Donald Berwick, the person appointed by Obama to be in charge of Medicare, has a column in the Wall Street Journal that makes a very good observation about how relative prices are falling for products bought and sold in the free market. But he then draws exactly the wrong conclusion by asserting that further crippling market forces for healthcare will yield similar cost savings for programs such as Medicare.

Here’s the relevant passage from his Wall Street Journal column.

The right way is to help bring costs down by making care better and improving our health-care system. Improving quality while reducing costs is a strategy that’s had major success in other fields. Computers, cars, TVs and telephones today do more than they ever have, and the cost of these products has consistently dropped. The companies that make computers and microwaves didn’t get there by cutting what they offer: They achieved success by making their products better and more efficient. …Under President Obama’s framework, we will hold down Medicare cost growth, improve the quality of care for seniors, and save an additional $340 billion for taxpayers in the next decade.

I have no idea whether Berwick realizes that he has inverted reality, so I can’t decide whether he is cynically dishonest or hopelessly clueless. All I can say with certainty is that what he wrote is sort of like asserting “gravity causes things to fall, so therefore this rock will rise when I let go of it.”

from biggovernment.com

Sportspickl.com recently posted the "draft philosophy" for eight NFL franchises.  I realized they fit my current (and former) FFL owners as well.

Black Knights: The best players are available at the top of the draft so pick players who will allow you to be at the top of te draft every year (Bengals)

Parsons: You'll probably blow the pick anyway so don't over think it (Broncos)

Wiseman: Use your first four picks to take the four members of the world's current top ranked 4x100m relay team.  After that pick a few guys who might have played football before (Raiders)

Grote: Load up with as many white guys .... with....uh ....heart as possible (Colts)

Ewing: Don't draft for positional need.  Always take the cheapest player available (Cardinals)

Flash: Draft a Hall of Famer in the 6th round one time then live off that forthe next dozen years (Patriots)

Bechtol: Step 1.  Fire Matt Millen.  Step 2.  TBD (Lions)

Binion: There's a draft???  Crap.  Can I bum off your list?  (Redskins)

I know the Left has a vested interest in Obama being “The One” and everything being about him, but I just heard The Donald's conference yesterday after The Birth Certificate was released. The questioner seemed to believe that this was the first and only time a candidate's bona fides have been questioned. In point of fact the Donks started it (and I don't just mean Mrs. Clinton.)

Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886), 21st president of the United States, was rumored to have been born in Canada.

Christopher Schürmann (born 1848 in New York) entered the Labor primaries during the 1896 Presidential election. His eligibility was questioned in a New York Tribune article, because he was born to alien parents of German nationality

Republican Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) was questioned in an article written by Breckinridge Long, and published in the Chicago Legal News during the U.S. presidential election of 1916, in which Hughes was narrowly defeated by Woodrow Wilson.

Republican Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) was born in Phoenix, in what was then the incorporated Arizona Territory of the United States. During his presidential campaign in 1964, there was a minor controversy over Goldwater's having been born in Arizona when it was not yet a state

George Romney (1907–1995), who ran for the Republican party nomination in 1968, was born in Mexico to U.S. parents. Romney's grandfather had emigrated to Mexico in 1886 with his three wives and children after Utah outlawed polygamy. Romney's monogamous parents retained their U.S. citizenship and returned to the United States with him in 1912. Romney never received Mexican citizenship, because the country's nationality laws had been restricted to jus-sanguinis statutes due to prevailing politics aimed against American settlers.

Lowell Weicker (born 1931), the former Connecticut Senator, Representative, and Governor, entered the race for the Republican party nomination of 1980 but dropped out before voting in the primaries began. He was born in Paris, France to parents who were U.S. citizens. His father was an executive for E. R. Squibb & Sons and his mother was the Indian-born daughter of a British general

John McCain (born 1936), who ran for the Republican party nomination in 2000 and was the Republican nominee in 2008, was born at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone.

So eligibility issues have been raised SEVEN times before … six of them against Republican candidates.

And from The New York Times no less.

The Elph who unseated Allen Grayson is taking some heat.  NYT give him kudos.

Notice that Webster did not compare the crowd to Timothy McVeigh. No talk of abandoning the town hall meeting format. No claim that the folks who showed up with opposing views are not actual constituents. No demand that everyone turn in their cameras first, lest something embarrassing end up on YouTube. No bizarre claim that constituent meetings not be considered ‘political events.’

The president’s first budget led to a debt spiral, but he excused it because of the financial and economic crisis. The president’s second budget led to a debt spiral, but he excused it because the Bowles-Simpson commission was going to fix it. The president’s third budget led to a debt spiral, but he whined that he had to do that because Republicans might criticize a real budget.

The comparison to the House budget was so shaming he was compelled to give a speech on a new “plan” to end the greatest threat facing this nation. But there was no plan. Just another speech. And today, more whining.

from Get a Mirror — or a Plan

except when he can.

See that spike back in 2008?  See how it drops off a cliff?  That was July 14.  By some strange coincidence, that was the very same day then-President George W. Bush lifted, by executive order, a federal ban on offshore oil drilling.

Read the whole thing. Buying Avery labels afterward is optional.

A few decades ago I was making my bones as a bartender in a VERY leftwing establishment here in the C-bus. Had an interesting discussion with a regular. He was a 60's hippie dude, no college credentials but pretty well read. HATED Rand. Said she was pointless because the stuff she wrote about could never really happen.  Today I found this: Atlas is Shrugging" ...

The whole country is a life-sized, 3-D promotional diorama for Atlas Shrugged. We are all living through a live-action version of the novel.

In Atlas Shrugged, businesses begin moving to Colorado, a state that is denounced as regressive because it has "hardly any government," in order to escape strangling government regulations in their home states. In response, the federal government issues a decree forbidding companies from relocating. Sound fantastical? Last week, in the real world, the Obama administration's National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint demanding that Boeing locate its assembly line for the 787 Dreamliner in Puget Sound instead of Charleston, South Carolina—on the grounds that Boeing should not be allowed to escape the death grip of the unions by moving to a "right to work" state.

In Atlas Shrugged, a brilliant young oilman invents a revolutionary process to extract oil from shale, but even though the country is desperate for energy, he is shut down by government regulations. Science fiction? In the real world, a process called hydraulic fracturing—hydrofracking or just "fracking" for short—is making it possible to extract astonishing quantities of natural gas from shale formations across the country. This promises to revolutionize domestic energy production. But even though the country is desperate for energy, the media and the government are readying a campaign to impose a moratorium on fracking and smother it in its infancy.

In Atlas Shrugged, productive firms are bled dry to provide bailouts for failing companies which produce "unreliable goods at unpredictable times." In the real world, General Motors and Chrysler were bailed out with $80 billion dollars of our tax money so that they could bring us nine of the eleven "Worst Cars on the Road."

In Atlas Shrugged, men of talent and initiative are disappearing and withdrawing from the economy because they refuse to accept punishment for their hard work and ambition. In the real world, legendary ad man and entrepreneur Jerry Della Femina just announced that he has sold his famous restaurant and is withdrawing from all of his other ventures because "I'm just not ready to have my wealth redistributed. I'm not ready to pay more tax money than the next guy because I provide jobs and because I work a 60-hour week and I earn more than $250,000 a year." And to show that art imitates life imitating art, he explains: "So why am I dropping out? Read a brilliant book by Ayn Rand called Atlas Shrugged, and you'll know."

In Atlas Shrugged, the advocates of uncontrolled government keep spending money faster than they can expropriate it from a shrinking number of producers. A chapter later in the novel is titled, "Account Overdrawn." In the real world, S&P has just downgraded the long-term outlook for US government debt, a precursor to downgrading the nation's credit rating. Enough said.

Go read the rest of it.

but eerily Orwellian.  From pajamasmedia.com

John Podhoretz reads the New Yorker so you don’t have to, and quotes Ryan Lizza’s article on Obama’s foreign policy. And voila! A meme is born:

The most-discussed article of the week will surely be Ryan Lizza’s report on the development of the Obama foreign policy in the New Yorker, called “The Consequentialist.” The notable quote in the piece comes at the end:

Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding.

His warning about inflation includes this gem:

If the deficit doesn’t matter, why have any taxes at all? And if there is some point at which the deficit does start to matter, and become dangerous, when is that point if $1.6 trillion isn’t it?

I know, it’s not a new question.  Republican Progressive, Sen. Albert Beveridge of Indiana, asked in a 1898 speech: “If the government can make money with a stamp, why does the Government borrow money? If the Government can create value out of nothing, why not abolish all taxation?” The question is still worth asking because Donks have never offered a convincing answer.

If Bush/Gingrich/Palin had said this they'd be doing 20 minutes about it on SNL.

At a fundraiser in Southern California last week, where pump prices are the highest in the country, Obama acknowledged the political peril of high gas prices. He said, “My poll numbers go up and down depending on the latest crisis, and right now gas prices are weighing heavily on people.”

He tried to show that he feels motorists’ pain. “I admit, Secret Service doesn’t let me fill up the pump anymore,” he said.