Survey:

Half of primary-care doctors would QUIT medicine

With the election of The One, we have the promise of national health care. If the Senate gets a filibuster proof majority, we will have it soonest. Tom Daschle will be Health and Human Services Secretary; he prays at the altar of socialistic programs.
Keeping that in mind, peruse the following excerpts:

[A]…survey, released this week by the Physicians’ Foundation, which promotes better doctor-patient relationships, sought to find the reasons for an identified exodus among family doctors and internists, widely known as the backbone of the health industry.

Of the 12,000 respondents, 49 percent said…[]… because there’s too much red tape generated from insurance companies and government agencies. And if that many physicians stopped practicing, that could be devastating to the health care industry.

With lower reimbursement from insurance companies and the cost of malpractice insurance skyrocketing, these health professionals say it’s not worth running a practice and are changing careers. Others say they’re going into so-called boutique medicine, in which they charge patients a yearly fee up front and don’t take insurance.
And some like Pocinki are limiting the type of insurance they’ll take and the number of patients on Medicare and Medicaid. According to the foundation’s report, over a third of those surveyed have closed their practices to Medicaid patients and 12 percent have closed their practices to Medicare patients

One of President-elect Barack Obama’s health care promises is to provide a primary care physician for every American. But some health experts, including Pocinki, are skeptical.
“People who have insurance can’t find a doctor, so suddenly we are going to give insurance to a whole bunch of people who haven’t had it, without increasing the number of physicians?” he says. “It’s going to be a problem.”
(All emphasis mine)

Watch this disaster unfold. The alt-A-Sub-prime mortgage mess will be a triffle compared to this debacle.

The only blessing in this play is the fingerprints on this will be all Democrats and RINO’s. One can only hope that not too many die in the interregnum.

“Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.”-Robert Heinlein

If you think this election will resolve the differences in this country, I doubt it. Since the 2000 election, positions have hardened; in 2004 the hubbub be came roars. The volume is only rising.

After ACORN rigged mortgages for illegals, then registered them to vote including the Dallas Cowboy Football team in Nevada, I’m not confident this election is going to be an “OH Well” on the 5^th of Nov.

The congressional GOP sold their honor for pottage. They’re toast.

[snip]
However this election turns out, there will be turmoil. If Obama wins, a large part of the country will feel angry and powerless against the will of the left leaning blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia. (In fact, they already feel that way, I assure you.) They will believe that ACORN created enough false voter registrations to put Obama over the top. If McCain wins, the left will riot and claim, “The Diebold machines were hacked!” The blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia will resent that the will of the “dumb hicks” in flyover country overruled that of their “betters”. And we will hear the cries of, “Racism! Racism!” ad nauseam.

I hate to sound all doom-and-gloom, but I see absolutely no solution to this. Or at least no solution in which America stays in the same form it is now. I hope I’m wrong about that. I guess we’ll see.

This started with the spoiled kids of the ’50’s whose parents didn’t want them to suffer the pain of the depression and post depression life.

And of course, as David Frum has written, the sixties were really the vanguard, the early warning detector of the looming culture war, which rages–if a “cold civil war” can be said to rage–to this day.

Guess what brats, welcome to 2008 and the great meltdown.

A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.-Robert Heinlein

A little bit of the pork from the Senate “sweetners” to help the bailout bill. We all can get a toot on to forget the reaming the government is giving us. There was no pork for Vaseline help in the bill. Need to ask Barney about that.

Business & Media will keep you abreast of all the shenanigans.

For those schooled in our public institutions, perhaps this explains the subprime mortgage mess more clearly and just who is getting the coated end of the stick.

The Brits do have a dry way of getting the point across.

Then there is this SNL skit that has been pulled which actually lays the blame where it belongs.
Go here to see this beaut. This is one they don’t want you to see!

Congress depleted this weekend administering anesthesia to the taxpayers; the actual fiscal bailout device is a suppository wrapped in #60 grit sandpaper.

Please use these to prevent severe lower back injury from sudden attempt to stand erect. Secure wrists and ankles before BAILOUT is administered!

No irritation protection necessary, this will take your mind off the insertion!

For this, what do we get? Bad paper, paper the banks don’t want and no ONE can sell. What anchors this paper? Foreclosed houses, which cannot be sold now, will not be sold in the near future and after standing empty, become even more desirable, correct.
Has anyone ever seen abandoned or closed government property? Slums have higher resale value. What do you think a stripped house is worth as collateral to John D. Taxpayer?
This is what your collateral will look like, euphemistically called a “fixer-upper” by your friendly Realtor.

Imagine a $400,000 mortgage securing this wonderful three story country farmhouse with mountain views on a country lane.

Listen to Chris Dodd or Barney Frank, or your congressman/woman entertain you with caring tales of past sensitivity to taxpayer plight. In a pig’s brown eye they do. Paulson certainly doesn’t. Bush read his idea of a good deal off the teleprompter. Bail out my buds and all is swell. (Paulson’s idea of getting along)
However the mushwits in DC tell us we need to jumpstart the housing industry, get them going to put the economy “back on track.”

” HUH?” What are they smoking?

Call your congress critter; tell him/her to be generous. Let the banks and Wall Street keep their great deals for themselves. We need this crash to get people off this insane living on this house of credit cards. Credit tightens up, people drive beaters (just like the Jones’) and they’ll take jobs the illegals won’t do.
Let Paul pay for his sins now. Leave Peter’s pockets alone.

“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.”
Andrew Jackson

Have a good look at what is happening in DC now.

All the pomposity of Dodd, Reid, and the rest of those miscreants, who are now worrying about the bailout because they want the lobby money to fill the re-election coffers, here’s how you sound and what look like outside the Beltway.

You’re easy to recognize!

Tell us again how you care about the taxpayers, the little man, the working stiff.

I’ll cry in my beer. ( if I had gas to go to a bar to buy a beer, if I could afford a beer, if my house hadn’t depreciated) I’m glad Obama got a good loan to buy a nice house. I’m glad Rangel and Dodd got good deals on mortgages and Harry got that sweet deal on that desert property.

I understand that auto loans and credit cards might be included in the bailout. I don’t have any of those debts. How much do I have to borrow to be included?

It feels terrible to work, pay all your bills on time, they be left out of this great deal. It really sucks. And I don’t even have money left over to buy a beer to cry in. But I have a picture of all of you!

This is the mess you get when the balance isn’t. It isn’t Donks and Republicants.It is Liberals and RINO’s voting to spend like drunks on social programs with no accountability; robbing one program to pay for another.

Now that Congress put the taxpayer out to dry, from where comes the money to pay for Medicare which is in the hole now. Social Security which is teetering on the edge and the prescription drug plan, you remember the one EVERYBODY clamored for, is in the red zone from the start.
Liberals and RINO’s, tell me your plan to pay the interest on T-Bills held by other countries? What are you going to do if they wish to cash in to ease their problems?
Now to the banking mess.

The fiasco we face does have a beginning and a time line of a perceptibly short duration.
We only look back to 1988, to a Democrat controlled congress. There is some Republican complicity too, in the FED by Greenspan and in Treasury. We need some names at which to point fingers; here is an ample supply. For the chimpy Loveable Liberal ALL are annotated to save you calling out bias, racist or liar. Makes the info easy for you, links to the WaPo, which as we know, is NOT biased.
Here’s the progression.

In 1990, the Fed, under former J.P. Morgan director Alan Greenspan, permitted guess who–J.P. Morgan–to become the first bank allowed to underwrite securities. [snip]
Four legislative attempts were made to weaken or repeal parts of Glass-Steagall from 1988-1996. One reason they failed is because smaller banks feared that opening the doors to allow banks to trade in securities would lead to the domination of larger banks–a fate that has come to pass.
The biggest change came in 1996 when Alan Greenspan issued a ruling allowing bank investment affiliates to have up to a quarter of their business in investments. [snip]

In 1986 a young man named Sanford Weill grew bored with Wall Street and purchased one of these subprime lenders, Commercial Credit, a loan company based in Baltimore. In his paper “Banking on Misery Citigroup, Wall Street, and the Fleecing of the South,” Michael Hudson notes Weill drove employees to sell more. [snip]
This kind of practice resulted in multiple lawsuits that surfaced in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Hudson cites one example:

Jackson, Miss., attorney Chris Coffer says, he obtained confidential settlements for about 800 clients with claims against Commercial Credit or its successor, CitiFinancial.

Starting with Commercial, Weill began wheeling and dealing until a little over a decade later he would head the largest financial institution in the world.

The Repeal of Glass Steagall

In the background of the go-go economy, the feeling grew among some economists and the financial community that Glass-Steagall hampered America’s financial competitiveness. Among the many voices favoring this was Alan Greenspan along with former Goldman Sachs partner Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. In a 1995 speech and testimony to Congress Rubin signaled the Clinton Administration was ready to repeal Glass-Steagall:

“The banking industry is fundamentally different…[]…domestically, the separation of investment banking and commercial banking envisioned by Glass-Steagall has eroded significantly.”

Anyone who thinks the repeal of Glass-Steagall was forced on an unwilling Bill Clinton need only read Rubin’s testimony. A year later Sandy Weill set in motion the forces that would finally end Glass-Steagall. [snip]

Of course a NY Times photo of the event is with Clinton smiling is worth how many words?

Weill proposed the most audacious financial merger of in American history: he would merge one of the largest insurance companies (Travelers), one of the largest investment banks (Salomon Smith Barney), and the largest commercial banks (Citibank) in America. The problem was the merger was illegal in terms of Glass-Steagall. Independent Community Bankers of America CEO Kenneth Guenther captured the audacity of the deal in an interview with Frontline:

Here you have the leadership — Sandy Weill of Travelers and John Reed of Citicorp — saying, “Look, the Congress isn’t moving fast enough. Let’s do it on our own. …[]… And they pulled this off with the blessings of the president of the United States, President Clinton; the chairman of the Federal Reserve system, Alan Greenspan; and the secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin.
And then, when it’s all over, what happens? The secretary of the treasury becomes the vice chairman of the emerging Citigroup.

Talk about a sinecure.
Then we have this marvelous statement from the bozo Rubin;

Curiously, one of those converts is none other than Robert Rubin who has stated:

If Wall Street companies can count on being rescued like banks, then they need to be regulated like banks.

Since it was Rubin who played a major role in the deregulation this statement is nothing short of incredulous.
As the record shows, Rubin had a great deal to regret. [snip]

(The link in the quote goes to Paul Krugman who has an antenna full of pigeons)
Before you say it, yes, Gramm was the Chairman of McCain’s committee since tossed off the campaign.

Senate Banking Committee Chair Phil Gramm, House Banking Committee chair James Leach, and Virginia Representative Thomas Bliley introduced bills in the Senate and House under the benign-sounding name of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, becoming the key sponsors of the bill as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act,
The Senate voted on this and it passed. Biden voted for the repeal, McCain didn’t vote. 90-8 was the roll call in favor.
Finishing up, here are some questions I’d like answered.
Obama has already stated he would not reinstate Glass-Steagall. When asked Barack Obama notes:
Well, no. The argument is not to go back to the regulatory framework of the 1930’s because, as I said, the financial markets have changed substantially.
Also, four of Obama’s top six contributors include Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and–guess who–Citigroup. Another biggie, Fannie Mae fat cat Franklin Raines chatting up the Obamoe although the Obamoe lies about it. (Get it here in the WaPo)

This mess is getting tougher, not easier and still may crush the economy. While we wait, perhaps Hillary might tell us what she thinks of the repeal of Glass-Steagall; Would she roll back the repeal? It is a toss up between Monica and this for the greater ignominy.

Pelosi: Dems bear no responsibility for economic crisis

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when asked Tuesday whether Democrats bear some of the responsibility regarding the current crisis on Wall Street, had a one-word answer: “No.”

They’re all practicing stand up delivery I guess so they have work after the collapse of the country.  The Republicants are no better, both parties porked their districts to gluttony.

Well, it’s over, the piper has his hand out. And Congress is looking to the taxpayer to front the money.  John Q. Public is broke too, Nancy sowhatcha gonna do?

The fat lady ain’t gonna sing ’cause she ain’t gonna get paid either!

Blood for Oil

The body of a truck driver lies on the road after he was killed by a van while he manned a picket line at the entrance to a wholesale market during a strike over high fuel prices in Granada, Spain on June 10. Another lorry driver was killed on the same day in Portugal during a separate incident at a picket line near Lisbon. (AFP/Jose Luis Sanudo)

I wonder what these environmental cretins have to say about this blood for oil.

With the ordaining of McCain by the GOP, the RNCC is having a bit of a problem with the rank and file.

For your schadenfreude, here is a list of e-mails to Cole at the RNCC, 633 comments and growing.

Republican Solutions and a Positive Agenda
Posted By: Tom Cole, May 16, 2008 - 9:52 AM

Everyone needs a lift, this supplies it.

This bit of “illogic” passing as for a book provides all the motive for driving them out of the GOP. Or leaving them there and forming the Conservative Party. Here is the prime example.

Brown University’s alumni magazine recently published an essay written by former Senator Lincoln Chafee (the essay was excerpted from his new book, Against the Tide). [snip]
In another part of the book, Chafee had the temerity to say that, “The central front in [Bush’s] war on Congress was this $1.6 trillion raid on the public purse.”

Letting taxpayers keep more of their money is a “raid” on the treasury? Amazing. Chafee is a confused, bitter man with no sense of economics.

Then again, this is the Liberal mindset

In hope of re-election, many RINO’s have signed on to this idiocy.

Projections from the power producers show am increase for residential electricity of between $800.00 and $2200 per annum for each household.

The trading “fees” for all companies that exceed a to be determined level shall go to renewable generation; included are all sources that are unsustainable without massive government largess: Wind, organic waste (excluding incinerated municipal solid waste); biomass and hydroelectric, geothermal, solar thermal, photovoltaic, tidal, wave, or other nonfossil fuel, nonnuclear source.

Most of the aforementioned methods fell to the wayside as either inefficient, unreliable or extremely expensive. The square miles essential to install wind farms or solar panels able to generate the power mandatory for the country is immense. Unless we are returning to the Bronze Age, then power needs radically ebb.

Of course, large corporations such as GE will profit from strong-arming the taxpayers by promising magical inventions for the Gaian believers.

And you thought the era of cottage industries ended.

S.317

Electric Utility Cap and Trade Act of 2007 (Introduced in Senate)

TITLE I–GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE

SEC. 101. GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE.

(a) In General- The Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7401 et seq.) is amended by adding at the end the following:

`TITLE VII–GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE

`SEC. 701. DEFINITIONS.

`In this title:

`(1) AFFECTED UNIT-
`(A) IN GENERAL- The term `affected unit’ means an electric generating facility that–
`(i) has a nameplate capacity greater than 25 megawatts;
`(ii) combusts greenhouse gas-emitting fuels; and
`(iii) generates electricity for sale.

`(B) INCLUSIONS- The term `affected unit’ includes–
`(i) a cogeneration facility; and
`(ii) a facility owned or operated by any instrumentality of–
`(I) the Federal Government; or
`(II) any State, local, or tribal government.

`SEC. 712. SCIENTIFIC REVIEW OF THE SAFE CLIMATE LEVEL.

`(a) Definition and Objective of Maintaining the Safe Climate Level-
`(1) FINDING- Congress finds that ratification by the Senate in 1992 of the UNFCCC, commitments which were affirmed by the President in 2002, established for the United States an objective of `stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’.
`(2) DEFINITION OF SAFE CLIMATE LEVEL- In this section, the term `safe climate level’ means the climate level referred to in paragraph (1).
[…]
`(3) COMPOSITION-
`(A) IN GENERAL- The Panel shall be composed of 8 climate scientists and 3 former Federal officials, as described in subparagraphs (B) through (D).

`(B) CLIMATE SCIENTISTS- Not later than 270 days after the date of enactment of this title, the President of the National Academy of Sciences shall appoint to serve on the Panel 8 climate scientists from among individuals who–

No call for a climatologist in this mob.

`(i) have earned doctorate degrees;
`(ii) have performed research in physical, biological, or social sciences, mathematics, economics, or related fields, with a particular focus on or link to 1 or more aspects of climate science;
`(iii) have records of peer-reviewed publications that include–
`(I) publications in main-stream, high-quality scientific journals (such as journals associated with respected scientific societies or those with a high impact factor, as determined by the Institute for Scientific Information);
`(II) recent publications relating to earth systems, and particularly relating to the climate system; and
`(III) a high publication rate, typically at least 2 or 3 papers per year; and
`(iv) have participated in high-level committees, such as those formed by the National Academy of Sciences or by leading scientific societies.

The whole “Obama can unite us” meme is amusing. For example, Obama must have struggled long and hard to attract conservative “stalwart” Lincoln Chafee, right? Chafee’s loss didn’t exactly sadden conservatives. However, let’s give Obama some credit. He does have an Eisenhower granddaughter nobody ever heard of as an Obamacan. If McCain wants to keep up with the Jones, he better dig up an FDR relative, so he can start advertising them as McCain-o-crats.

 And we wonder why U.S. companies would ever want to move offshore.

Iceland and Taiwan to Slash Corporate Tax Rates

Iceland is known as the Nordic Tiger because of rapid economic growth. Much of the nation’s prosperity is the result of free-market policies, including a 36 percent flat tax on labor income, a 10 percent flat tax on capital income, and a corporate tax rate of just 18 percent (down from 50 percent at the end of the 1980s). But Iceland is not resting on its laurels. The government has just announced a reduction in the corporate tax rate:

The corporate income tax will be cut from 18 per cent to 15 per cent, effective for the 2008 income year and come into force in the 2009 assessment year.

Meanwhile, even though the 25 percent corporate tax rate in Taiwan is already substantially lower than the 39 percent-plus rate in the United States, Taiwanese politicians apparently recognize that globalization and tax competition are powerful arguments for even lower rates. Tax-news.com is reporting that the government therefore plans to slash the corporate rate to 17.5 percent - and also make unspecified reductions to personal income tax rates:

It emerged this week that the Taiwanese cabinet has approved plans to reduce corporate and personal income tax rates, although the proposed changes must still secure parliamentary approval. The cuts would see the business tax rate reduced to 17.5% (from 25%), and the personal income tax rate slashed, according to reports. [snip]

When will American politicians hop on the tax-cutting bandwagon?

Why promote an independent citizenry when you can be as fascist as possible. Besides, Pelosi and Reid said it can’t work.