The Decade of our Discontent

It is with a sigh of relief, and hope for the future, that we are saying goodbye to 2009, and a decade from hell. The fall of the Soviet Union ushered in an era of peace, and with that era of peace came the peace dividend. Going into the new millennium, the United States was running a government surplus, and the economy was booming thanks to the advent of the digital age and the resultant increase in productivity that blew corporate earnings estimates through the roof. The stock market soared, and we all got rich.

Politically, the country was worried about sex in the oval office, and sharks going up the east coast of the United States. Europe was free and reuniting. Freedom and democracy were in ascendency. The United States was the sole world super power. It was a brief, shining moment in American history.

Things turned south starting with the 2000 presidential election. A constitutional crisis loomed as Bush and Gore brought us to the brink through legal maneuvering as to who won Florida’s electoral votes, and the presidential election. Sensing a pending doom, the Supreme Court of the United States cherry picked the case, and awarded Florida’s electoral votes to Bush, although Gore won the popular vote nationally. I believe the Supremes were on firm legal ground for what they did and the conclusion they reached, but it tore the country apart.

The following September, we learned that the fairytale world of peace and security was just an illusion, as radical Muslim fundamentalists succeeded in the most devastating attack ever on the American homeland by a foreign adversary. This time the enemy wasn't a country, but a bunch of religious fanatics; a much stealthier foe.

It seemed downhill from there. The stock market crashed. The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to almost zero setting the stage for what would become the financial collapse of September, 2008, which almost brought down the entire world economy. Between now and then, Enron collapsed causing turmoil in the energy markets. And other American business icons pounded on the government door for survival money, as Lehman Brothers bankrupted itself, along with General Motors and Chrysler. The pillars of American capitalism crumbled around the carcass of once mighty Wall Street.

Financial, political and cultural scandals headlined the news on an almost daily basis, culminating the largest financial scam of all, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Billions of dollars just disappeared, and his wealthy investors, many of them retired, ended up broke and living on social security checks.

In the meantime, the country went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq as nuclear proliferation among radical Muslim countries made the cold war look like a walk in the park. Even as those wars continue, the country now faces deadly turmoil in Pakistan and Yemen, and the big Kahuna of Islamic nut cases…Iran.

In the midst of all of this, America elected its first black President chanting a charismatic mantra of hope and change. What we got was an ideological despot who seems hell bent on carrying out a radical, liberal agenda through extreme health care and environmental policies as the economy continues to head south. Obama's popularity ratings have fallen farther faster than any other President in United State history. The extreme politicization of our government processes will play out again next fall when America will most likely, and reluctantly, turn right again, causing gridlock in the Washington…which almost sounds attractive.

As we enter the last year of the old decade, or the first year of the new decade depending on which pundit you are listening too, there is one thing about which you can be sure: the old Chinese adage of "may you live in interesting times" applies to us. Maybe that's why they have so much of our currency!

God bless America, and here’s hoping for better times ahead.

Ohio's Lump of Christmas Coal

If you want confirmation of the adage “nice guys finish last”, you need look no further than how Ohio, and for that matter most of the other states, got screwed in the Senate version of health care “reform.” In case you were sleeping, which wouldn’t be surprising given that the vote to end filibuster took place a 1:00 AM, Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska threw his principles out the window for thirty pieces of silver, giving Harry Reid and his progressive cabal the 60th vote needed to move the health care onto the Senate floor for final passage.

Senator Nelson is a conservative Democrat elected on the bluest of blue dog Democrat principles rooted in fiscal responsibility with a dash of strong anti-abortionism. 57% of his constituency opposed passage of this version of health care reform. Nelson did his dog and pony show waiving the pro-life flag; that is until Obama and Reid waived some green in front of his face.

Included in the quid pro quo for his vote was an exemption for Nebraska doctors from regulations prohibiting doctors from referring patients to hospitals that they own. It also provided a grant of $100 million for construction of a new university hospital. Finally, and this is really the one that you should be concerned about, it guaranteed that the Federal government would pick up 100% of Nebraska’s Medicaid costs for new Medicaid clients under the reform bill IN PERPETUITY.

Among many of the new hidden costs in the health care bill are federal mandates to the states to increase their Medicaid costs. Medicaid is federally mandated, but paid for and administered by the states, with state taxes. In Ohio, I believe it is the single biggest line item in the budget. California is on the verge of bankruptcy in large part because of unfunded Medicaid mandates. The same is true for New Jersey and New York. This is on top of a lesser, but still very expensive, $500 million deal made with Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu from Louisiana…also based in the Feds covering Louisiana’s Medicaid costs.

What that means, of course, is that the taxpayers in the rest of states, like Ohio, will not only be paying our Medicaid costs, but the costs of Nebraska and Louisiana.

So…..wither Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio? What did he get for Ohio? What did he get for his vote? There is an Italian word for it that is perfect…but I’m afraid you would look it up. And “up” is exactly where Ohio got it!!!

On the other hand, at least we know that Sherrod Brown isn’t a whore…or maybe he is, and he just was too stupid to establish the price. Either way, this year Ohio got a bunch of coal in its Christmas stocking. Maybe we should all move to Nebraska.

Mr. President: Don't Tell Me It's Raining When You're Pissing on My Leg.

One could not have written a script on how not to achieve health care reform any better than Obama and his Democratic cohorts in Congress. The hubris of these folks verges on the incomprehensible. Just as it’s not nice to full Mother Nature, Congress and the President should never fool the American public. Ask Richard Nixon (Watergate), Bush 1 (Read my lips, no more taxes), Bill Clinton (I did not have sexual relations with that woman), and Bush 2 ( let’s go get those weapons of mass destruction).

The latest contestants in the game of “Let’s Fool the American Public” have attempted a ideological coup to take over 1/6th of the American economy. The issue for these folks was never reform. It was always control.

First they thought they could pass it before anybody was paying attention. Then they thought they could lie to the public about the cost. Then they thought they could lie about how to pay for it. Then they thought they could lie about how health care would be administered. Then they lied to the seniors about Medicare cuts. And when they couldn’t lie anymore, they simply and literally shut the doors to any outside scrutiny of the negotiating process with the Democratic caucuses, and pushed ahead with reckless abandon to pass a left wing health care takeover that the American public clearly doesn’t want. Sooner or later the public would catch on, and it did.

Will some version of health care plan pass sometime in the next few months? I suspect it will; but not in the form that these guys tried to foist on us. For right now, we would be better off with nothing.

What President Obama should have done is spell out to the public in simple understandable terms the problems our health care system faces, and a number of alternatives to solve those problems with associated costs. An issue as personal as health care deserves a straight forward statement of problems, solutions, and costs. Two thousand pages of legislation loaded with boards and bureaucracies and coercive mandates and hidden taxes and fees and flimsily disguised health care standards review boards (the death panels) is NOT the way to go. And you NEVER make deals with the major players in the game and then renege on what you agreed to do for them in exchange for their support. After agreeing to help him, Obama stuck it to big pharma, the hospitals, the AMA, the insurance companies, the doctors, seniors, and just about everybody else. As the saying goes, don’t tell me it’s raining when you are pissing on my leg.

We all know that health care reform is needed, and buried in these massive bills are some potentially good ideas. The real shame in all of this is that Obama is missing a golden opportunity to show real leadership in an honest discussion of the issues, solutions, and costs. Instead, in a bid to get the long term Democratic dream of a single payer health care system ala Britain and Canada, he and his colleagues have resorted to chicanery and trickery and lies, all while the American people are dealing with a major recession and massive unemployment.

They assumed the American public, blinded by the light of the Messiah Obama, would not see what is going on. Lesson # 1 for any President: the American public may be many things, but it is not stupid. It appears that Barack Obama is now the next in a long line of Presidents who have learned that lesson the hard way.

The Importance of Losing

We are living through a teachable moment courtesy of President Bush and President Obama. Through political correctness, America has lost its ability to lose. If ever there was a time to learn anew the importance of losing, it is now. It is only through losing that we learn to win. Nothing motivates the desire to win than a good shellacking. Losing causes us to work harder and work smarter. Losing teaches us how to correct what we have done wrong.

In this age of bailout, and “too big to fail” politics, one wonders how we got to this point? It is not the function of government to determine winners and losers. It is the function of government to provide the rules under which the game is played, and to provide for an orderly exit for the loser. Government is not the mommy and daddy telling their children to start the game over in hopes of a different result.

But why should we be surprised when that is exactly what we have been teaching our children in our schools these past twenty years. Teachers can’t fail anybody because it will hurt the student’s self esteem. Children are prohibited from keeping score in intramural athletic events because “they all should be winners.” Communal thinking has permeated our education system, and it is getting worse instead of better.

Rather than teach children that there are no winners and losers, wouldn’t it be better to teach our kids that in life, there are winners and losers. More importantly teach these kids how to win and how to lose. There is no shame in losing. There is only shame in not trying.

This is important to society on a number of different levels. Allowing winners to succeed provides for efficiency in our economic system, and allows the best and the brightest to rise to the top. From winning on the sports field to winning in business, within reason, is the driver behind our economy from which our entire society benefits. You can’t do all of those social programs without someone making the money to pay for them.

But teaching kids to lose is even more important to our society. It teaches kids perseverance. It also helps to steer kids back into the right direction. For example, if a kid does not do well in football, you don’t keep beating him over the head to do well in football. Maybe he/she belongs in baseball, or golf, or choir, or music. One will naturally gravitate to where one does well and succeeds.

It does no one good to be allowed to coast. Why should I work for an A when I know teacher will give me a C if I do nothing? Why should I work to overcome whatever deficiency is in my background when doing nothing will provide the same result? That attitude translates into real life, and society is producing more and more people who enter adulthood with a sense of entitlement. We can only afford so many of those folks.

That doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t provide a safety net. But the definition of the safety net needs to be radically revised. A safety net does not mean the government should be providing breakfast, lunch and dinner to the offspring of irresponsible parents. A safety net does not mean that the government should be paying for clothing and shelter for people when their money is being spent on cell phones and electronic gadgetry. That isn’t a safety net. That is a lifestyle.

Likewise, the government should not reward companies who have acted badly with massive amounts bailouts. It should, instead, be rewarding those companies that acted prudently.

The gravity of America’s financial crisis in September, 2008, was obvious. But do you really think that AIG or Citigroup will change their ways? Yes, they are paying the government back. But I will guarantee you their company culture and method of operations will not change. It is even worse with GM and Chrysler. We, as a society, need to learn what happened here and the wisdom, or lack thereof, of the response. No company should be too big to fail. Those companies should have been broken up or allowed to sink.

America needs to change its culture. From pre-school to Wall Street board rooms, the motivation to win and the importance of losing should be re-introduced into our approach to life. If things keep going the way they are now, we will be increasingly called on to continue to morph our social safety net into a society of social entitlements that is unsustainable.

Obama's Achilles Heels

President Obama’s administration is finally seeing what happens where the rubber meets the road. His charisma is nice, but he is the Democratic donkey with four Achilles heels. Any one of them can bring him down. The front two heels are the economy/deficit and his health care initiative. Enough has been said about those. The hind heels, however, are looking more and more tenuous. Climate Change and Afghanistan are festering. It doesn’t look good.

Last week, the entire climate change debate collapsed when hackers hacked into the computers at Britain’s East Anglia Climate Research Unit. Just in case you aren’t familiar with what the CRU is, let’s say it is to Climate Change proponents what the Vatican is to Catholics. It is the proverbial belly of the beast.

The emails and reports are stunning in their display of manipulation of scientific research to achieve a political end. It is worth taking the time to read some of them. The CRU operatives discard studies that don’t agree with their view. They demonize legitimate scientists whose work contradicts their political agenda. And even scarier, they gin up… translate: fudge…the data to match what they think the data should show. In an even worse case scenario, these guys “lost” the basic research data, and only kept records of the “revised” data which had been massaged to reach the proper conclusions. In effect, global warming aka climate change is a manipulated hoax.

The CRU operatives responded by saying that other scientists have arrived independently at the same conclusions. Unfortunately, many of them used studies and data provided to them, or that had been sanitized, by the East Anglia CRU. Scientists wanting to do contra-studies have been “frozen out” of the scientific communities and research money. The debate about global warming is over! The only issue is to how to stop it! So there!!!

Unfortunately, Obama has taken the same position. Global warming is scientific fact. There is no disagreement. We must press forward or the earth will be destroyed. That was the tenor of Press Secretary Gibbs statements relating to the rapidly collapsing global warming house of cards. They just can’t admit it. Hello! Carbon Dioxide is plant food. The earth has natural warming and cooling cycles, and we are going into a cooling cycle…and the CO(2) levels in the atmosphere during the last two ice ages were higher than they are now, or projected to be, in the future.

If Obama presses forward with his Cap and Trade legislation, and other such initiatives based on punishment of the United States and the transfer of billions upon billions of dollars of wealth to third world countries, he will be run out of Washington on a rail. Even worse than the anger that will be directed towards him as utility and petroleum bills skyrocket, he will be trivialized. He should go to Copenhagen get his Nobel Peace prize, and skip the climate change conference which is now a joke.

In the midst of everything else, a President whose political roots are in social justice/peacenik activism now has to send soldiers into war. According to Obama, Iraq was a war of choice and Afghanistan was a war of necessity. I guess it depends on who is sitting in the Oval Office and when. While our troops are dying on the Afghan/Pakistani border, Obama was out playing golf and being President of the world, ignoring troop level requests from his hand-picked general.

What is he worried about? A corrupt Afghan government! Do ya’ think? There is no good choice in Afghanistan. The mission of smashing the enemy hiding in the mountains stands separate and apart from nation building. Our troops are going to be there for a long, long time. A corrupt Afghan government is a given. The American military presence is required in case the semblance of government that is there collapses. The Taliban can never be in charge of Afghanistan again. At the end of the day, the bigger problems are a collapsed nuclear Pakistan and a nuclear Iran. For that reason alone, Afghanistan will on our radar for years to come.

On this issue, Obama loses on the right, which believes he will never do enough; and the left, which believes he will do too much.

The only remaining question is which one of Obama’s four Achilles heels will bring him down. Any bets?