Republican Rep Republican Michael Republican Grimm (R-NY) (Republican) Arrested. Republican.

I think he's a republican.  It's noted here and here. Politico however takes the cake.

WE GOT EM NOW!

Conservatism and Twitter -- Useful but thin on substance

I like Twitter to a certain extent. It has opened up a world of information to me on a variety of subjects and sites like Twitchy has used it to great effect. Nick Searcy has been using it like a sledge hammer against the left and Iowahawk may be the best conservative humorist in 140 character increments.

But it has its problems, one of them being that it is nearly impossible to properly defend and define conservatism on any number of issues or to get in a substantive argument with a liberal without resorting to the irrelevant or the trivial.

Liberal Diversity: Everyone be a culture-free drone of the state, or else racists or something

Liberals really don't like other cultures. I have been assuming they are racists but I'm not so sure now. I think they are simply statists and like all statists, everyone must conform. They may not care about black or white as long as you all dress the same, act the same and vote the same. We can control you regardless of skin color.

In that vein, everything different then from them is bad. Really. It makes it all very black and white to them. They dress it up in terms like "Cultural Appropriation" and "diversity" but really, they want everyone to be bland, cultureless drones.

I started on this road from reading this article on the federalist.

A few weeks ago, the Palestinian-American feminist made a splash with an article in Salon explaining “Why I Can’t Stand White Belly Dancers.” Her argument, to the extent she offers one, is that this is a peculiar form of exploitation called “cultural appropriation.” She ends with the advice: “Find another form of self-expression. Make sure you’re not appropriating someone else’s.” 

Now that is an interesting principle if we were to apply it consistently. The mind reels. Enormous parts of our culture have been influenced by and therefore “appropriated” from someone else. Much of contemporary American popular music was “appropriated” in one way or another from Southern blacks, as are whole styles of dance. Tap dance was appropriated by whites from blacks, who appropriated it from the Irish. Or maybe the other way around, or both. Parts of the American Arts and Crafts style were “appropriated” from traditional Japanese homebuilding. Franz Liszt encouraged his contemporaries to “appropriate” melodies from the Hungarians like all get-out. Classical architecture was “appropriated” from the Romans by the descendants of the very barbarians who sacked the empire. And so on. 

What Jarrar condemns as “appropriation” is actually “learning.” It is the transmission of new ideas, and the more sources they come from, the more vibrant the culture.

Indeed. Here's the problem with a vibrant, diverse culture, it encourages vibrant and diverse ideas. That can't happen in a socialist state. It helps me understand my previous article regarding casting choices in movies. You can cast a black person in a white role but you can't cast a white person in a black role. Think about it, everyone must be a bland, vanilla, with no discernable cultural characteristics. If they do, they can be mocked, especially white southerners. Even Adam Sandler movies will make fun of anyone who doesn't seem like a bland white person, including blacks, gays, mexicans, and pretty much everyone else.

Any depiction of a minority as having a culture outside the norm is called "stereotyping." Any white person dressing or celebrating another culture is called "cultural appropriation." In other words, there are state sanctioned (read: politically correct) permits to celebrating culture. Only Indians can belly dance, only Hawaiians can do the hula. They are given special dispensation as they are grandfathered in. But anything new, say a movie or other form of entertainment must follow the guidelines as put forth by your helpful, enlightened (and usually lilly-white) liberal orthodoxy.

So if you feel that Japanese culture speaks to you, you want to learn more about it and take to wearing kimonos or watching Anime, you are appropriating their culture. You're the wrong color, you haven't gotten the proper permits and the thought police will be arriving soon to send you to some sort of re-education camp. Most likely it will be easier for everyone to just conform to a state sanctioned method of dress and speaking.

Enjoy your diversity.

Oregon Turns Racist and Other Obamacare Stories

Oregon is dropping their state-run Obamacare because apparently over the course of the last few months, everybody in Oregon has inexplicably become racist. There is hope because they are moving over to the federal system so perhaps they are actually just slightly bigoted.

Cover Oregon still isn’t online six months after its troubled launch, and now it looks like it never will be. Portland’s KATU reports that Oregon officials will recommend dumping its “beleaguered” state-run exchange, which was only able to accept paper-only applications because of its nonfunctional website, and will switch over to the federal program.

More and more of us will stop being racists as our plans get cancelled and we'll be forced onto the federal exchanges:

The Obama administration is quietly trying to stamp out some of the skimpiest health plans, a decision that industry officials say could trigger yet another wave of cancellation notices. 

The administration is targeting a type of coverage called fixed benefit or indemnity insurance, which give patients a fixed sum of money whenever they visit the doctor or land in a hospital.

With this kind of success, it's no wonder Senators are starting to defend and run on Obamacare. Kind of. 

It’s an exceptionally well-crafted ad, and I imagine it will help raise Senator Begich’s favorable image. Not surprisingly, it focuses on what is consistently the most popular aspect of Obamacare, a ban on pre-existing conditions used to block insurance. This is one aspect of Obamacare that both Republicans and Democrats support in overwhelming numbers and some variation is included in almost all Republican health care alternatives. No one is for pre-existing conditions. 

But as far as the ad being a defense of Obamacare, if you’re reluctant to name what you are “unabashedly” defending, it’s hard to see how this bodes well for the fight. It’s like showing up at the game with a bag over your head to cheer for your team.

Well they "kind of" defend it because Obamacare only "kind of" works:

The administration has failed to meet 44 statutory deadlines required under Obamacare, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS). 

The report, released on Monday, documents every provision with a specific deadline within the health care law and the administration’s actions taken as of April 15, 2014. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has missed more than half of the 83 deadlines mandated since March 2011.

So the thing Democrats do best, which is force other people to do things they don't want to do, is also something they fail at executing.

The Federalist cuts through the bullshit to show how racist they really are, by questioning whether or not the people are actually getting quality care.

In the torrent of information which deluges the public, the problem of price controls is scarcely mentioned because most writers in the medical policy community belong to a small group of academics, social scientists, economists and members of think tanks whose interests and expertise are in the financial rather than the medical aspects of healthcare.  They  lack the real life experience to appreciate the effects of their recommendations on practicing physicians and their patients. Doctors who know the problems are too busy coping with them to write about them.

This is a long one but in essence Obamacare is destroying the fundamental economics behind health care. If you do this to the housing market, peoples homes are underwater and it's a real pain. But point Phillips Gausewitz makes is that doing this to the medical market will cause more medical problems as Canada and other countries are experiencing due to delays in care:

This situation and the loss of the many intangible rewards of practice: gratifying patient relations, respect, time and funds for continuing education; have made the practice of medicine a much less attractive profession. Physicians who are financially able retire sooner than they would have previously, and the best qualified potential replacements often choose less frustrating careers. 

The result is the growing shortage which, unless corrected, will result in conditions here like those in Great Britain, Japan and Canada where patients are dying and cancers becoming untreatable while they are on waiting lists for care.

Price controls was tried during Nixon and we saw how well that turned out. Let it burn? It's burning. The question is how much damage will it cause.

Let it Burn? Let it Burn.

So Ace has an interesting article today. 

Note the actual phrase begins with "let". It's a passive word. No one is saying "Start a fire and burn it down". It is burning already. 

Out of control entitlement spending, zero political will to control discretionary spending and an unchecked debt is the fuel that is feeding this fire. 

You want to know who is actively fanning the flames of this fire? Mainstream Republican candidates and office holders, not tea party fanatics or people who simply have lost interest in trying to stop the conflagration. 

In fact, it's these "grown ups" who are so darn "electable" that are actively doing something....putting more fuel on the fire. 

...

Until people realize that with the GOP as presently constituted stopping the increase in the rate of burning, let alone putting the fire out isn't on the menu and nothing will change. 

So don't look at those of us who have washed our hands of this mess as the ones unwilling to stop the burning. We tried and were told to shut up. You guys who insist on voting for the GOP which will add more fuel to the fire are the ones who are grunting "fire good!", not us.

I would not just say we are part of the "let it burn" crowd anymore. The fire is now out of control. But "Letting it burn" is not an irresponsible view but actually an attempt to make people deal with what they have wrought. I fully support it. We tried to fight it, we tried to get rid of it in courts, we've tried to get people to listen. Not just Obamacare but all the Democrat/Liberal policies of "Government First." The spending, the corruption, the fraud, the waste... we fight these things because we know that they cannot continue. The best way is to stop them before they start.

It's now too late for that. The laws are in place. The spending is out of control. Until adults start saying "No", and change the laws, this will not be able to continue. It WILL burn, whether we let it or not. Perhaps we can get the Scott Walkers of the world elected in the Senate, House, and Presidency. People who understand that the governments job is not to take from those who succeed and spend it on garbage.

No I'm not saying they give it to the poor because honestly, the poor aren't really any better off. The amount of money getting shifted away from the working middle and upper class should be more than enough to let poor people live a lot better than they do. No, the money goes away. It feeds politicians and donors and companies and labor unions and the giant bureaucracy that doesn't seem to improve anything. In short, the money disappears and the debt grows.

This is now out of control. Best thing to do is retreat to states that have at least some sort of bulwark against the on-coming storm until the rest of the country grows up and wises up.

Obamacare Roundup

That rocket scientist over at MSNBC says Dems should just say "Your crappy plans are gone, deal with it." Way to look out for the poor there, Hyphenated-Asshat. I mean Harris-Perry. Nothing says compassion like telling your voters to suck it.

Obamacare is back in court by the way. Ever have a friend who always seemed to end up in court? Did they eventually implode? Anyway this is for the abortion mandate:

The administration and abortion advocates insist that Conestoga and Hobby Lobby are about women’s rights, not religious freedom. This claim is strike one against the administration. 

Nearly 50 years ago, the Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, created a “right to privacy” in the matter of contraception, and then eight years later, in Roe v. Wade, extended it to include abortion, even though those activities are not mentioned in the Constitution. Yet the Court never suggested that private citizens could be forced to buy things for other people.

Yup, women's rights are now defined as having other people take care of their medical expenses. Oh feminism, how far you've fallen.

But choices are for us big, government, powerful, intellectual types. Not for you peons, defined as anyone making their own money. So you people get shaken down:

It’s worth noting at this point that HHS regulates these markets in significant ways, especially after the passage of ObamaCare. This wasn’t just a case of working the phones for a charity. This was the Cabinet official with the most impact on these businesses extolling the efforts of a supposedly independent group launched by a close adviser to the President. It doesn’t take much ink to connect those dots, which is why insurers began complaining loudly enough about the pressure for Congress and the media to take notice. 

It was a shakedown, pure and simple, to wring more money and assistance out of industry players in order to bypass Congress on funding operations within the executive branch. That should prompt Congress to demand more answers, and perhaps to cut off even more funding to HHS until they get them.

 Your government is here to help. Or else.

Remember, this is the Affordable Care Act. It's right there in its name: Affordable. And yet...

Obamacare will cost large companies between $4,800 and $5,900 more per employee and add hundreds of millions to their overhead, according to a new survey. 

The American Health Policy Institute conducted a confidential survey of 100 large employers—those with 10,000 or more employees—asking what costs they expect to incur from Obamacare over the next decade. 

Factoring in the health care law’s added mandates, fees, and regulatory burdens, employers anticipate cost hikes between $163 million and $200 million in 2016, a 4.3 percent increase. By 2023, employers will be paying 8.4 percent more than “what they would otherwise be spending” for their employees’ health care. 

In the next 10 years, the total cost of Obamacare to all large American employers is estimated to be from $151 billion to $186 billion, according to the study.

Affordable. Affordable. Affordable.

Show Me The Money

Forgive very dated movie reference. Heritage has come out with their annual report on where the money goes. It's a good read but for reference, let's check out the percentages:

Here's the money for 2012. As you can see, we spent 45% on entitlements. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. All programs going bankrupt and are rife with fraud. Remember, 65 billion lost to fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicare alone. 

Here's 2013. Looks like we're paying out more entitlements to entitled whiners. Ok, we put ourselves into this mess, we can't just turn it off overnight. But consider this: Obamacare isn't on this yet. That doesn't start until this year.

National defense, meh. Who cares. We now spend more on all the other entitlements like welfare than we do on defending the nation. Welfare is not in the constitution but defending the country is. 

Read the article, good stuff.