Nightly Ramble: Friday

Welcome one and all to this most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

• BEAUTIFUL KILLER: Dr. Helen Smith (That’s Mrs Glenn Reynolds to you)  examines the concept that beatiful women can be killers, too. That people can be surprised by this point is I think indicative of something larger than our relationships with the fairer sex.  I wonder how many elections, for example,  I decided because one candidate is the better looking?  Certainly, at least a few.  Obama, for example.
• “POPULATION CONTROL”  BY ANY OTHER NAME: Jonah Goldberg hits this one out of the park, as regards the supposedly ecologically driven call for a one child policy world wide:
  

  Imagine if someone wrote an op-ed saying that we need a planetary ban on abortion. Feminists would get their dresses over their heads in outrage about such a naked assault on “reproductive freedom.” But here is a woman in a very prestigious Canadian newspaper arguing, in effect, that every country in the world should force women everywhere to have an abortion if they already have a child. Put aside, for a moment, the pro-life objections to this. Even if you think the unborn are really just a bunch of cells, mere “uterine contents” with no more moral import than fingernail clippings, how on earth can anyone believe in “reproductive freedom” and not be absolutely horrified by the police-state evil of such proposals?

  Well, exactly. With a nod to Billy, I’ll invoke Hayek:

  “Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.”

  It seems to me the Jonah’s comment plays directly to this quote, particularly the first sentence.It’s obvious, that there is a transposition being made here from the economic to the everyday life, but the principle is sound.  And it is, as the name of the book that’s quoted from implies, a mile stick on the road to serfdom.

• AND THAT”S NOT ALL Lest you consider that this would be the only area where the government would make decisions about you and your life, consider the provision being floated by majority leader Harry Reid.
  Back on September 10 of this year, the president employed the stratus to faces while telling us…

  

  Barack Obama

  They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they get sick.

  Of course, he was referring by “they”, to the private health insurance companies.  But watch what happens when government takes control of your health care…. yes, children, exactly what they were protesting when the private companies had control. From the AP today:

  WASHINGTON — A loophole in the Senate health care bill would let insurers place annual dollar limits on medical care for people struggling with costly illnesses such as cancer, prompting a rebuke from patient advocates.

  The legislation that originally passed the Senate health committee last summer would have banned such limits, but a tweak to that provision weakened it in the bill now moving toward a Senate vote.

  As currently written, the Senate Democratic health care bill would permit insurance companies to place annual limits on the dollar value of medical care, as long as those limits are not “unreasonable.” The bill does not define what level of limits would be allowable, delegating that task to administration officials.

  Adding to the puzzle, the new language was quietly tucked away in a clause in the bill still captioned “No lifetime or annual limits.”

  Now, of course I am aware that the article apparently refers to private insurers being able to play such limits.  Why on earth would they do that with the private insurers, unless they planned on doing it in the government plan as well?  So, in other words, not only are we being lied to, by the president when he says there would be no such limits, but now we’re being lied to in the framework of the bill.  Such upstanding people, these Democrats.

• WHO GETS THE GRAVY? We keep seeing these reports about how the economy is recovering, and jobs are being created.  Yet we also see jobs being lost in the private sector.  And there’s the clue.  The only growth going on in terms of jobs is in the government sector.  As a matter of fact the average pay for government workers these days is $30,000.00 over that of the average private sector worker.  In other words, the people who are losing their jobs are out of work and being asked to pay more and more taxes to support the Democrats grandiose schemes, are being asked to pay for more and more government workers who make far more than they themselves do.  USA TODAY says:
  

  The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

  Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

  Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

  Does anybody think that this isn’t going to have a percussion set the next election?  I suppose the answer that question depends on whether or not ACORN is still running the census and manning the voting stations. Anyone up for “Animal Farm?”