| Tuesday, September
28, 2010
Who are the Independents who voted in Obama?
The Rush Limbaugh program today has a debate on the subject. There are a
number of opinions, but none seem to be the obvious: there is no group
description because there are many who think of themselves as "independent".
They don't all fit into one basket.
The traditional "Independent" voter says "I don't vote for the party, I
vote for the man." There used to be a lot of those. I don't hear so many
now. They are the traditional "good government" voters who in local
elections used to periodically rise up and "turn the rascals out" with
reform platforms. Professional politicians called them "googoo's" and in
city politics the goal was to keep them lazy. Don't rile them up.
The Obama victory got most of those. He was the one they had been waiting
for. Hope and Change. Good Government was coming.
There's another large bloc of independent voters: nominally members of
one party or the other, they didn't devote much time or effort to politics,
seldom voted at all, and paid most of their attention to their own affairs.
These generally turned out en bloc to vote the Creeps out. Some thought
they'd get real change, and some were excited at the prospect of hope and
change and the Inauguration and the promises of how things were going to be
different.
There are other groups within the "Independent" category. Few are
happy with what we got.
And they never catch wise.
==============
The Obama Administration defends the upcoming insurance changes in
today's Wall Street Journal.
Health Insurers Finally Get Some Oversight
In the past, these companies ran wild with no
accountability
By KATHLEEN SEBELIUS
In the last two weeks, my department has been
accused of "thuggery" (this editorial page) and "Soviet tyranny" (Newt
Gingrich). What prompted these accusations? The fact that we told
health-insurance companies that, as required by law, we will review large
premium increases and identify those that are unreasonable.
There's a long history of special interests
using similar attacks to oppose change. In the mid-1960s, for example,
some claimed Medicare would put our country on the path to socialism.
But what is really objectionable about these
comments is not who they're attacking, but what they're defending. These
critics seem to believe that any oversight of the insurance industry is
too much, and that consumers would be better off in a system where they
have few rights or protections.
Meanwhile, insurance companies no longer sell many policies for children,
and are altering the policies they do offer. Under the new laws, if they
offer insurance at all they must offer it at the same price to those who are
very ill (have pre-existing conditions). Of course that isn't insurance,
that's welfare. Perhaps we ought to offer welfare to those who are ill and
without insurance, but forcing insurance companies to pay for that may not
be the best way to do it.
The simple fact is that medical science continues to develop techniques
that may "work" in the sense of prolonging life. Some are obvious: quit
smoking, don't get morbidly obese, get some exercise every day. Some are new
and expensive. AIDS is no longer a death sentence. The cocktails are
expensive, but they do allow a reasonably normal life for extended times.
Some cancer drugs will keep patients with advanced cancer technically alive
for a few more days, or weeks, or even months, but they cost a lot and there
is no pretence of a normal life. Both AIDS and advanced breast cancer are
preexisting conditions.
What should the public pay for? Is this independent of what the nation
can afford? Was any of this debated? What was the outcome of the debate? I
must have missed it.
Insurance companies are raising premiums. If they don't they will be out
of business. If they do, Kathleen Sebelius will investigate them.
===============
Harlan just got back from the convention in Madison and
called. We talked for a while. He's tired. It was good to hear from him.
==============
drugs and sport killing in Afghanistan
Jerry,
Rogue units, drug use, sport killings. I used to
think this wouldn't be "another Vietnam" especially since we have no
draftees, but nope, we're still sending the same sacks of crap to war now
as we did then. Yea, it is exactly another Vietnam and we did it to
ourselves, this time with a highly paid, highly trained, highly motivated
all-volunteer force.
http://us.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/
asiapcf/09/27/afghanistan.sport.murders/
index.html?hpt=T2
From the article:
"Other soldiers charged said they were afraid of
Gibbs and admitted smoking hashish laced with opium nearly every day. Cpl.
Emmitt Quintal, who is charged with trying to interfere with a military
investigation and drug abuse, told the Army investigator the whole
deployment was using drugs on "bad days, stressful days, days when we
needed to escape." Quintal told investigators in May that the platoon --
under Gibbs' direction -- went to the barracks of a man who they believed
was a snitch and beat him up. After the beating, Quintal said on the tape,
"Gibbs sat down casually and told [him] if he snitched again he would kill
him and that he had killed people before and that he had no problem
killing again. At that time, Sgt. Gibbs had a cloth. He opened it and
dropped it and three human body fingers fell on the ground. At that point,
I really lost my head."
DAMN I hope they hang these f**kers, every last one
of them. And cashier their entire chain of command for being blind to what
was going on in their unit. People are going to be lining up to take shots
at me when I deploy, because of what these people did. I'd pull the lever
(or the trigger if they get the firing squad) myself. We haven't learned a
damn thing. A 20 year war, you'd think we'd be able to see this coming and
pull those troops out before they do something like this, but no, we're
still making the same stupid leadership errors now as we did then.
Please don't post my name, but holy hell please at
least link to the article and write your congresscritter to ask that they
do what they can to ensure the strictest punishment if these people are
found guilty. PTSD or blast trauma my ass, they got bored and killed
people for fun.
A Serving Officer
I post this as requested, but not as either endorsement or
condemnation. I have no claim to knowing what actually happened.
I do know that something like that was inevitable, and will
happen again. Even with long term volunteer professional soldiers. I
am amazed that there is not more of this. A long war with no end in sight,
no visible progress, many signs that we are repeating mistakes made from the
time of Alexander the Great onward -- that is the worst thing I can imagine
for the health of the Legions. Even if we are in fact winning, even if
things have changed from the time of Tamerlane, Babur the Tiger, the
two British Afghan Wars, even if the technology is different and our
prospects better, that is not being conveyed to the troops at the sharp end.
When there is no visible progress the days are long.
There are many kinds of professional soldiers. Many never
break. Many do, and they break in different ways. The old Indian Fighting
Army sometimes carried out massacres. The Foreign Legion famously
suffered from cafard, the bug, being bugged; the cure for the bug was a
rifle and the chance to use it, but that is not a cure that works if applied
daily in situations in which there are complex rules of engagement.
Danger every day with no prospect of ending it with a supreme effort is a
quite different stress from, say, D-Day and the conquest of France, Battle
of the Bulge, the race to the Rhine. Every company grade officer has known a
Sergeant Gibbs, and often was glad to have him; but also knew that one day
he would break badly. Leading troops into war is quite different from
reading and writing books about it.
Competent Empires do not engage their Legions in this kind
of war. Republics do not generally seek to export their cultures on
the barrels of their Strykers.
It is the duty of the Commander in Chief to make it clear to
the Legions why they are engaged, and what they must do.
====================
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