Painting over the US of A

The truth has many ways of finding its master...

This is what happens when leftists are given the brush.

When you Shake Hands with the Devil, Healthcare Style

When you Shake Hands with the Devil, Healthcare Style

by Dave Cribbin

When they cut their deal with the Administration the insurance companies rolled the dice and came up snake eyes. They traded away proper insurance underwriting practices in order to capture a larger customer base, one that would be guaranteed through government force. Like their auto company brethren who struck their own Faustian bargains before them, they have come away a several fingers shy!

After promising the insurance companies a government mandate that would force young people under penalty of fines to purchase insurance (not very American sounding, is it?) the administration's minions in the Finance Committee said Oops, we lied. They watered down their mandate, delaying it's start date and reducing the penalties enough as to make it ineffective, leaving the insurance industry hanging out to dry.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not going to shed a single tear for the insurance companies. The bargain they sought with the Administration was despicable. They know how insurance works and doesn't work, and have played the go along get along game with the government for far too long, instead of being a force for positive change. This time it came back to bite them, and they're going to need stitches to close the wound.

The Government in it's extremely finite wisdom is doing exactly the wrong things to fix the problem of rising health care costs.

A quick history lesson for those who have forgotten. It was the Government's involvement in health care, subsidizing employer sponsored insurance payments by making them tax deductible, in order to cure other problems it created by imposing wage and price controls during World War II, that started us down the road to health care ruin in the first place. When you subsidize something the demand for it goes up. It's like having a clearance sale! The very same politicians who believe so strongly in incentives when they are handing out $7,500 of your tax dollars so their fellow eco-warriors can drive green in a $40,000 electric vehicle are just undone by the fact that subsidizing health care has lead to an increased demand for it.

The solution to rising health care costs is LESS GOVERNMENT, NOT MORE!

The government needs to let insurance companies get back to selling insurance, which is a protection against a loss that is not economically recoverable from. Insurance is not a payment system designed to take the brain power out of the decision to go see a doctor simply because the cost of that visit is near zero.

The government needs to stop subsidizing health care via the tax code. When consumers of health care start to pay the real costs of the health care they purchase they will respond, like they do when the price of any other commodity they purchase increases. They will reduce their demand for it.

The government mandating what procedures need to be included in an individual's policy needs to end. Only the consumer can know what is of real value to them, and what they are willing to freely exchange their hard earned dollars for. When they are able to shop and compare costs and benefits, they will.

We need to let doctors be doctors and practice medicine again, instead of having to practice the bizarre form of health care CYA that an out-of-control trial lawyer lobby has forced upon them through outrageous malpractice awards.

Until we get the Government out health care, no real reform will be possible, and Government will continue to play their game, which is to shift costs onto what ever group happens to occupy their demon of the day spotlight.

Below is a link with the fax number of every senator who is voting on the bill today. Send your senator a note and let him know how you feel.

http://www.grassfire.org/1122/targets.htm

Dave Cribbin is a Liberty Features Syndicated writer.

http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?Display=1669

912DC Video.. practice with editing software

Sarah Palin's strength has never been greater...

Our Love is Here to Stay

By Carter Clews

I have to admit that I was wrong about Sarah Palin.

Oh, not after the McCain debacle, when I wrote her a "love note" of sorts thanking that game lady for having been the only bright spot in that otherwise horrific display of Republican ineptitude. I thanked her for providing us all "one, brief, shining moment." As indeed she did. And still does.

No, I was wrong back when she stepped down as Governor of Alaska, and I, like so many others, opined to friends that she had made a politically fatal error. Now, I Stantonized, she "belonged to the ages." And it was our loss.

But, I'm happy to say, the inimitable Sarah has proved me wrong. Ms. Palin, it seems, has more lives than nine cats. And all of the negative smears by the mainstream media from 30 Rock to Ted Turnerville won't be able to muss a hair on her comely, cunning head.

(Nor will the fact that, as I am typing this column, I notice that lefty Bill Gates' Microsoft has not yet made "Palin" a part of the Word lexicon. Come on, Bill, if a weird word like "Obama" no longer brings up spell check, it's time to give Sarah Palin her just due. She is now part of the American scene, so try to stay up with the times.)

Simply put, Sarah Palin is a political phenomenon. We now hang on her every word. And we cheer her every pronouncement. When she speaks, people listen – because she is the one politician in America willing to say what's on the hearts and minds of the vast mass of the American people. She says it loud, and she says it clear. And she doesn't give a hoot in Hades whether the mainstream media and their political puppet masters like it or not.

From a personal perspective, I can tell you in a New York minute that Sarah Palin is the only politician in American today I would cross the street to see. And Barack Obama, of course, leads the pack of those I would cross the country to avoid. Which helps explain why Sarah's new autobio is already #1 on Barnes & Nobles' best-sellers list – a full six weeks before its release!

What makes Sarah such a unique phenomenon – and what keeps freedom's foes awake at night wondering what she'll do next? Quite simply, it is the fact that her appeal is indefinable. And one of the first rules of the far left's "politics of personal destruction" is that one must first define, before one can then destroy, the enemy.

The real reason the far left hates Sarah Palin, of course, is that she embodies -- top to bottom, inside and out -- all that they hate to the very marrow of their poisonous bones.

She has borne a Downs Syndrome baby and refused to abort it even after she knew that, in their opinion, it had proven to be "defective." She believes in the basic soundness of the American system and the wholesome values that made this nation as good as it is great. She has insisted upon being married to the same man for more than 20 years in the far left's toss-them-off and trade-them-in society. And to top it off, she even believes in God!

In sum, Sarah Palin is an outright affront to the ruinous situational ethics by which the left defines its very existence.

For that, those on the left can never forgive her. And, for that as well, those on the right can never forget – and will not abandon -- her. In short, our love is here to stay.

So, now the die is cast. I'm happy to say, I was wrong. Sarah was right. And, Barack Obama's utmost inner longings notwithstanding, that blur in a skirt he sees fast approaching over his right shoulder isn't going anywhere any time soon – except, perhaps, to the Oval Office.