Category Archives: morality

Responsibility

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The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt.  People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.

Cicero understood this in 55 BC.  Rome failed to recover her sense of responsibility—personal and individual, as communities, as a nation—at all levels.  Tyranny arrived shortly after Cicero published his realization.

Short-of-Death Panels

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Power Line received an email the other day from a gentleman who is…how shall I put it—unimpressed…with Obamacare.  It’s a long email, but you should read it all.  It recounts his experiences following a pair of strokes—one of them massive—he suffered a bit under two years ago at the ripe old age of 30.  The man spent three months in the hospital, much of that time on life support, and his doctors tell him that had he survived (his chances were about 1%—as he notes, a new meaning for a Democrat mantra), he should have been a vegetable.  But he had a Cadillac insurance policy—one of those openly attacked by Obamacare, and he had very much good fortune that Obamacare would have obviated.

There’s much in the man’s email that recounts his good fortune at not—yet—having to wear the yoke of Obamacare; I want to excerpt just a bit [emphasis added].

Had I been an elderly patient responsible for my own care, or not had the extraordinary family connections that I have at my disposal, I would have been in serious trouble and undoubtedly come out of this much worse.
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I saw the cost-cutting is much more tangible.  A major factor in my recovery has been physical, occupational, and speech therapy.  Without those things I wouldn’t be able to roll over, put on my socks, or eat, among other things.  In fact, before my therapy began I was scheduled to enter assisted living.  Because my therapy was so effective….
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One of the things Obamacare is doing is forcing Medicare’s CMS to cut back on quite a lot of rehabilitation services.
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One of the things that changed for “new” stroke patients was limiting reimbursable therapy visits of all kinds for stroke patients to ten total (because my stokes had happened before the change I was grandfathered in, so to speak).  Ten!

I have had well north of 200 visits.  At upwards of $250/visit for most therapy not many folks could sustain that for long without insurance (and remember, jobs go away when you’re in the hospital as long as I was).  Had I been restricted to ten visits my best case scenario would have involved a home nurse.  I wouldn’t have been able to find work.  And had I been single (as many stroke patients are because they’re elderly and their spouse has passed) I would have become destitute, thus likely landing in the Medicaid system, eventually.

That’s an incredible and frightening amount of power to be put in the hands of DC bureaucrats.  My therapy was at one of my hospitals (I had four) and every day I heard Medicaid patients being told their therapy visits were being cut off.  Those CMS decisions are consigning people to wheelchairs, or worse.
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Granted, my case was exceptionally bad but being limited to 10 visits almost would have been a death sentence.  I’ve experienced some of the most awful things imaginable and to think that a bureaucratic decision made in Washington…could have consigned me to that forever….

It’s August and our Representatives and Senators are in town hall season—those of them with the courage to face us up close and in public, and to listen to us.  Go there, and go there often.  Tell our Congressmen to put an end to Obamacare—no more argument, no more “debate,” no more dithering.  Tell both Democrats and Republicans.  Tell the Progressives and Conservatives, too.

Remember, in the primaries and elections of 2014, who follows your instructions this season.  Also remember who didn’t even have the courage to face you in an open town hall.

Racism Coming to a Neighborhood Near You

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…or even to your neighborhood.

[T]he Department of Housing and Urban Development is imposing a new rule that would allow the feds to track diversity in America’s neighborhoods and then push policies to change those it deems discriminatory.

The policy is called, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.”  It will require HUD to gather data on segregation and discrimination in every single neighborhood and try to remedy it.

This is just racism being manufactured where none necessarily exists.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan:

Unfortunately, in too many of our hardest hit communities, no matter how hard a child or her parents work, the life chances of that child, even her lifespan, is determined by the zip code she grows up in. This is simply wrong.

He added his claim that

[d]ata from this discrimination database would be used with zoning laws, housing finance policy, infrastructure planning and transportation to alleviate alleged discrimination and segregation.

We’ll make up a racism beef; that’ll solve the problem.  Malarkey.  We need, instead, to address actual causes—lack of jobs, exacerbated by a failed recovery and stagnant economy; failure of family structures; poverty impacted heavily (but not exclusively) by the foregoing.  Racial “imbalance” has nothing to do with this; it’s just a club with which Progressives will attempt to beat those who disagree with them—just as they did the banks with CRA, contributing heavily therewith to the housing bubble.

Man-Caused Disasters

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…and the men who cause them.  The disasters are no big deal, certainly aren’t actual terrorism, so the men who cause them also are no big deal; certainly they’re not terrorists.

Of course we should continue to release them from Guantanamo.  That’s what President Barack Obama said last May at the National Defense University.

I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen, so we can review them on a case by case basis[.]

Never mind that the ones he has in mind are Saudi citizens, and that they’ll go to Yemen.  Or these minor details:

  • Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen…is now the greatest al Qaeda threat to the US homeland according to US intelligence
    • formed in part by several former Guantanamo Bay detainees who were released in 2006.
  • Merger between former GITMO detainees from Saudi Arabia and the AQ escapees in Yemen formed al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
  • Recent spate of prison breaks across the Middle East and North Africa…such escapes by al Qaeda often lead to the formation of the next affiliate
    • July 21 in Iraq at Abu Ghraib, many of the most hardened al Qaeda prisoners [escaped]
    • Second prison north of Baghdad was breached at about the same time with similar results
    • 1,000 inmates in Libya, many incarcerated on terrorism charges, escaped in late July from a Benghazi prison in an operation coordinated with gunmen from outside the prison walls
    • July 30 Taliban fighters…broke 250 prisoners out of a Pakistani jail
  • Recidivism rate of released GITMO detainees reaches 25%

But these are just guys doing bad things; they’re not actual terrorists.  The war against terror is winding down, and al Qaeda is on the run.

Sure.

A Good Little Republican

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Here‘s Iowa Governor Terry Branstad (R) on Obamacare and Obamacare state “insurance” exchanges:

My approach is not to complain about things, but to get it done best we can.  It’s our responsibility.

There’s a good little, courteously compliant Republican.

No, Governor, it’s your responsibility to act against the irresponsible, never to meekly accept it as your lot.  You work for the people of Iowa, not the Progressives of DC.