Category Archives: Throw Da Bums Out

Last Day

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Everyone else is looking backwards today, but that’s simply too too easy. After all, we can sum up this year (and last year and the year before that) quite simply:

America’s national politicians-for-life, faced with a $16,352,743,884,513.53 debt and a bank that turns into a pumpkin at midnight tonight, decided to fight the War on Guns instead. (This follows the War on Drugs and we all know how well that worked out.)

Maybe they have finally realized that the Arab Spring of 2012 could become the American Spring of 2013.

~ ~ ~

I have just finished a loverly vacation. The weather was beachy. Marathon had a sand castle contest and Key Weird opened a sculpture exhibit with unicycles. We chased fleas, talked to birds, sang to sea lions, and took about 2,600 pictures, the digital equivalent of 72 rolls of film. And through it all, it did not once snow in the Florida Keys.

I don’t make New Year’s Revolutions but I would like to make a few changes in my life. For the record I am blessed with the two best friends a man could have and I don’t particularly want to add stuff. I bought the best camera I’ve ever owned last month. I have a couple of pretty good computers and plenty of pocket electronics. I don’t need an airplane.

I need time. See, this year I want to
hit a home run, even in the minors;
revisit the 40 states I’ve already photographed and visit the rest of them for the first time;
win the lottery;
hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (as long as there’s an elevator back up);
sell an invention;
sell 100 photographs;
sell a book;
and reduce my use of serial semi-colons.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve replaced or repaired most of the little things that plagued me and stole the time I needed to do all of the above:
the gas chainsaw that never ran (bought an electric);
the hydronic heating pipes that freeze in the winter (installed an antifreeze pumping system);
the satellite receiver that didn’t receive (they sent me another);
the IT client who lied to me, chewed up hours of time to repair stuff their prior service company did wrong, then refused to pay (shed same);
the pellet stove that stopped burning (I stopped trying to repair it and bought an exhaust fan);
my iPod dock (put a couple of powered speakers in service instead);
the slow leak in a couple of car tires that the fixes never seem to last and always seem flat when needed (ongoing);
and the new TV that hums in the external speakers (diagnosed but not fixed).

It’s time to stop having to fix the little stuff.

That all means 2013 will be the year Mr. Fixit puts a new roof on this house, digs up the sewer line, and has to drag the seawall out of the sea, innit. At least I shall endeavor not to take on new clients.

Happy New Year!

No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.
— Mark Twain

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a Member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
–Mark Twain

There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
— Mark Twain

Thanks to the Congress, the public debt rose $3,009,622.24 between 11:59 a.m. and noon today.

Thorsday Thorn: Not a Single Dime

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“You will not see your taxes increase by a single dime, not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains tax …”

“It’s a tax,” Chief Justice John Roberts decreed.

Liberals and conservatives alike threw out George H. W. Bush when he promised “no new taxes.” Conservatives are already on on board to dump Barack Obama for that and a litany of other evils.

It’s time for the liberals to fish or cut bait: you can either dump your great and exalted O for lying to you or run off with your tail between your legs and pretend that a tax is not a tax is not actually a tax.

Here’s What Obamacare Actually Does For You

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“Wow! It is without any doubt the law now,” my friend Nola Guay crowed. “And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in it that I don’t like!”

Two days from our celebration of Independence from a monarchy, how about the facts that it is yet another tax, that it will continue to drive up the cost of seeing your doctor, and that the Regent of Pennsylvania Avenue just stole yet another piece of your heritage?

But Mr. Obama says he gave you something good!

She sent me a poster of the Obamacare Top 10.


The Obamacare Top 10

Here’s What Obamacare Actually Does For You:

(1) “Access to health insurance for 30 million Americans …”
Every one of the 46 million Americans without health insurance had “access” to it before Obamacare came to be. Access has never been the problem.

“and lower premiums.”
Your insurance premiums have doubled in the last 10 years. They’ve continued to go up because many Obamacare provisions don’t take effect until after the election or 2014.

The problem isn’t higher premiums. The problem is the high cost of our medical system. Work on cost and I guarantee premiums can come down.

(2) “The ability of business and individuals to purchase comprehensive coverage from a regulated marketplace.”
Wow. I guess the Banking and Insurance industry wasn’t already regulated. Now it will be more regulated. Like Cable TV is. That’s gonna make it better.

(3) “Insurers’ [sic] cannot discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.”
Um, anybody remember ERISA? Been there, done that.

(4) “Tax credits for small businesses that offer insurance.”
Oh, goody. We’ll raise taxes on all the rich small businessmen and businesswomen to come up with the money to give them tax credits back.

(5) “Assistance for businesses that provide health benefits to early retirees.”
See above. And don’t forget that “early retirees” doesn’t mean thee and me. It means the United Auto Workers who get to retire with full benefits and the GM stock Mr. Obama stole from the other retirees like thee and me who used to own that company.

(6) “Affordable health care for lower-income Americans. Obamacare extends Medicaid to individuals with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty line.”
No new taxes, though. This won’t hurt a bit. You might feel a little pinch…

(7) “Investments in women’s health. Obamacare prohibits insurers from charging women substantially more than men …”
Oh, goody again. So Obamacare singlehandedly disallows the actuarial tables insurers live by. Or men, who cannot have children, get to pay a higher premium than they would under actuarial calculations. And old peeps. And children. All higher premiums.

(8) “Young adults’ ability to stay on their parents’ health care plans.”
That’s a good one. Didn’t need 2,700 pages to do that. Speaker of the House John Boehner mentioned yesterday that the insurance companies themselves lobbied for it because federal law kept them from allowing dependents to stay, well, dependent past their high school or college years.

See, young adults are generally healthier than older adults. That should improve the revenue the insurance plans generate.

(9) “Discounts for seniors on brand-name drugs.”
Oh, swell. The home of the $6,000 hammer will negotiate the cost of your Viagra.

Wait. That’s not right. Don’t the drugs we want fall into the “donut hole”? (That’s the difference between the initial coverage limit and the catastrophic coverage threshold currently in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. This Administration loves donuts. One box of Munchkins™ coming up for your med-surg snack. Mmmm, donuts.)

(10) “Coverage for the sickest Americans.”
Bwahahahahahahahahah hah ha. And ha.

My friend Rufus had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2011. My mom’s breast cancer metastasized in 2001. Oddly, both of them were pretty darned sick. Both of them had coverage, Rufus on a company retirement benefit and Mom on Medicare and Medicare Part B.

That was before Obamacare.

Thomas Sowell commented, “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.”

Bottom line: “It’s a tax,” Chief Justice John Roberts said.

So tell me again, other than nationalizing the payment system for health care (and running up the costs), What Obamacare Actually Does For US? ‘Cause I just don’t see it.

I wrote a two part series a couple of years ago on how to fix our broken health care system:How to Fix It, Part I
How to Fix It, Part IIAnd here’s the entire ObamaCare category:
Obamacare in America

Next week, we look at the squadron of opossums in Ninja outfits who raided my trash can and laid the blame on the raccoons.

Here We Come, Purged or Not

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Monroe County’s part in the great Florida Voter Purge of 2012 has finished. “We do have a clear understanding of the National Voter Registration Act and we have to conform to it,” Elections Supervisor Harry L. Sawyer, Jr., said. “We are not going to break the law even if the governor thinks we should.”

Florida officials (except Mr. Sawyer, apparently) want to compare thousands of names from the state DMV’s non-citizen roster against the Homeland Security immigration database. Federal officials refused. It’s a simple premise. If you are not a citizen of Florida, you can’t vote in a Florida election; if you’re not a citizen of these United States, you can’t vote in any election here. Not one. Period.

“We can’t let the federal government delay our efforts to uphold the integrity of Florida elections any longer,” Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner said.

To Purge or Not to Purge
The U.S. Department of Justice in the person of Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas E. Perez ordered the state to stop the purge because it could violate federal voting laws.

Florida claims that the DoJ and Homeland Security have deliberately denied Florida access to what Homeland Security calls its “SAVE Program.”

It is indeed true that elections supervisors like Mr. Sawyer have delayed cleaning their checklists until we got too close to a national election. The National Voter Registration Act bans checklist decontamination within 90 days of a federal election; this year, the primary election on August 16 stops the state from purging the rolls after May 16. That ought not stop us from identifying the non-citizens on our voter lists. Or from purging the non-citizens for the general election which does not occur until November 8.

Big Brother knows who you are
I must have been living under a rock because I didn’t realize that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security knows who is in this country illegally. That department operates the “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements” Program, a database known as SAVE, which contains citizenship information on about a gazillion people. Homeland Security. And they have them listed in a special phonebook that is incompatible with all the state DMV databases.

Let me repeat that with emphasis in case anyone missed it. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security knows who is in this country illegally. And they don’t seem willing to do much about it.

“The number of noncitizens who are on the rolls or appear to have cast unlawful ballots grows by the day. And there’s no evidence yet that any lawful voter has been kicked off the rolls,” the Miami Herald reported.

Suppression or Fraud?
The ACLU has accused Florida of “voter suppression.” The Monroe County Tea Party has accused the Obamanation of abetting “voter fraud,” mostly because Homeland Security knows who is in this country illegally and doesn’t seem willing to do much about it.

I don’t know why it’s so tough to prove that a non-citizen actually cast an illegal ballot.

Oh. That’s right. The Feds won’t tell the state who might be illegally in the country which means there’s a whole lot less proof of suppression and a whole lot more appearance of fraud.

No matter whether you fall on the illegal alien or “undocumented guest worker” side of the argument, the government has become harder and harder to trust.


Go Arizona

And that, boys and girls, is why Arizona and other states (except Vermont) figure they need to do in-person immigration status checks. And why Florida needs to purge its voter checklists.