Monthly Archives: September 2016

Pardon Me?

Posted on by
Reply

There is a campaign afoot by folks like George Soros, Daniel Radcliffe, Susan Sarandon; other guys of the Left including Steve Wozniak and Jimmy Wales; the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International to get President Barack Obama (D) to pardon Edward Snowden.  It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, either; recall President Bill Clinton’s (D) pardon frenzy in his last days in office.

Anthony Romero, ACLU’s National Director, even acknowledges that Snowden broke the law, but that shouldn’t matter—there are mitigating circumstances.

No.  If Snowden truly believes what he did was a righteous act of civil disobedience or an act of whistle-blowing or that there are mitigating circumstances, let him come back to the US, stand trial for his actions, and make his case to the nation and to its representatives in his case, the jury of his peers.

Symbolism Matters

Posted on by
Reply

But so do actions.

Alex Taunton asked if he should take a knee, too; he decided not.

Kaepernick taking a knee can be a useful symbol—but with what concrete action is he linking it?

As Taunton noted, acts of protest need at least to be connected to the thing protested, they need to be concrete as well as symbolic.

To which I add, acts of protest are not that when all they are are acts of ego.

Read Taunton’s piece at the link above.

Here We Go Again

Posted on by
2

Because.  Just because.

In the wake of the Exxon/Mobil deal and the AOL/Netscape deal a while ago, here some other mergers we might expect to see:
Hale Business Systems, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Fuller Brush and W.R. Grace Company merge to become Hale Mary Fuller Grace.
3M and Goodyear merge to become MMMGood.
Zippo Manufacturing, Audi Motors, Dofasco and Dakota Mining merge to become Zip Audi Do Da.
Denison Mines, and Alliance and Metal Mining merge to become MineAll Mine.
Federal Express and UPS merge to become FED UP.
Xerox and Wurlitzer will merge and begin manufacturing reproductive organs.
Fairchild Electronics and Honeywell Computers will merge and become Fairwell Honeychild.
3M, JC Penney and the Canadian Opera Company will merge and become 3 Penney Opera.
My dog used to chase people on a bike a lot. It got so bad, finally I had to take his bike away.

A girl asks a boy: “Peter, how much do you love me?”
The boy looks her in the eyes, “Look up at the stars, that’s how much I love you.”
The girl is confused, “But it’s morning, there are no stars?”
Boy nods, “Exactly!”

If I got 50 cents for every failed math exam, I’d have $ 6.30 now.

For Sale: Parachute. Used once, never opened, small stain.

Yo momma is so fat, I took a picture of her last Christmas and it’s still printing.

Doc, I can’t stop singing the “Green, Green Grass of Home.”
He said: “That sounds like Tom Jones syndrome.”
“Is it common?” I asked.
“It’s not unusual,” he replied.

You’re welcome.

Consequences

Posted on by
Reply

Two more prisoners who were released from the Guantanamo Bay detention center in the first six months of the year have returned to the battlefield, the White House said Wednesday.

Seventeen of the 161 prisoners released by President Barack Obama (D) have returned to the “battlefield” to continue their butchery.  This much isn’t only on Obama; President Bush the Younger released 532, of whom 113 went back to their butchery.

However, this return of prisoners to their fighting is what Obama is extending and accomplishing—even with the example of Bush’s results before him—whether he intends it or not, with his insistence on releasing all the Guantanamo prisoners so he can try, again, to close the place.

Obamacare Fail

Posted on by
1

The headline of this Wall Street Journal piece pretty much says it all: Average Cost of Employer Health Coverage Tops $18,000 for Family in 2016.

The sub-head, with careful reading, adds clarity: Pace of cost increase slowed by accelerating shift into high-deductible plans, new survey shows.

That cost of employer coverage, buy the way, refers to the premiums employees must pay: $18,142 for a 2016 typical employer-offered family plan, and employees have to pay 30% of that, typically, up from 29%.  Like a sergeant I once worked with liked to say, sort of, “Holy cats.”

Is that cost increase rate actually slowing, though, where it matters to the individual—the employee?  Not in the deductibles.  Shifting into high-deductible plans means the policy holder—the employee—has to pay lots more out of his own pocket just to get to the point where the coverage plan begins to pay its 50%, or 60%, or maybe as high as 80% of the medical costs.  For that year.  Then the deductible has to be paid anew.

Notice another part of that sub-head: accelerating shift into high-deductible plans.  That means that in that next year, the erstwhile high-deductible plan may not be available: the employee may be stuck with purchasing a different plan, perhaps with an even higher deductible, perhaps with higher yet premiums, perhaps with coverage not as useful to the employee.

This is what Obamacare, not the employers, has wrought.  This is what needs to be tossed in its entirety into the medical waste disposal and replaced with a more honest environment within which actual insurance can be had, and competitively so.