Healthcare Reform

This was the smartest thing I’ve read about health care reform. From Megan McArdle.

t’s no good saying that well, we should try to be more like the Netherlands–you can’t build a system on the assumption that you will, suddenly and for no apparent reason, be able to import someone else’s political culture. Progressives are watching the whole health care legislative process with utter dismay as it produces a monster of a bill that not even its mother could love–and trying to love it anyway, on the grounds that it’s a start. But this ridiculous hodgepodge, this hypertrophied Rube Goldberg apparatus, is not some startling aberration of the political process, induced by some Republican dark magic. This is the kind of thing the American political system produces. This is why all of our programs have a substantial element of the inexplicable and bizarre.

Greg Mankiw explains how marginal tax rates will be going up with this health care reform especially for lower middle income people. Not exactly what Obama ordered.

And Alan Reynolds discusses the old Joe the Plumber situation. Redistributing the health.

All the leading proposals involve massive redistribution from people with healthy lifestyles to those who take more risks. As the Congressional Budget Office explained, “Premiums in the new insurance exchanges would tend to be higher than the average premiums in the current-law individual market . . . because the new policies would have to cover pre-existing medical conditions and could not deny coverage to people with high expected costs for health care.”

For all you Battlestar/Terminator/Firefly/Joss Fans

The LATimes has been doing interviews concerning each of the Dollhouse episodes.

This link will take you to the list.

Summer Glau is going to join this season as DC’s ‘Topher’.

Honduras

On Honduras, please read Fausta for a look at the speech given by President Micheletti to the OAS. Or as I like to call it a spanking.

La Gringa has the video.
Micheletti:

“First, I wish to express unending thanks for the good will that you are showing . . . but we must speak out about something: the truth. You do not know the whole truth and, at times it appears that you do not want to hear it.

This guy is a hero.

Micheletti:

“I made a comment to some friends that we are not afraid of the United States, its State Department, of Brazil, of Mexico, but we are afraid of Mel Zelaya. Very afraid of his return. Because another thing I like to mention is how other countries point at small countries such as ours and say: corruption, corruption, corruption. . . . But now that we stop acts of corruption, we are singled out by you. Today we show the world what kind of government we had under Zelaya and you are angry at us.

Micheletti:

“We only want the truth to be known. I have said it before and I repeat it today . . . if I am an obstacle, I will step aside, but I demand that this man who has caused the worst disasters to the economy and the morale of the country to step aside, as well.

Afghanistan

I haven’t been talking much about Afghanistan, but today there are a number of must reads for you.

HotAir’s Allahpundit finds the President deciding that the Taliban is not the enemy and maybe we can give them what they want, they’ll stop trying to kill us and we can go on about fighting al-Qaeda.

And suggests Bill Roggio is a must read concerning the distinction, and I agree.

Sa’id’s calculation is plain. Mullah Omar would not agree to turn over bin Laden when he was faced with the prospect of imminent annihilation. Surely Omar will not part ways with the terror master now that his prospects for success are greater than they have been in years.

Read the whole thing.

Also note Obama’s early views of “negotiating with the Taliban”.

The Boston Globe though, notes there are different versions of “the Taliban” and many versions are just warloads looking to get rid of occupiers vs religious jihadists.
Arturo Munoz, retired CIA analyst and is now a senior political scientist at the government-funded Rand Corporation notes:

“Foreigners have been playing the ‘great game’ for centuries in Afghanistan,’’ he said, citing the Persians, Russians, British, and other outside powers who enlisted the Afghan people to further their interests. “You need the Afghans to play. They have been only too willing to play – as long as they see a benefit for themselves.’’

Ralph Peters is still recommending the Joe Biden approach.

Focus ruthlessly on the destruction of al Qaeda and its auxiliaries across the border in Pakistan or wherever they may appear in Afghanistan. This is the counter-terror practice that’s worked for 3,000 years.

I don’t know anything about war, but it does appear that the Afghans a) need us there, b) don’t want us there and c) have not been as abused by al-Qaeda like the Iraqi’s were that they are rising up against them themselves which was a key thing to the “surge” in Iraq.

However, in Pakistan, the Taliban have been abusing the population of late.

With Obama’s fantastical Nobel Peace Price winning negotiating skills, [the link is to Al Jazeera] maybe he can come up with a way for us to openly and unitedly enter Pakistan with Pakistani’s and once and forever get rid of the enemy of both of our countries, thus freeing Afghanistan for themselves without Taliban/al-Qaeda or us.

Honduras

“Dialogue” has begun.

Apparently each sentence of “dialogue” ends in “Sign the San Jose accord of else” so I’m not sure I’d call it dialogue.

Here though is a VERY helpful speech for Obama to give when he finally decides to apologize for this huge mistake he’s made about Honduras. (ht the indispensable LaGringa)

Here’s the opener.

“On behalf of the President of the United States and myself, I apologize for having jumped to the conclusion that events in Honduras last week constituted a military coup. We should have taken the time to understand the legal and constitutional issues in play in Tegucigalpa and should not have pre-judged the outcome. Our knee-jerk decision to stand with Hugo Chávez, Daniel Ortega and Raúl Castro was based on our political proclivity, not on an informed understanding of the issue at hand.

“Manly Men” and the Pill

Discussion is being generated about the advent of the pill and the feminization of the celebrities who we women are attracted to.

And me?

hmmmm?

In the animal kingdom in the meantime they are finding that “lowly” females will choose the more lowly males. Perhaps that’s where human studies should go on the diminishment of the “manly man” over the years.

Which Way Will Malaysia Wander?

This was an interesting story out of Malaysia. A Muslim woman from a modern family in a modern state, went to a state that practices Sharia law for Muslims. (the country has a broad range of religions)

She was with friends at a hotel and drank a beer without be “carded” for her religion. Half an hour later she was arrested, eventually sentenced to a $1500 (American) fine and 6 lashes with a cane.

Those 6 lashes have the government bothered. They don’t want to be seen as falling into Talibanism, but they also need votes from the extreme. They’ve suggested that the woman be certified “insane” and such no need to cane her.

Her own family is insisting the sentence be carried out.

NOT because they agree with it, but because they want the world to see the potential problems coming up in Malaysia.

Her relatives are self-confident, modern Muslims. Kartika’s father, who owns palm oil plantations and a safari lodge, regularly took his nine children skiing in Switzerland or shopping in Amsterdam. Most of the family members have attended university, many of them abroad. They’re religious, but the idea that Kartika should be humiliated with a caning just for enjoying a little beer would never have crossed their minds.

This makes her father’s news on this evening in Kuala Kangsar all the more surprising. He’s engaged a team of well-known lawyers, the family patriarch explains, and given them a clear assignment. The attorneys are to make sure Kartika is declared fully fit for punishment and that the Shariah law sentence is executed, in public.

This is his challenge to the government, Shukarno Abdul Mutalib declares, because Malaysia needs to finally admit one important thing — that it’s not, in fact, ruled by the Taliban.

All well and good as long as his daughter [the one who would be caned] agrees!! Hopefully someone at least asks her….Der Spiegel didn’t.

Pre Zelaya Arrest

LaGringa has posted an article she wrote before Zelaya was arrested.

For those of us in places where Honduras was not on the front page, it certainly adds to our knowledge of what was going on that led to the arrest.

Zelaya is a crook.
He coerced government employees to go out and buy votes for his “referendum” and if towns refused, he cut off their electricity.

At the time of the ouster of Mel Zelaya, Rixi Moncada [the manager of a government run electric company] was again in Choluteca. She fled the country but left behind some L.260,000 in cash and a couple of guns in her hotel room. Speculation was that the cash was to be used for payments for votes. What else could explain the head of the electric company camped out in a hotel room with that amount of cash on the morning of the election?

Afterward, it also came out that operating and international aid funds for Choluteca had been illegally withheld by Zelaya as retribution for Mayor Soriano’s refusal to campaign for the cuarta urna. The same had been done to the mayors of Tegucigalpa, La Ceiba, and many others.

Tamiflu

This story was interesting and a bit frightening.

Apparently Tamiflu doesn’t break down as it goes through you and into the sewer.
And Tamiflu doesn’t break down going through the sewage plant to the water.

……this leads to birds ingesting the stuff potentially leading to Tamiflu resistant strains of future flu.

Concerns are now building that birds, which are natural influenza carriers, are being exposed to waterborne residues of Tamiflu’s active form and might develop and spread drug-resistant strains of seasonal and avian flu.

Interesting times.

Memories – or lack thereof on the left

Rachel Maddow seems to have lost all memory of previous administrations.

While she accuses Jim DeMint of treason for going to Honduras – more specifically for DeMint suggesting that Honduras continue to “defy” the US – (more on that later) – Maddow suggests this is such a horrible Republican thing without once mentioning Pelosi’s trip to Syria where she basically walked into peace negotiations with zero authority!

Jim DeMint was on a fact finding tour, not a “defy the US” tour. The MSM is putting words into his mouth.

In the meantime, it looks like there might just be some openings for the US to get back on the right side of this.

The representatives of OAS, after learning of the “iron defense” of Honduran institutions, advised the mission that will hit the country this week that “what happened in Honduras is an internal problem and its solution should be framed in the United Nations Charter that says in article II paragraph 7, where no provision of this Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state nor shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter”.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady has more on Honduras in the Wall Street Journal where Zelaya is blaming the “Jews” for his predicament.

Here’s another sad part of this sordid affair:

The Honduras debate is not really about Honduras. It is about whether it is possible to stop the spread of chavismo and all it implies, including nuclear proliferation and terrorism in Latin America. Most troubling is the unflinching support for Mr. Zelaya from President Barack Obama and Democratic Sen. John Kerry—despite the Law Library of Congress review that shows that Mr. Zelaya’s removal from office was legal, and the clear evidence that he is Mr. Chávez’s man in Tegucigalpa. On Thursday, Mr. Kerry took the unprecedented step of trying to block a fact-finding mission to Honduras by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, who is resisting Mr. Obama’s efforts to restore Mr. Zelaya to power.

Can you imagine? Your country is going through the hell of having to oust a president 4 months, 4 months before the next presidential election and the reason the international community decides to not support you and your rule of law (agreed upon by Congress and the Supreme Court and the ousted president’s own party) is because the debate is not about you, but about chavismo.

Gag me!!
Can some serious person in our state department start treating Honduras like the independent state that it actually is!!??