Year: 2015

Democrats propose more Obamacare to solve problems caused by Obamacare

3:22 pm

Link here. Read it all, but here is a good quote to get you started:

The problem is that the deductibles on many Americans’ health insurance policies have shot up so high that as a practical matter they can’t afford care. If a couple had a deductible of, say, $500 in the past, and it’s now $3,000, that couple has to spend a lot of money out-of-pocket before reaping the benefits of coverage. And the higher the deductible, the more likely a person is going to skip some sort of needed treatment or medicine because he or she can’t afford the up-front costs. “About a quarter of all non-elderly Americans with private insurance coverage do not have sufficient liquid assets to pay even a mid-range deductible, which at today’s rates would be $1,200 for single coverage and $2,400 for family coverage,” the Wall Street Journal reported in March.

So now, many of the same groups that agitated for Obamacare are agitating for new government spending or tighter controls on the insurance industry and businesses to “solve” the problem. But perhaps the first question to ask is: How did those deductibles get so high in the first place?

The answer is Obamacare.

Bluntly, almost all the high costs and deductibles we see now in health insurance and healthcare that have appeared in the last five years have occurred because they were specifically mandated by Obamacare. So of course, according to the warped logic under which the modern Democratic Party operates, we should immediately expand Obamacare even more! Meanwhile, the Republican leadership is scrambling to prop up Obamacare due to their terror that everyone will blame them for its problems, even though they opposed Obamacare from the beginning, never wrote one word of the law, and contributed not a single vote in favor.

You can’t make this stuff up.

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Appeals court rules against Obama immigration executive order

2:42 pm

The law is such an inconvenient thing: A federal appeals court has sustained a lower court injunction halting the Obama administration’s effort to make up law and issue amnesty to illegal immigrants.

Three significant take-aways from this:

  • 1. The case will now proceed quickly to the Supreme Court.
  • 2. The courts appear to be united against Obama’s illegal action, a fact that to me is a relief considering the number of Democratically-appointed judges in recent years who have allowed their partisan leanings to influence their decisions.
  • 3. This will strengthen the hand of the lower court judge whose injunction was defied by the Obama administration, making it easier for him to impose serious contempt charges against Obama officials and Department of Justice lawyers.

Overall, this and other recent court rulings against the Obama administration give me hope that we are still a nation of laws, not men, and that we will weather this bad period and come out of it intact as a free nation.

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Senate Republican leaders ready to cave to save Obamacare

11:36 am

In the mistaken belief that a court ruling against Obamacare subsidies would damage Republicans, Senate Republican leaders have written a bill that would nullify the court ruling and save Obamacare.

With several Senate Republicans facing tough reelections, and control of the chamber up for grabs, 31 senators have signed on to a bill written by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) that would restore the subsidies for current Obamacare enrollees through September 2017. But the administration would have to pay a heavy price — the bill would also repeal Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates and insurance coverage requirements. …

But even if Johnson could somehow persuade Obama and Senate Democrats to accept his plan — a herculean task — the bigger problem will be his Republican colleagues in the House. The growing divide between the two chambers leaves the GOP in an awkward spot. The court could gut Obamacare in June, handing Republicans a long-sought victory they couldn’t achieve legislatively. But without a backup plan that the whole party supports, the GOP has no way to blunt the political damage if millions of Americans lose the ability to pay for their health insurance.

The madness here is in somehow assigning any blame to the Republicans. They didn’t write this law. They aren’t at fault if it goes down. The only political damage that will occur if the Supreme Court rules against subsidies will be against the Democrats. To think the Republicans will be hurt by this is plain stupidity, which isn’t surprising coming from a Senate leadership run by Mitch McConnell with the help of John McCain.

The Republicans should be arguing that, following a court ruling against Obamacare, the best solution would be to repeal the law outright and start over. Period. That is what the public wants, and has wanted, in poll after poll now for seven years, beginning two years before the law was even passed and continuing even as the law has increasingly gone into effect.

If the Democrats refuse to agree to a repeal than they will be the ones once again causing the problem. The Republicans shouldn’t be afraid to make this clear.

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New world record for longest hoverboard flight

9:04 am

The inventor of a hoverboard designed to be flown by an individual standing on the board has set a new world record, flying more than 900 feet.

Canadian inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru traveled a distance of 275.9 m (905.2 ft) on a propeller-based hoverboard he created himself. The machine was reportedly designed and built over the course of 12 months. “I wanted to showcase that a stable flight can be achieved on a hoverboard and a human could stand and control with their feet,” Duru is quoted as saying to Guinness World Records, which has recognized the feat.

Video of the flight is below the fold. It appears he essentially scaled up a drone to carry human weight.
» Read more

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The Russian investigation into Progress failure stalled?

8:47 am

Internal disagreements appear to be hampering the investigation into the Progress launch failure in late April.

The investigation had been leaning to pinning the failure on the disintegration of the Soyuz third stage oxygen tank. Others, however, are now claiming that the disintegration itself was caused by an improper separation of Progress from the rocket. The result is that the investigation has delayed the release of its findings.

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UAE establishes space agency

8:31 am

The competition heats up: The United Arab Emirates (UAE), in conjunction with its goal to send an unmanned probe to Mars, has announced the formation of its own NASA-like space agency.

Reading the long official press announcement at the link above will make you realize that a lot of this is public relations fluff being pushed by the UAE’s sheiks. Stripping that away, what I find left is mostly a program to educate students.

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Berlin July 1945 in color

6:01 pm

An evening pause: For Memorial Day, on which we not only honor the war dead but we are supposed to refresh our memories about why we fought in the first place. This color footage of occupied Berlin shortly after surrender shows the devastation after World War II. Though it is tragic to see, I will be honest and admit that I feel little sorrow. The Germans brought this upon themselves by plunging the world into two world wars, and in the second used it as an excuse to commit unspeakable genocide. In order to make sure they would never do it again, and would instead become a part of the civilized world, it was necessary to hit them as hard as these images show. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin all understood this. So did the entire populations of all three allies.

If only we had the courage today to do the same to the petty dictators and Islamic fanatics in the Middle East. They are as brutal, as violent, and as bigoted as the Nazis were, and will soon have atomic weapons at their disposal to use as they wish. To really bring them to heel they need to be given the same harsh lessons we gave the Germans.

I fear however we will not have the courage to do so until after they drop some nuclear bombs on a few cities.

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The state of the Republican presidential campaign

11:01 am

This political report on the annual Southern Republican Leadership Conference and its response to the speeches of a large number of the Republican presidential candidates provides a very good overview of the state of the campaign, and who is really in front.

Not surprising to me, Walker is considered the front runner, with Cruz and Paul in the second tier (best indicated by how often both were attacked by the other candidates).

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Corruption in the Russian space industry

8:52 am

A slew of stories in the Russian press today illustrate again the deeply ingrained problems that country has, both in corruption and in its ability to produce a quality product.

The last story describes the overall scale of the corruption, which is not confined just to the space sector, but can be found in many industries. The aerospace industry just happens to be the most visible outside Russia, and thus the most embarrassing. Yet,
» Read more

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“If they are white kill ‘em all.”

9:30 am

Feel the leftwing love: The student who organized a demonstration last month where people were encouraged to stomp on the American flag has written a 4,700-word essay in which he enthusiastically calls for the murder of all whites.

Quoting former Nation of Islam leader and New Black Panther Party chairman, Kallid Abdul Muhammad, Sheppard wrote of whites, “we give them 24 hours to get out of town by sundown.”

“I say, if they don’t get out of town, we kill the white men, we kill the white women, we kill the white children, we kill the white babies, we kill the blind whites, we kill the crippled whites, we kill the crazy whites, we kill the faggots, we kill the lesbians, I say god dammit we kill ’em all,” Sheppard continued. “If they are white kill ‘em all.”

Some might say that this guy is merely a fanatic and that I am wrong to associate him with the left. I would simply note that his racist opinions come right out of the gender and ethnic politics the left has been pushing for the past two decades. If he isn’t leftwing, he is at least a child of that movement.

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