Coulter's Healthcare Plan

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=36080

In the first sentence, Congress will amend the McCarran-Ferguson Act to allow interstate competition in health insurance.

We can't have a free market in health insurance until Congress eliminates the antitrust exemption protecting health insurance companies from competition. If Democrats really wanted to punish insurance companies, which they manifestly do not, they'd make insurers compete.

The very next sentence of my bill provides that the exclusive regulator of insurance companies will be the state where the company's home office is. Every insurance company in the country would incorporate in the state with the fewest government mandates, just as most corporations are based in Delaware today.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

S.C. governor's race: It's like 2008 all over again

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/governor-races/87359-sc-governors-race-its-like-2008-all-over-again

Mitt Romney’s endorsement of state Rep. Nikki Haley on Tuesday pits his candidate against three hopefuls aligned with other 2008 presidential candidates.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) is backing Rep. Gresham Barrett (R-S.C.), Mike Huckabee is backing Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is a close ally of state Attorney General Henry McMaster.

All four candidates are huddled within about 15 points of each other in most polling on the race, making it a wide-open affair.

Of course, Huckabee and Romney have a little more skin in the game, as South Carolina is a key presidential primary state, and they may have designs on running again in 2012. Among other potential candidates, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) are both backing Barrett.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin have yet to weigh in.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Slaughter Solution: “It May Be Clever, but It Is Not Constitutional”

You can't pass the health care bill without an actual vote:

http://volokh.com/2010/03/15/it-may-be-clever-but-it-is-not-constitutional/

The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form. As the Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the “exact text” must be approved by one house; the other house must approve “precisely the same text.”

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Executive Order 6102 - FDR confiscates gold in 1933

Here's a little history lesson for you: FDR confiscated gold in 1933, paying Americans $20.67 per ounce, and then set the price at $35 per ounce, thus devaluing the paper money. In high school, they taught us about the Robber Barons and greedy capitalists causing the Great Depression, but I don't remember anything about the U.S. government stealing gold from citizens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

> Executive Order 6102 required U.S. citizens to deliver on or before > May 1, 1933 all but a small amount gold coin, gold bullion, and gold > certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve, in exchange for > $20.67 per troy ounce. Under the Trading With the Enemy Act of > October 6, 1917, as amended on March 9, 1933, violation of the order > was punishable by fine up to $10,000 ($166,640 if adjusted for > inflation as of 2008) or up to ten years in prison, or both.
>
> Order 6102 specifically exempted "customary use in industry, > profession or art"--a provision that covered artists, jewelers, > dentists, and sign makers among others. The order further permitted > any person to own up to $100 in gold coins ($1,664 if adjusted for > inflation as of 2008; a face value equivalent to five troy ounces of > Gold valued at $4800 as of 2009).
>
> The price of gold from the treasury for international transactions > was thereafter raised to $35 an ounce. The value of the dollar was > thenceforth determined by its value relative to other national > currencies.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

TaxProf Blog: Tax Foundation: 52 Million (36%) of Tax Returns Pay Zero Income Tax

My feeling is that everyone should pay at least a nominal amount of taxes, and no one should pay to high a percentage of their income. I don't like the idea that politicians can "buy" votes of non-taxpayers by promising to soak the rich. As Margaret Thatcher said, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money".

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2010/03/tax-foundation--1.html

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

The Health Care Number You Didn't Hear

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2010/02/26/the_health_care_number_you_didnt_hear_98362.html

American health care is an accidental system. Private coverage - the type most Americans have - has its origins in the wage controls of the Second World War as employers offered rich health-insurance benefits in pre-tax dollars. Public coverage like Medicaid and Medicare, on the other hand, takes its inspiration from the Beveridge report in Britain, drafted in the early 1940s; Lord William Beveridge believed in zero-dollar health care - that people ought to pay nothing at the point of use. Today's American health care fuses these two systems, but with a common economic flaw: people are overinsured, paying pennies directly on every dollar of health service they receive.

The end result: for every dollar spent on health care in the United States, just 12 cents comes out of the individuals' pockets. Imagine what food costs might be if your employer paid 88% of your grocery bill or what a trip to Saks might be like if your company covered the vast majority of the costs of the shopping spree.

Far from addressing the 12 cent problem, Obamacare would exacerbate it. With its rich subsidies, expansion of government programs, insistence that all insurance cover specific services (and some with no copayments at all), Obamacare would pour fuel on the fire of health inflation. It's one reason that even the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services - a federal employee - predicts cost rises under the President's plan.

The White House has been sharp with its critics, demanding that they outline an alternative vision. Here's one: that Washington move decisions away from bureaucrats (be they corporate or government) and empower individuals and families. In other words, American health care should be more like the other five-sixths of the economy where consumers spend more of their own money - certainly much more than 12 cents on the dollar - and get more value for it.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Who Is The Stimulus Money Stimulating? Teachers

http://biggovernment.com/vderugy/2010/03/10/who-is-the-stimulus-money-stimulating-teachers/

Based on the Recovery.gov data, more than two third of the 594,754.3 jobs “created or saved” with the stimulus funds were “created or saved” in the Department of Education [see the article for the chart].  Basically, what the administration meant by shovel ready projects was funding for your next door teacher.

Read the whole thing.  There are interesting stats on union membership, too.  Does all this spending mean that we should expect big improvements in public education?  Or maybe it's just that the public education bureaucracy is too big to fail?

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

A Debate between Reagan and Obama

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Sending a Message with the Census

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDAzNTgyZTM4NGRiMzUxNDk2MzljMDBlMDdlYTQxMzU=

I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks "What is Person 1's race?" (and so on, for other members of the household).  ... Answer Question 9 by checking the last option — "Some other race" — and writing in "American." It's a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Steyn: It’s About Government, Not Health Care

http://article.nationalreview.com/427119/its-about-government-not-health-care/mark-steyn?page=2

Look at it from the Dems’ point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health-care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That’s a huge prize, and well worth a mid-term timeout.

I’ve been bandying comparisons with Britain and France but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of “one-sixth of the U.S. economy” — i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. 

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

The Letter Dogging Tom Campbell

I like Tom Campbell, but this looks bad:

http://www.investigativeproject.org/1834/the-letter-dogging-tom-campbell

Campbell's opponents say his letter stands among many signs that indicate he may be soft on terror or hostile toward Israel. Campbell has expressed regret over the letter, but claimed he was not aware of incriminating facts about Al-Arian when he wrote it.

"None of that had come out," Campbell told the Los Angeles Times last week.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Low-tax Texas beats big-government California

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Low-tax-Texas-beats-big-government-California-86681467.html

Now it is California's ruinously expensive and increasingly incompetent government that seems dysfunctional, while Texas' approach has generated more creativity and opportunity.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Steyn: Our own Greek tragedy

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/26/our-own-greek-tragedy//print/

We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government. Once a chap's enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest. He's got his, and to hell with everyone else. People's sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Obamafeld

The endless banter, the self-absorbed complaining – it sounds like Seinfeld, but with our liberal leaders, it’s just another day of the politics of meaninglessness. Watch the latest Politizoid and comment here: http://pjtv.com/v/3171

Climategate: ‘The Science is Settled,’ They Told Copernicus

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-science-is-settled-they-told-copernicus/?singlepage=true

Notice that Tolosani “refutes” Copernicus by referring not to the observations — in predicting planetary positions, Copernicus was twice as accurate as Ptolemy — but to the opinions of Aristotle. What is striking about the AGW controversy is that the believers in human-caused warming do exactly the same: they cite the opinions of the authorities rather than the evidence.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Student protest signs

University of Washington students protest against budget cuts ... and demand remedial grammar courses. (Via Instapundit.com)

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Charles Rangel to quit key tax post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/03/AR2010030300949.html?hpid=topnews

The embattled chairman of the tax-writing House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, Charles Rangel, said on Tuesday he will step aside temporarily as chairman after being admonished by a House ethic panel.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Global Warming Fraud

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/02/025705.php

the IPCC's fundamental conclusions, relating to the allegedly unprecedented warming of the past half-century, are based on bad surface temperature data and are contradicted by more-reliable satellite data and by our knowledge of the earth's climate history. We know for a fact, in short, that the computer models that are the only basis for the AGW theory are wrong

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Relieve the Chairman of His Gavel - NYTimes.com

When the NY Times comes out against a Democrat, you have to wonder about Pelosi's commitment to ethics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28sun3.html?th&emc=th

This should galvanize the committee to conclude its snail-paced inquiry into Mr. Rangel’s behavior, including: his acceptance of rent-subsidized apartments from a Manhattan real estate developer; his failure to pay taxes on rental income from a villa in the Dominican Republic; and his soliciting of a $1 million donation — to a university center named after him — from a corporation with business before Congress. Mr. Rangel, the House’s designated master of fiscal accountability, already deserves to be stripped of his gavel.

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican

Obama in Great Shape, Still Trying to Kick the Nicotine Habit

I didn't know he was still smoking.  That won't bend the health care cost curve, now will it?  Bill Bennett points out that it's a bad idea to smoke and use nicotine gum or a patch at the same time.  

Personally, through enormous will power, I force myself to drink only decaf coffee as part of my healthy lifestyle.  A couple of No Doz on the side makes it palatable. That way, I feel better about myself, and demonstrate to the world that I'm serious about kicking the caffeine addiction someday real soon.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/02/28/obama-gets-check-white-house-release-results-sunday/?test=latestnews

Posted via email from The Blue Pelican