Reflections From a Murky Pond

Sometimes you almost have to laugh at the blatant partisan bias and hypocrisy of President Obama’s followers, especially the ones who work for his and the Liberals’ pet media / propaganda outlets like MSNBC.

MSNBC’s Carlos Watson says Socialist means Nigger – but Birther’s OK

This is how Obama, his Liberals and their media shills operate. They reach and reach and reach – or just invent something out of whole cloth – in order to inject Race into any opposition to President Obama, The First African-American President, or dissent against his and his Liberals’ agenda.

While this video is utterly appalling, it is also ironically humorous since Carlos Watson so casually referenced those Americans who want to see irrefutable legal proof President Obama’s birth on American soil – generally considered a requirement for holding the Presidency – as “Birthers.”  Since the Liberals have spent a vast effort to paint these people, along with the Tea Party protesters and anyone who opposes them, as racist, using the pejorative diminutive of “Birther” is tantamount – especially in the context of the video – to calling them racists.

To watch Watson complain that Socialist is a codeword for Nigger in the same screed in which he apparently uses Birther as a codeword for Racist is just amazing. My only question is whether Watson is too stupid to know what he did or whether he and MSNBC believe that their audience is too stupid to know what he did.

Now I can just about agree that there should be some limits to the rhetoric of political debate and argument; past a certain shifting point language can impede rather than foster such debate. It’s just very obvious that Americans cannot and must not allow the Liberals to decide what those limits shall be – but then, I’m obviously a racist. 😉

PETA is at it again and this time their “campaign” doesn’t possess the cuteness and humor of their ridiculous “Sea Kitten“ marketing efforts. Nor is it yet another rendition of their perennial use of naked or nearly naked women and girls to shock and scandalize the public while playing on the prurient nature of Western culture.

This time PETA – or at least their cells in New York – has chosen to directly target young children in an effort to traumatize them and hopefully cause a psychological aversion reaction in them regarding McDonald’s.

PETA Targets Young Children For Trauma and Abuse

Despite understandable and proper outrage from American parents, the psychological terrorists and child abusers of PETA claim that children are jaded enough by television and video games to handle the “carnographic” images, and have sworn to continue their sick campaign.

From CBS 6 (WRGB), Albany, NY:

Activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) will hand out “Unhappy Meals” to children at an Albany McDonald’s restaurant today to protest alleged chicken abuse, according to a statement this morning by PETA.

PETA alleges that McDonald’s allows its chicken suppliers to abuse the animals before they are slaughtered for food. The organization advocates “controlled-atmosphere killing,” a method that promotes animal welfare.

Children who buy meals at the McDonald’s at 391 Central Ave. today beginning at noon will encounter PETA staff, headed by an activist in a chicken costume.

The “Unhappy Meal” that PETA will give to children – a spoof of a Happy Meal – will include a “menacing, knife-wielding” Ronald McDonald cutout, a ketchup packet disguised as chicken blood, a plastic chicken covered in “blood” and a “McCruelty” t-shirt.

The statement indicates that PETA will target children so they will “join its campaign” to convince McDonald’s to change slaughter methods.

This time depraved vermin of PETA has gone to far. They seek to traumatize as many children as possible in order to further their agenda by scarring the minds of the children of Americans.

PETA accosts children with THIS in some McDonald’s parking lots

In America we defend children from abuse and we punish the depraved vermin who seek to harm them and scar their minds. That’s something that PETA seems to have forgotten – if, being unaccustomed to such things in their own culture, they ever knew it in the first place.

I’m originally from the South. Down there we take these matters seriously and we don’t worry overmuch about what the law will say about the retribution we mete out to filth like these.

The problem now faced by American parents is that these abusers who are targeting American children are protected by the law. PETA is allowed by the current laws of the land to conduct these psychological terror attacks on American children. Parents seeking to defend their children against these depraved individuals have no legal recourse with which to do so.

Those who choose to abuse our children have turned away not just from America, but from Humanity as well. They are nothing but rabid vermin and must be recognized as such.

In this case our laws, over the years having been suborned from their proper intent, have failed America’s children. When the law has failed our children, the children of an America already in dire peril, what recourse is left to any of us to protect and defend our children from abusers like PETA? What means are left to us and how much courage and self-sacrifice does it take to use them?

Remember when defending freedom, liberty, and America with heart, mind, voice, and, if needs be, blood was considered a good thing? Are you old enough that the schools still taught that America was based upon the ideas of personal liberty and personal responsibility and that it was each of our duties to defend those principles?

That Liberty Shall Not Perish From The Earth

Those days are over, dead and gone, sunk into the long night because we Americans didn’t have the will to face what we had allowed to happen. Now we Americans are called an angry, racist mob. That is how the Liberals brand us for dissenting from President Obama’s agenda for “rebuilding America.”

But the words of Obama and his Liberals are, while strident and derisive, lacking in truth or meaning. Those words, the mouthings of small men bent on bringing all down to their level, lack the resonance of simply delivered truths.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

— President Ronald Reagan

So, my fellow Americans, we must remember the warning from President Reagan and hardened hearts and toughen our skins against the cries and insults of the Liberals. Do not trouble yourselves to listen to their screeds save to take pride in the fear you have struck within their black hearts.

We face what is truly an existential threat to America; the misborn mongrel rape-child of a nation that our enemies wish to spawn will not be America – though we will be able to recognize it as yet another shadow of the failed states we previously defeated.

In this war for our children and our children’s children’s future freedom words are the weapons that will carry the day – and may we all hope and pray to our Gods that it will stay that way, even as we, perforce, ready ourselves for the sad chance that it won’t. Wield them well and truly and steady yourself yourselves to shrug off the words of our enemies so that Liberty shall not perish from the Earth.

The Evil Insurance Giants – everyone hates them, but who are they? WellPoint? UnitedHealth Group? Not exactly; in these times those evil insurance giants are likely to be your employers.  According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 55% of covered workers were in self-insured plans in 2007. Since the the trend towards employers funding the own health insurance has increased.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi may make a raucous show of vilifying the insurance industry because it’s an easy way of garnering support for the Liberals’ healthcare agenda, but her claims, no matter how loud and shrill, bear only a marginal and passing acquaintance with the objective truth of the matter.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi prefers class warfare to truth.

She recently lashed out at the health insurance industry and urged Liberals to do the same during the August recess.

“They are the villains in this,” Pelosi said of private insurers. “They have been part of the problem in a major way. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening. And the public has to know that. They can disguise their arguments any way they want, but the fact is that they don’t want the competition.”

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“It’s almost immoral what they are doing,” added Pelosi, who stood outside her office long after her press conference ended to continue speaking to reporters, even as aides tried in vain to usher her inside. “Of course they’ve been immoral all along in how they have treated the people that they insure with pre-existing conditions, you know, the litany of it all.”

But when the painful echoes of the Speaker’s tirade fade away, we’re still left with a problem – the facts. As the White House blog reminded us, “facts are stubborn things;”  they don’t go away just because you scream lies and engage in hatemongering to further your agenda.

A majority of larger employers self-fund their employees health insurance benefits.  A self-funded health insurance plan is an insurance arrangement in which the employer assumes direct financial responsibility for the costs of enrollees’ medical claims. Employers sponsoring self-funded plans typically contract with a third-party administrator or insurer solely to provide administrative services for the self-funded plan.

2007 Statistics for Self-Funded Plans:

12% of  workers in small firms( <200  workers) with employer-provided health insurance are in self-funded plans

53% of workers in mid-sized firms (200 – 999 workers) with employer-provided health insurance are in self-funded plans

76% of workers in large firms (1000 – 4999 workers) with employer-provided health insurance are in self-funded plans

86% of workers in very large firms (5000+ workers) with employer-provided health insurance are in self-funded plans

Any of the amendments, codicils, and/or provisions in the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 (AAHCA) that affect the required coverage to be a “qualifying plan” or expand the coverage requirements (part-time workers) are not going to directly negatively impact those “immoral villains” in the health insurance industry. They’re going to directly negatively impact the large segment of American employers who self-fund their employees’ health benefits.

Would anyone care to guess how many of the real “Evil Insurance Giants” will drop their health benefits offerings, pay the penalty tax for doing so because it’s cheaper than meeting the government’s requirements, and just let their employees purchase the Public Option?

Are you still so sure you’ll be able to keep your current health insurance if you like it?

President Obama’s White House Health Care policy adviser and brother of Obama’s Chief of Staff and “attack dog,” Rahm Emanuel, has some very disturbing plans for healthcare “reform.” Dr. Emanuel advocates a collectivist system of “merit-based” healthcare services.

In an example of Orwellian TrueSpeak he calls his plan the Complete Lives System.

Dr. Emanuel first published his ideas of merit-based healthcare in the 1996 Hastings Center Report (Volume 26, No. 6) where he declaimed:

This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity – those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations – are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia. A less obvious example is guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason.

You can download the article in PDF format here.

Over the ensuing years Dr. Emanuel fleshed out his plan over the following years and published it in the January, 2009 issue (Volume 373, Issue 9661) of The Lancet. Some excerpts from the article follow:

Some people wrongly suggest that allocation can be based purely on scientific or clinical facts, often using the term “medical need”. There are no value-free medical criteria for allocation.

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Consideration of the importance of complete lives also supports modifying the youngest-first principle by prioritizing adolescents and young adults over infants. Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments. Similarly, adolescence brings with it a developed personality capable of forming and valuing long-term plans whose fulfillment requires a complete life.

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When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.

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Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.  Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.

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Accepting the complete lives system for health care as a whole would be premature. We must first reduce waste and increase spending.

The complete article in PDF format, entitled, Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions, can be downloaded here.

Dr. Emanuel’s Complete Lives methodology of applying his interpretation of both allocative and distributive justice to healthcare is put forth in the context of having scarce medical resources available. That’s an important consideration when reviewing his Complete Lives proposal; it is not meant to address the allocation and distribution of readily available and plentiful medical resources, only scarce ones. It is a two-tiered system divided between basic (guaranteed) and discretionary (not guaranteed) medical services.  Some citizens will receive only basic services while others will receive both basic and some discretionary health services.

So we have to take Dr. Emanuel’s ideas in the context in which they were set, which makes them somewhat less monstrous and horrific than some of the commentary on the subject would have you believe.

That being said, one of the oft-stated goals of President Obama’s healthcare “reform” was to reduce costs and the amount of America’s GDP being spent on healthcare. That certainly implies that money – tax dollars or deficit dollars – will essentially be a medical resource. This could very easily create the sort scarcity that would call Dr. Emanuel’s bio-ethical philosophies into play. Dr Emanuel is, after all, a special advisor to the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget for health policy. He would definitely be consulted on streamlining expenditures.

How does that you feel? It definitely makes my skin crawl more than a little bit. There are just too many ways that Dr. Emanuel’s particular twist on eugenics could be quietly and on-legislatively introduced into any government ran healthcare system for me to be comfortable with the idea.