states the way Wonderboy does.

Once again, we see this administration bullying a private company. This time, by lying about the company's practices. Not misinterpreting, but simply lying about the company's actions.

What a friendly place the US has become to do business, eh?

Duped: Tim Robbins Stumps for John Edwards

Before the sad, ugly saga of lying John Edwards slips out of focus for good, check out this video clip from December of 2007.

Liberal actor Tim Robbins plays the role of dupe. Only, it's not a fictional role. It's the real, gullible Robbins, stumping for Edwards in Iowa.

Note his mention of Edwards' "integrity." Pretty laughable and pathetic, isn't it?

Next time you hear Robbins pontificate on things political, remember his appallingly bad read on Edwards' character.

Wonderboy Uses Alinsky's Tactics On Paul Ryan

The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel wrote an excellent piece in Friday's edition detailing how Wonderboy is employing his hero, Saul Alinsky's tactics against Congressman Paul Ryan, R-W.

Ryan is one of the most outspoken of Republican House members on the subject of healthcare, and has offered reasonable, effective ideas for health care reform over the past year.

Of course, Wonderboy and his Congressional allies initially ignored Ryan, then cried that the GOP is the party of "no."

Now, hard on the heels of the First Rookie's claim that he'll listen to any new ideas on health care, he has, according to Strassel, fingered Ryan.

Then set his attack dogs after the Republican.

The president's budget director weighed in to criticize Ryan's plan, while ignoring questions about Wonderboy's own scheme. Democratic House members chimed in, as if on cue.

Strassel views all of this, correctly, through the lens of classic Alinsky doctrine,

"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

The Democrats in Washington aren't interested in any new or other ideas on health care, aside from their own monstrosity.

And their recent actions, from Wonderboy to his minions, bears this out.

Liberal Democrat Lies As Talking Points

Yesterday, as I was briefly channel surfing in the early afternoon, I came across one of those local access political interview programs.

Being New Jersey-centered, it had the hallmarks of a small-time affair. Among the pundits was an impossibly young woman who was representing the liberal Democratic position.

Although it was ostensibly a local political venue, the topic seemed to be national health care. One of the hosts was asking the young liberal woman what was going to happen with the health care bill now, and the guest dutifully assured the hostess that the House would now pass the Senate's bill, as is.

What came next from her mouth, however, was something for which I was totally unprepared. Two outright lies.

The Democrat's carefully worded remarks were, to paraphrase,

'We have to fix health care, because it's 16% of the economy. And we have to fix the economy, so, because health care is a big part of it, the economy won't be fixed until we fix health care.

And health care is all intertwined. So it can't be solved in small steps. It has to be one big bill, because it's so complex.'

These are two incredibly huge lies. But it shows you how determined the liberal Democrats in Washington are to have their party march in lockstep, even down to some piss ant 20-something liberal Democratic 'strategist' on a local NJ cable political hour.

First, government isn't, and can't, "fix" the economy. This pretty young thing's head is evidently all messed up on how a market economy actually works.

The US economy isn't "broken." It's been in a recession, which is a naturally-occurring phase of any market economy. And if "fixing" the economy involves, to judge by Wonderboy's actions, owning the domestic auto industry and handing it to the UAW, I don't think we need any more of that sort of "fixing." We simply can't afford it.

As to healthcare, it can be reformed. But in steps. It's an outright lie to contend that it's so complex that only a 2,000-3,000 page Congressional bill, which nobody will read in its entirety, and which conveniently rewrites the tax code and other key parts of American life, can provide said reform.

In this recent post, I echoed the GOP's Congressional leadership's call for action on several independent, but related health care points,

"The Congressional Republicans put forth alternative plans and amendments addressing the following aspects of health care reform:

1. Tort reform.
2. Interstate marketing of health insurance
3. Uniform pre- or after-tax treatment of health insurance premiums
4. Removal of mandates so that each buyer may purchase exactly what health insurance fits their needs.
5. Health savings accounts.
6. Federally-provided vouchers to the poor to buy health insurance, including, if necessary, for those with pre-existing conditions, federally-supplied health insurance of last resort.

Congressional Democrats ignored all of these ideas. So did Wonderboy."

Congress could pass legislation on each of these points irrespective of the others. True, together, they'll work much better. But each can stand on its own, contributing, over time, to the slowing in the growth of health care costs, providing equal cost-bases to all Americans for health insurance, and the ability of each person to buy just the health care they want, and no more.

To contend this is not possible is a lie.

Pure and simple.

Wonderboy's Big Healthcare Lie In The State of the Union Address

I couldn't bear to watch the lengthy whining that promised to be Wonderboy's State of the Union address last night.

However, I saw salient passages on the various news programs. And the one that really struck me as the baldfaced lie our First Rookie told when he claimed to be open to ideas about health care reform.

I don't have the exact quote, but he essentially said,

'If anyone has an idea to improve the quality of health care and reduce its cost, I want to hear it!'

Of course, this is a total lie.

The Congressional Republicans put forth alternative plans and amendments addressing the following aspects of health care reform:

1. Tort reform.
2. Interstate marketing of health insurance
3. Uniform pre- or after-tax treatment of health insurance premiums
4. Removal of mandates so that each buyer may purchase exactly what health insurance fits their needs.
5. Health savings accounts.
6. Federally-provided vouchers to the poor to buy health insurance, including, if necessary, for those with pre-existing conditions, federally-supplied health insurance of last resort.

Congressional Democrats ignored all of these ideas. So did Wonderboy.

Even last night, he continued to lie through his teeth, claiming to be open to all ideas which would improve US health care.

Looks like three more years of the same from this president. A lot of self-impressing rhetoric composed mostly of lies.

Harry Reid's Twisted Logic

Perhaps this week the nation has seen why Harry Reid will probably be leaving the Senate next year after an electoral defeat.



That's right. Democratic Senate majority leader equates speaking out against his health care bill with having been for slavery.

Never mind that Reid, nor his ally, Baucus, steadfastly stiff-armed Republican ideas and amendments to their bills.

Nor that many voters simply want more reasonable, reasoned, considered reform that is genuinely bipartisan.

No, to simpleton Harry Reid, if you are not backing his style of health care reform, then you're no better than someone who backed slavery.

So much for free speech and debate in America. Try that, and a Democratic Senator will accuse you of supporting slavery.

No wonder he's trailing both GOP candidates for his seat in next year's election.

Phil Jones Goes Down Over Global Warming Lies

As I described in this recent post, the hacking of East Anglia Climate Center's server resulted in publication of emails that revealed lies, distortions and other dishonest behavior by scientists claiming that global warming is real and poses a great threat to mankind.

Now, the Center's head, Phil Jones, has stepped down amidst the furor. His colleague, American scientist Michael Mann, is being investigated by his university for wrongdoing connected to the emails and various articles he has written, and possible data manipulation or suppression.

Of course, America's liberal media has missed this story. Al Gore is also nowhere in sight as the scientists and science behind Warm Boy Al's current money machine is revealed to be a fraud.

California liberal Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Energy Committee, also seems to be absent as the climate research fraud becomes more clear.

Fortunately, the story is getting plenty of attention elsewhere around the globe. Other countries take much more seriously spending trillions of dollars for carbon emission controls when the science behind the prescriptions is now being called into serious question as the fabrication of a few self-anointed climate zealots.

Score one for common sense and freedom of information.

Now, More Inconvenient Climate Truths

Some embarrassing information- inconvenient truths, if you will- recently came to light. A Wall Street Journal piece provides some of the details.

Keith Johnson begins his article,

"The scientific community is buzzing over thousands of emails and documents -- posted on the Internet last week after being hacked from a prominent climate-change research center -- that some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend humans are responsible for global warming.

The correspondence between dozens of climate-change researchers, including many in the U.S., illustrates bitter feelings among those who believe human activities cause global warming toward rivals who argue that the link between humans and climate change remains uncertain.

Some emails also refer to efforts by scientists who believe man is causing global warming to exclude contrary views from important scientific publications."

Oops! No politicization or fraudulent behavior here, eh? And what about all those liberals contending that "the debate is over?"

The article continues,

""This is horrible," said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute in Washington who is mentioned negatively in the emails. "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical." "

Yeah, it ends faster when your side lies about the facts, doesn't it?

The Journal piece reports,

"In all, more than 1,000 emails and more than 2,000 other documents were stolen Thursday from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the U.K. The identity of the hackers isn't certain, but the files were posted on a Russian file-sharing server late Thursday, and university officials confirmed over the weekend that their computer had been attacked and said the documents appeared to be genuine.

Most climate scientists today argue that the earth's temperature is rising, and nearly all of those agree that human activity is likely to be a prime or at least significant cause. But a vocal minority dispute one or both of those views.

A partial review of the hacked material suggests there was an effort at East Anglia, which houses an important center of global climate research, to shut out dissenters and their points of view.

In the emails, which date to 1996, researchers in the U.S. and the U.K. repeatedly take issue with climate research at odds with their own findings. In some cases, they discuss ways to rebut what they call "disinformation" using new articles in scientific journals or popular Web sites.

The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with.

In another, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday."

So, basically, these liberal global warming theorists have been at work for more than a decade lying, falsifying data, intimidating and foreclosing the publication of dissenters.

Not only does it seem that the debate on human sources of climate change isn't over. It appears that we can't even trust the data, since these emails provide evidence that it's been tainted by these biased researchers.

About That 37th Place US Ranking In Health Care From WHO

When the initial proposition or premise of an argument over a major decision is found to be false, it's usually time to stop the debate and revisit the entire context of the debate.

Such a situation has now been revealed to be true for the US health care debate. Specifically, Wonderboy and his party's members have made a point of claiming to exhaustion that the US health care systems is ranked "37th in the world." This, we are told, is the reason for redesigning the whole mess. When, that is, the administration isn't claiming that excessive health care costs as a burden on business is the leading reason to redesign the health care system.

Last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal carried a fascinating piece by Carl Bialik in his column, The Numbers Guy, entitled "Ill-Conceived Ranking Makes for Unhealthy Debate."

It should be required reading for every Congressional and administration member, as well as any voter interested in the health care debate. Because Mr. Bialik's piece is so important and, being the WSJ, it won't be searchable by non-paying readers, I've reposted substantial portions of his column, in order to accurately present the big picture of the WHO data.

Before launching into Mr. Bialik's piece, let me provide a general orientation to the topic. Having been a quantitative type from my early years in undergraduate business school, I am fairly well-versed in both doing and critiquing the work of others. Just because someone cites a study, that doesn't mean the study has any bearing on the topic at hand.

Research methodology, as composed of definitions of terms, measurement approaches, and analytical techniques, to name a few components, has many dimensions which may be evaluated for either error, or context for interpretation of results and conclusions.

Mr. Bialik very capably reveals many aspects of the WHO report which mitigate its use as the Democrats and liberals have been applying it in the current health care debate.

Mr. Bialik begins his article,

"During the health-care debate, one damning statistic keeps popping up in newspaper columns and letters, on cable television and in politicians' statements: The U.S. ranks 37th in the world in health care.

The trouble is, the ranking is dated and flawed, and has contributed to misconceptions about the quality of the U.S. medical system.

Among all the numbers bandied about in the health-care debate, this ranking stands out as particularly misleading. It is based on a report released nearly a decade ago by the World Health Organization and relies on statistics that are even older and incomplete.

Few people who cite the ranking are aware that some public-health officials were skeptical of the report from the outset. The ranking was faulted because it judges health-care systems for problems -- cultural, behavioral, economic -- that aren't controlled by health care."

So we learn at the outset that even those in the medical field don't take the vaunted WHO report at its face value.

"It's a very notorious ranking," says Mark Pearson, head of health for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the 30-member, Paris-based organization of the world's largest economies. "Health analysts don't like to talk about it in polite company. It's one of those things that we wish would go away."

More recent efforts to rank national health systems have been inconclusive. On measures such as child mortality and life expectancy, the U.S. has slipped since the 2000 rankings. But some researchers say that factors beyond the control of the health-care system are to blame, such as dietary habits. Studies that have attempted to exclude these factors from the equation don't agree on whether the U.S. system looks better or worse."

Here we see a failing on the very first element of research design. One of my graduate school mentors, Wharton Marketing Professor Jerry Wind, taught me that if I could not construct the data analysis plan and tables prior to going into the field with my research instrument (questionnaire), then I wasn't ready to field the instrument. A good researcher already has the data analysis plan detailed, with each individual analysis specified, just from knowing what the questions and form of the responses will be.

Foremost among these are the so-called objective variables, i.e., the outcome measures for which causal or related variables are being sought and which effects are being measured.

On that topic, controlling for things which may affect, but aren't strictly part of the study, is critical. In the area of medical system effectiveness, common sense dictates that you need to control for the incoming patients' uncontrollable initial conditions. This would include things like lifestyle variables- diet, exercise, even genetics. Apparently, none of this was done in the WHO study.

"The WHO ranking was ambitious in its scope, grading each nation's health care on five factors. Two of these were relatively uncontroversial: health level, which is roughly the average healthy lifespan of a nation's residents; and responsiveness, which is a sort of customer-service rating encompassing factors such as the system's speed, choice and quality of amenities. The other three measure inequality in health-care outcomes; responsiveness; and individual spending.

These last three measures struck some analysts as problematic, because a country with unhealthy people could rank above a healthier one where there was a bigger gap between healthy and unhealthy people. It is certainly possible that spreading health care as evenly as possible makes a society healthier, but the rankings struck some health-care researchers as assuming that, rather than demonstrating it."

Here, we see the problems arising from what I just mentioned. Health-care outcomes seems a reasonable topic, but "individual spending?" This latter item would absolutely be conditioned upon the initial health situation of individuals. Thus, without some control across populations measured, this measure will be meaningless.

Yet health care spending is one of the two major clubs with which liberals beat the US health care system as poorly performing.

"An even bigger problem was shared by all five of these factors: The underlying data about each nation generally weren't available. So WHO researchers calculated the relationship between those factors and other, available numbers, such as literacy rates and income inequality. Such measures, they argued, were linked closely to health in those countries where fuller health data were available. Even though there was no way to be sure that link held in other countries, they used these literacy and income data to estimate health performance.


Philip Musgrove, the editor-in-chief of the WHO report that accompanied the rankings, calls the figures that resulted from this step "so many made-up numbers," and the result a "nonsense ranking." Dr. Musgrove, an economist who is now deputy editor of the journal Health Affairs, says he was hired to edit the report's text but didn't fully understand the methodology until after the report was released. After he left the WHO, he wrote an article in 2003 for the medical journal Lancet criticizing the rankings as "meaningless."

The objects of his criticism, including Christopher Murray, who oversaw the ranking for the WHO, responded in a letter to the Lancet arguing that WHO "has an obligation to provide the best available evidence in a timely manner to Member States and the scientific community." It also credited the report with achieving its "original intent" of stimulating debate and focus on health systems."

This is stunning! First, we learn that many of the desired data items were simply absent. So rather than either reduce the scope of the study, or redesign it to use available data, the researchers simply grabbed at some presumed correlated measures in some countries, then applied those correlative associations to completely different societies and economies. This technique basically assumes the result, since one uses assumed relationships to churn out "results," which are, of course, as expected, because, well, you created them from an a priori formula.

The results are truly useless, as Dr. Musgrove contends. Further, as Mr. Murray states, the study was only supposed to stimulate "debate and focus on health systems." This would mean it wasn't intended to be conclusive, or used as conclusive evidence about anything actionable. Only to spur debate.

In effect, the WHO designed a flawed study which was only meant, anyway, to provide some rough directional findings for debate. Not to conclude that this or that country was demonstrably better or worse on health care system performance. Precisely what US liberals wishing to nationalize health care are now doing.

"Prof. Murray, now director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle, says that "the biggest problem was just data" -- or the lack thereof, in many cases. He says the rankings are now "very old," and acknowledges they contained a lot of uncertainty. His institute is seeking to produce its own rankings in the next three years. The data limitations hampering earlier work "are why groups like ours are so focused on trying to get rankings better."

A WHO spokesman says the organization has no plans to update the rankings, and adds, "We would not consider it current."

Here, we have the WHO contending that a study which is 10 years old is still current in its implications. Does anyone else seriously believe this?

More importantly, do you rip up and redesign one of the world's more complex and effective health care systems, some 15% of the US economy, on the unreliable conclusions of a decade-old study not even intended to provide firm conclusions for any actions?

"And yet many people apparently do. The 37th place ranking is often cited in today's overhaul debate, even though, in some ways, the U.S. actually ranked a lot higher. Specifically, it placed 15th overall, based on its performance in the five criteria. But for the most widely publicized form of its rankings, the WHO took the additional step of adjusting for national health expenditures per capita, to calculate each country's health-care bang for its bucks. Because the U.S. ranked first in spending, that adjustment pushed its ranking down to 37th. Dominica, Costa Rica and Morocco ranked 42nd, 45th and 94th before adjusting for spending levels, compared to the U.S.'s No. 15 ranking. After adjustment, all three countries ranked higher than the U.S.

Still, people often claim that the 37th-place ranking refers to quality or outcomes. High spending rates pushed the ranking down but didn't degrade the quality of care. Among those who have recently failed to make that distinction in published comments are Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette; Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin; and Margaret E. O'Kane, president of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, an advocacy group.

Representatives for Ms. DeGette and Mr. Harkin didn't respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for the National Committee for Quality Assurance said, "WHO is a respected organization. ...We have no reason to believe it is inaccurate, and we would never knowingly misrepresent or misuse another organization's data."

Here we see that many US politicians don't even know the details of the WHO study they cite. This is, as I noted in my earlier comments, perhaps the worst way in which research studies are used. Yet that is precisely what liberal US Congressional members are doing with this flawed WHO study of a decade ago.

"The flawed WHO report shouldn't obscure that the U.S. is lagging its peers in some major barometers of public health. For instance, the U.S. slipped from 18th to 24th in male life expectancy from 2000 to 2009, according to the United Nations, and from 28th to 35th in female life expectancy. Its rankings in preventing male and female under-5 mortality also fell, and placed in the 30s.

But even such analyses, more limited in scope than the WHO's effort, face similar problems: How to differentiate between the quality of the medical system and other factors, such as diet, exercise and violent-crime rates.

Some think that if the U.S. health-care system isn't responsible for troubling outcomes, trying to fix it doesn't provide the best return on investment.

"We might get more bang for the buck by setting aside some of our health-care money to support novel approaches to improve nutrition, education, exercise or public safety," says Alan Garber, an economist and professor of medicine at Stanford University. "Not every health problem has a medical solution."Nor can everything be ranked -- especially health-care systems. "I think it's a fool's errand," says Dr. Musgrove."

And here we have the "Sunday punch," as it were, from misusing the WHO study's report.

Let's take the two negative health trends in US male and female life expectancy cited above.

Any sensible person would first ask,

"Which countries moved up in the rankings, which are above the US, and what is different in those societies and countries from the US?"

You wouldn't just assume the difference was due to the countries' health care systems. Diet, lifestyles, genetics, or other cultural differences could all figure more prominently than health care systems.

There is so much detailed commentary one could make on the WHO study's flaws that it's really impossible to do so from the outside. But it's a pretty good bet that to study the various aspects of comparative health care systems' effectiveness's, a lot of smaller studies focused on specific topics in more controlled situations would have produced much more valuable, credible and actionable findings.

From what I read in Mr. Bialik's excellent piece, I have no confidence in any part of the WHO report on health data from a decade ago. It should scare you, as it does me, that our politicians are taking this report at all seriously.

The False Advertising For A Public Health Care Option

I happened to see an ad for public option health care yesterday. The ad in question made use of alleged "facts" that were calculated to prove the wisdom of a public option, i.e., government-run health care.

Among the things I recall about the ad were that it alleged that one insurance company controlled more than 90% of some measure of insurance, though it didn't mention what that measure was. There were similar statistics cited, without sources, to suggest that there is no competition in the health insurance sector.

Here are two other pro-public option ads you can find on YouTube.



I found it notable that this first video only engaged in ad hominem attacks. That is, the health insurance CEO is bad simply because he lives in a large house and is paid a large salary. There's no mention of his background, how long he worked to attain that position, or how well, or poorly, he has done for his shareholders.

We know nothing about the family that lost their home, allegedly due to health-related expenses. We don't know if the home was too expensive for their budget, or what their lifestyle was, and how it may have contributed to their medical expense woes.

In short, there are no contexts for either emotional appeal.



This video is just a farce. I guess the intent is to suggest that insurance companies can change policy rules on a whim. I don't think that's at all true. In fact, my guess is that, being subject to state regulations, they probably have to appear before a state insurance commission with rate increase requests.

However, for some states, like mine, New Jersey, there are so many mandates and such an inhospitable health insurance climate, that the best, cheapest plans allowing the buyer to tailor the policy for her/himself, won't do business there. Instead, we are hostage to what is, admittedly, a non-market in health insurance, in which rate increases are simply dictated.

But that's a consequence of political actions by state legislatures, not the insurance companies. I know for a fact that health insurance coverage is about half as expensive just sixty miles west of me, across the Delaware river, in Pennsylvania.

What public option proponents don't discuss is any of the following:

-Most situations of a lack of competition in health insurance were constructed by politicians.
-Industry concentration is a common occurrence in most multi-state industries.
-Insurance companies are, for the most part, publicly-owned. Thus, so-called excess profits for insurance companies are, in fact, good for their shareholders, who could be American voters and taxpayers, should they so choose to buy the equities of those insurance companies.
-Comparing US health care spending to that of other countries makes no allowance for more innovative treatments and drugs used in the US. Nor does it address whether it is good, or bad, to spend more on something like health care. Perhaps more spending denotes better outcomes, longer lifespans and higher satisfaction with outcomes.
-Comparing foreign country health care costs with those of the US, without mentioning different tort lawsuit environments, is a gross misrepresentation of the true situation. Much US health care expense is engendered in defense of unregulated tort lawsuits for damages beyond simple medical malpractice.

In short, the public option proponents grossly distort, limit and hide the context of their so-called "evidence" against a health insurance market devoid of government-run providers, but allowing inter-state competition without mandated coverages in policies.

Such a situation would, in fact, allow for the most competition, with no tax-free, hidden-cost government 'competitor' undercutting actual costs, and driving private insurers from the marketplace.

If insurance companies were allowed to easily sell policies across state lines, without the needless complexity of conforming with 50 state insurance commissions policies,' and state-created mandates were eliminated, health insurance policy costs would drop immediately.

Add tort reform, and US health care costs for the same excellent level of care would fall even further.

The simple truth is that today's health insurance market is what it is as a consequence of many state legislatures, and the federal government, through Medicare and Medicaid, not through the design of the insurance industry.

Michelle Obama Is A Liar Or ?????

Lost amidst the hoopla over the recent, failed Chicago Olympics 2016 bid was adequate focus on a fairly impassioned lie told by the First Rookie's wife.

Michelle Obama was recorded as tearfully recalling watching US Olympian Carl Lewis- a black, of course- at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics on her father's lap!

Some observant wags quickly did the math and reported that Wonderboy's wife has apparently been infected with same lying disease as Hillary Clinton.

Remember when Hillary mis-remembered being under fire as she flew into some Eastern European airport during her husband's administration?

This time, it seems that the Anointed One's spouse was over 20 years of age when she was sitting on her dad's lap.

Do tell!

I guess either Michelle is a liar.....or we are to infer that she didn't have the healthiest of upbringings, n'est pas?

More of Wonderboy's Health Care Lies

A staff editorial in the Wall Street Journal last Thursday crystallized some of the bald-faced lies that Wonderboy is telling on behalf of his beloved universal, single-payer health care plan.

The article noted,

"He likes to start off explaining our catastrophe of a health system. "What is truly scary—what is truly risky—is if we do nothing," he said in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. We can't "keep the system the way it is right now," he continued, while his critics are "people who want to keep things the way they are."

However, his supporters also want to keep things the way they are. "I keep on saying this but somehow folks aren't listening," Mr. Obama proclaimed in Grand Junction, Colorado. "If you like your health-care plan, you keep your health-care plan. Nobody is going to force you to leave your health-care plan. If you like your doctor, you keep seeing your doctor. I don't want government bureaucrats meddling in your health care."

So things have to change- except they won't. Your health care will remain as you like it, unless, of course, it is changed, because the system is currently broken.

Very clear, isn't it?

Then there's this,

"Maybe you're starting to fret about all those bureaucrats and bean-counters again. You shouldn't, according to Mr. Obama. "The only thing I would point is, is that Medicare is a government program that works really well for our seniors," he noted in Colorado. After all, as he said in New Hampshire, "If we're able to get something right like Medicare, then there should be a little more confidence that maybe the government can have a role—not the dominant role, but a role—in making sure the people are treated fairly when it comes to insurance."

The government didn't get Medicare right, though: Just ask the President. The entitlement is "going broke" (Colorado) and "unsustainable" and "running out of money" (New Hampshire). And it's "in deep trouble if we don't do something, because as you said, money doesn't grow on trees" (Montana).

So Medicare is the model of how our First Rookie will expand government into all health care. Except, damn, it's broken. Medicare itself is "going broke," "unsustainable," and "running out of money."

Say what?

The bankrupt 1960s era Medicare program is the model for our new and improved government-run health care. But, sadly, it is a financial failure.

So let's double-down on badly-designed and -operated federal medical insurance systems.

Just precious, isn't it? Wonderboy will literally stop at nothing to sell his ill-considered takeover of your personal medical service.

Even lying, bluntly talking out of both sides of his mouth, contradicting himself at different stops while he flogs his flawed plan.

Not only is Wonderboy's health care plan bankrupt. So, clearly, is his own morality and any sense of principle.

About Those Death Panels: Wonderboy As Lawyer

Have you seen the video of Wonderboy's town hall meeting on healthcare?

He does something that is just what you'd expect a lawyer to do. It involves the so-called 'death panels.'

You see, buried deep in the bowels of the House healthcare bill are provisions for federal regulators to allocate medical care. Now, I can't recall exactly what the name of the commission is, but I can guarantee you it is not "Death Panel."

So when a colleague asked me how our First Rookie can stand in a town hall meeting and state so unequivocally that there are,

'no death panel that is going to deny care to your grandmother,'

he is, narrowly technically, correct.

But only a lawyer would think like that. Everyone else knows what the questioner meant. And that it is true.

It takes a true sophist, devoid of any principles or commitment to the truth, to so beguilingly lie, while technically telling not lying.

And that sophist is our president. A liar and a dissembler.

My colleague has said for a week now that someone should be cataloguing all Wonderboy's lies. I assured him that somewhere, someone is doing just that.

No doubt such a volume will be making an appearance by the next Congressional election cycle, as a reminder to voters everywhere of how they've been lied to by Wonderboy.

Democratic Energy Lies

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured an editorial by Robert Bryce, managing editor of Energy Tribune. The article's credits also mention his recent book, "Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of 'Energy Independence'" (PublicAffairs, 2008).


Lies are what Mr. Bryce uncovers in this excellent piece.

For example, Mr. Bryce begins his piece,

"Whenever you read about ethanol, remember these numbers: 98 and 190.
They offer an essential insight into U.S. energy politics and the debate over cap-and-trade legislation that recently passed the House. Here is what the numbers mean: The U.S. gets about 98 times as much energy from natural gas and oil as it does from ethanol and biofuels. And measured on a per-unit-of-energy basis, Congress lavishes ethanol and biofuels with subsidies that are 190 times as large as those given to oil and gas.

Those numbers come from an April 2008 report by the Energy Information Administration: "Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy Markets 2007." Table ES6 lists domestic energy sources that get subsidies. In 2007, the U.S. consumed nearly 55.8 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs), or about 9.6 billion barrels of oil equivalent, in natural gas and oil. That's about 98 times as much energy as the U.S. consumed in ethanol and biofuels, which totaled 98 million barrels of oil equivalent.

Meanwhile, ethanol and biofuels are getting subsidies of $5.72 per million BTU. That's 190 times as much as natural gas and petroleum liquids, which get subsidies of $0.03 per million BTU.

The report also shows that the ethanol and biofuels industry are more heavily subsidized -- in total dollar terms -- than the oil and gas industry. In 2007, the ethanol and biofuels industries got $3.25 billion in subsidies. The oil and gas industry got $1.92 billion."

Thus, Mr. Bryce reveals that the ethanol lobby is already sucking up more subsidies than oil and gas do.

By way of uncovering lies by Wonderboy's administration, he continues,

"Despite these subsidies, the ethanol lobby is queuing up for more favors. And they are doing so at the very same time that the Obama administration and Congress are pushing to eliminate the relatively modest subsidies for domestic oil and gas producers. Democrats want to cut drilling subsidies while simultaneously trumpeting their desire for "energy independence."

The cap-and-trade bill passed by the House aims to "create energy jobs" and "achieve energy independence." Meanwhile, Democrats are calling to eliminate drilling subsidies that have encouraged advances in technology that have opened up vast new U.S. energy sources. These advances have made it profitable to extract natural gas from the Barnett Shale deposit in Texas and the Marcellus in Pennsylvania -- deposits once thought too expensive to tap.

President Barack Obama's 2010 budget calls for the elimination of two tax breaks: the expensing of "intangible drilling costs" (such as wages, fuel and pipe), which allows energy companies to deduct the bulk of their expenses for drilling new wells; and the allowance for percentage depletion, which allows well owners to deduct a portion of the value of the production from their wells. Those breaks provide the bulk of the $1.92 billion in oil and gas subsidies.

In May, Mr. Obama called the tax breaks for the oil and gas industry "unjustifiable loopholes" that do "little to incentivize production or reduce energy prices."

That's flat not true. The deduction for intangible drilling costs encourages energy companies to plow huge amounts of capital into more drilling. And that drilling has resulted in unprecedented increases in natural gas production and potential."

So there you have it. Wonderboy has explicitly lied about the true state of various energy sector subsidies. Or he's genuinely so uniformed and lacks understanding that he can't correctly describe the current state of energy subsidies. Yet he proposes to alter them radically.

Very scary.

Mr. Bryce concludes by observing,

"Eliminating the tax breaks for drilling will make natural gas more expensive. Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., a Houston-based investment-banking firm, estimates that eliminating the intangible drilling cost provision could increase U.S. natural gas prices by 50 cents per thousand cubic feet. Why? Because without the tax break, fewer wells will be drilled and less gas will be produced. The U.S. consumes about 23 trillion cubic feet of gas per year. Simple arithmetic shows that eliminating the drilling subsidies that cost taxpayers less than $2 billion per year could result in an increased cost to consumers of $11.5 billion per year in the form of higher natural gas prices.

Amid all this, Growth Energy, an ethanol industry front-group, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to adopt a proposal that would increase the amount of ethanol blended into gasoline from the current maximum of 10% to as much as 15%."

That's an interesting explanation of the unintended consequence of removing current oil and gas production incentives. The current administration evidently fails to understand the effects on pricing and supply of curtailing currently in-place production incentives for oil and gas.

Regarding the ethanol energy scam, Bryce notes,

"That increase would be a gift to corn ethanol producers who have never been able to make a go of it despite decades of federal subsidies and mandates. Growth Energy is also pushing the change even though only about seven million of the 250 million motor vehicles now on U.S. roads are designed to run on fuel containing more than 10% ethanol.

There is also corn ethanol's effect on food prices. Over the past two years at least a dozen studies have linked subsidies that have increased the production of corn ethanol with higher food prices.

Mr. Obama has been pro-ethanol and anti-oil for years. But he and his allies on Capitol Hill should understand that removing drilling incentives will mean less drilling, which will mean less domestic production and more imports of both oil and natural gas.
That's hardly a recipe for "energy independence." "

Wow. Only about 4% of vehicles can even run on higher ethanol levels, and using it drives up the price of much of our food.

Yet the administration and Congress want to go full-speed ahead stripping existing energy production incentives from oil and gas, then paying to convert more of our major grain food, corn, into an energy commodity.

Foolish? You bet!

But what do you expect from a president with no life accomplishments, understanding of business or government. Just his own dreams of leveling endless playing fields as a lawyer.

Silly dreams for which we are all about to pay dearly.

Mark Sanford's Violation of the Public Trust

As I predicted in this very recent post, Mark Sanford has already come clean about lying on his expense reports regarding his alleged business trip, on his state's behalf, to Argentina.

I wrote in that post,

"Character and values are, for the most part, integral to people. When we see lying and deception occur in a politician's personal life, you can bet it's going on, or will, when necessary, or expedient, in their professional life, as well. "

Bill Bennett voiced the same concerns, and was mildly chastised in a Wall Street Journal piece this weekend for being so old-fashioned and puritanical in suggesting that Sanford is through.

Then came Sanford's admission that he needed to reimburse the state of South Carolina for expenses he incurred on what he now terms 'personal business.'

Oh.

So, basically, Sanford was willing to misrepresent the nature of that part of his travel, and claimed reimbursement from the state for expenses then incurred. But after his confession of infidelity, he hurriedly suggested that, well, yes, maybe he had to repay the people of his state after having fraudulently claimed those expenses as public business-related.

Seems Bennett and I were right, after all.

Sanford had no problem submitting personal expenses as state ones, until he got caught in the act.

If I were a South Carolina resident, this expense fudging would be the reason I'd want Sanford to resign, or be impeached.

His marital infidelity is, our could have remained, his own business. His whereabouts, when in Argentina, could have simply been described as a story to cover some pressing personal matters.

But his using public money to visit his paramour, then claiming it as business, is fraud and a lie.

For this, he needs to leave office.

The Medically Uninsured

Last week, on CNBC, I saw a very provocative segment on 'the uninsured.'

The anchors, Trish Regan and Erin Burnett, began with the now familiar 40MM or so who are allegedly Americans without health insurance.

During the segment, Erin Burnett began to further describe each subsegment of the 40MM, identifying those who could afford insurance, but simply declined to enroll. Or those eligible for publicly-paid insurance, but, again, did not enroll. There were other groups, which, when totalled, left only 8MM really unqualified, poor, uninsured not covered, wanting coverage, and unable to afford health insurance.

I've since seen similar numbers elsewhere, too.

Quite the difference, eh? A factor of about 5x overstated 'uninsured.'

You'd hardly tear up an existing private insurance system just to insure 3% of Americans, would you?

Modfiy and improve the system? Yes. Eliminate it? No.

Frisco Nan's Incredible Arrogance

It seems incredible that, after personally causing a political firestorm by accusing the CIA of lying to her, Frisco Nan (Pelosi) now refuses to answer further questions regarding the affair.

Is this extreme political arrogance, or what? To me, it smacks of the imperiousness with which our elected federal representatives now comport themselves. They seem to believe that their election to Congress places them above the rest of us, rather than makes them civil servants.

How can Nan, the Speaker of the House, seriously believe she is above accountability for her reckless charges against one of our nation's primary security agencies?

Whether Democrat or Republican, Congressional members who display this sort of arrogance demonstrate, yet again, why there seems to be a rising backlash against them across the nation.