I know, let's tax the Republicans!

Those silly lugs in Washington have me laughing again. Their latest attempt at scraping enough money together to pay for socialized medicine calls for taxing employer-provided insurance benefits, which isn't new.... But here's the kicker.... Unions are exempt!

That is, any employment benefit gained by collective bargaining will not be taxed -- although benefits to every independent, individual employee will be taxed -- to pay for socialized medicine. The UAW, the teachers' unions, the postal workers, the SEIU, etc. will all be immune from carrying their share of the rather staggering tax burden of socialized medicine.

Oh, those zany legislators! Just have to chuckle.

Picture this:

Late Sunday night. Pazzo Pelosi, Christopher Dudd, Barney Fudd, et. al., weary and exhausted in a conference room somewhere deep within the bowels of the Capitol Building, surrounded by wads of paper -- discarded ideas and calculator tapes -- empty Starbuck's cups, a couple pizza boxes stuffed in the trash can.... The men are in shirt sleeves, ties loosened. Pazzo has kicked off her heels and is shuffling around in bunny slippers. They all have red-rimmed eyes and find themselves continually stifling a yawn. They've been at it all weekend, trying to find the money to pay for socialized medicine. Too bad Geithner won't let them see the Fed's books.... Such a selfish snob....

Suddenly Pazzo jumps up, waving her hands around in those characteristic and vaguely menacing judo chop gestures: "By Jove! I think I've got it! We'll simply tax all the Republicans for this hare-brained scheme, then we won't lose our Democrat voter base!"

"Wew, I agwee that's the wesult we aww want, but how weow we do that?" Barney Fudd asks, genuinely dismayed.

A sly glimmer lights up Dudd's face like a jack'o'lantern. "I get it," he says, "So devilishly simple. How could we fail to see it until now? We'll make the unions exempt from the tax!"

Pazzo exchanges her bunny slippers for the ruby shoes, the men straighten their ties, then they all link arms and skip down the dimly-lit corridors of the Capitol Building, gaily singing, "We'll stick it to the red states, those grim Republican stiffs! ... Follow the Deficit Road! Follow the Deficit Road! Follow the, follow the, follow the, follow the, follow the Deficit Road!"

Fudd, of course, leads these efforts, his munchkin impression being unparallelled.

Oh, those crazy politicians. They never fail to bring a smile to my face.

Let's thank the Wiz they live in Oz and not the USA.

All God's children just want to be free

Like a lot of other Americans, I contracted a case of PTSD on 9/11. In addition, I clearly recall when Iran fell in 1979, parading US hostages around the streets, burning US flags. I remember waking up one morning to news account on my radio-alarm clock of a failed attempt to rescue US hostages, the effort made, or at least backed, by Ross Perot. That night on the news, the Iranians offered the west a news clip of the remains from that adventure: they dropped a charred human foot from a shoe box onto a desk top.

So I didn't think it would be too upsetting to watch Iranians rioting and all that. More like, "Isn't this what you voted for?" to borrow a phrase from Comrade Osama. Why not hijack a couple airplanes and blow up a few buildings while you're at it?

But it is depressing. More than half the population of Iran is under 30 years old. They don't remember the Shah or the glory of humiliating the USA. They grew up under the harsh control of the mullahs, so you'd think they'd be used to towing the line. Somehow, they aren't.

Which makes me believe that yeah, it's probably true: All God's children just want to be free. Or all of any God's children....

Of course, Comrade Osama is so deeply entrenched in his own political machinations, so calculating, that he won't come out in favor of human freedom. Too controversial. He's hedging his bets. After all, what if the mullahs just start breaking heads and everyone goes home? Apparently the Supreme Holy Butthead has brought in his version of tactical squads from outside of Iran, just in case the Iranian police and military balk at shooting at their brothers and sisters.

Then there's also the question about exactly what the hell Comrade Osama does believe in. His own success, for sure. His godlike silver tongue, for sure. But then I've been around for a long time, and especially around Chicago politics. I think I've finally figured out just exactly where he's coming from: 1968.

During the 2008 election campaign, many people made a lot of noise about Comrade Osama being a cohort of William Ayres. I wasn't sure who William Ayres was. (I was probably stoned at the time.) But then I heard that William Ayres is married to Bernadine Dohrn. Oh-h-h-h. OK.

Let's go back... On the very northern edge of Chicago, north even of the CTA "turnaround" we used to call it, the yards where the subway trains would, literally, turn around and head back south, there was a neighborhood called Juneway Terrace. It was maybe a couple miles square and a maze of big old-fashioned court-styled apartment buildings. Most of these apartments were studios or one bedroom, though some might have been two-bedroom. Overlooking the lovely old Calvary Cemetary, which is actually in the suburb of Evanston, where I grew up.

Anyway, Juneway Terrace, the street, was one main drag through this neighborhood. The area was built apparently for "newlyweds and nearly-deads." People got married, spent a couple years in this rabbit warren of tiny apartments, then moved on to bigger and better things as they established their careers and started a family. Or, having gone through all that, they sold their suburban houses and re-settled as retirees in Juneway. It was convenient to shopping, public transportation, even Lake Michigan. And cheap.

So now comes the 1960s. Northwestern students had made up a large component of Juneway Terrace residents -- those students who lived off the Evanston undergrad campus, anyway. The apartments were cheap. Other young people, including many draft dodgers and runaways, also found Juneway Terrace. By the late 1960s, Juneway was more or less the Haight-Ashbury of Chicago, although Old Town usually is credited with this. Old Town was fashionable and expensive, though, the preserve of college kids who let their hair grow to collar-length, then donned their costly fringed jackets and love beads on Saturday night, hoping to score a dime bag and some free love for the weekend. They weren't really committed. They had homes to go to.

Preceding the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Weathermen and Yippies sent out people whom I can only call "pre-event planners" to find temporary digs for out-of-town protesters. They were very active in the Juneway neighborhood. Everyone with an extra bedroom or spare mattress on the living room floor volunteered to house a Yippie or two during the Convention. The Yippies also routinely totally trashed the premises, including destroying refrigerators and smashing toilets -- these appliances belonged to "the man" -- but that's another story.

Anyway, so this was the Juneway Terrace I knew. Hippie Heaven. More affordable than Old Town for the "real" hippies, not the college students and others who operated on daddy's dime, but the "real" hippies, known only as Raven or Swamp-rat, usually draft dodgers just passin' through, often in search of clean underwear if they hadn't foresworn the use of underwear entirely, and owning nothing but a guitar that they probably couldn't play very well. You could always find a place to spend the night in Juneway, always make a drug connection, and the neighborhood cops were pretty well known to everyone. Not always well-liked, but in a couple cases, the local cops tipped off a favorite hippie pal about a forthcoming drug raid so that the hippie pal could avoid arrest. There was a certain amount of familiarity and sympathy.

So what does this all have to do with Comrade Osama? When I heard the name Bernadine Dohrn, bells went off. It must have been about 1970 or so, when the cops started actually shooting at college kids at Kent State and all... a big rumor went around that Bernadine Dohrn had a bomb factory in one of those apartments in Juneway. It was a rumor -- make no mistake. The bomb factory probably never really existed. But it was a big deal at the time, sort of like a hippie security blanket: OK, so they're shooting at us. But we have a bomb factory. It was almost scary.

No one knew exactly where the bomb factory was -- and believe me, in the Juneway neighborhood, it could have been anywhere. The whole idea was just impressive. And a little scary. Made you think again about where this all might end up.

So I got to thinking about all of this, in terms of Comrade Osama's place in the vast continuum of contemporary history.

Comrade Osama is a 1960s radical. He's still working for the marxist revolution. No coincidence he was a pal of William Ayres and apparently of his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, as well. Comrade Osama grew up on tales of glory of blowing up Draft Board offices and setting Lincoln Park picnic tables ablaze to piss off the pigs. Running up and down State Street breaking windows. No end to these wonderful achievements.

And you know what? Since then, marxism has failed in a genuinely monumental way. Good grief, let a couple people through the turnstyle in Hungary or Czechoslovakia or someplace, and suddenly the whole USSR collapses. Its satellite nations are suddenly floundering for support and moral backing, or lighting candles and singing about freedom.

My God, Ronald Reagan won, riding in on a high-spirited palomino, the cavalry charge sounding in the background.... All God's children just want to be free.

Actually, history has passed Comrade Osama by. Most of the old Juneway neighborhood was torn down and now really is not much more than CTA rail yards. It was easier to tear it down than to try to rehabilitate it. Sorta like the USSR.

Yet Comrade Osama, Ayres, probably Dohrn and many others of my general age group persist in clinging to the old 1960s social stereotypes and dreams of huge, faceless, populist uprisings. They're kinda like what used to be called Red Diaper Babies. Actually, Red Diaper Babies -- kids who grew up on the dreams and aspirations of 1930-style marxist revolutions -- were the people who hoped to lead the unrest of the 1960s. (See anything by David Horowitz.)

However, hippies were never easily led. Most would rather just fire up a joint and groove out on Jimi or Janis. I mean, think of Woodstock as a training camp for 1960s militant radicals. I mean, like, if you get, like, really stoned, and take off your shoes, and sort of like spin around looking up at the stars, and Country Joe is on in the background, it's like, so beautiful, man.... That's about as close as they ever came to making a revolution.

People who were radical college students in the 1960s are the ones who've written all the books about it, filled with righteous rage and love for the underdog and all that. Honestly, though, most of the hippies I knew just didn't want to work on Maggie's Farm (per Bob Dylan) all their lives. Most didn't know much about Vietnam, except that they didn't want to die there. They sure weren't marxists. Many of them grew up to be entrepreneurs, rethinking gym shoes and toasters and creating the Digital Revolution. In Chicago in the mid-1960s, hippie guys would ride the CTA trains passing out flowers. An ad for a head shop (where you could by blacklight posters and things like bongs) was taped around the stem.

Guiding and directing ticked-off and/or disenchanted people is kinda like herding cats. Or, more cliche, like teaching a pig to sing -- it doesn't work and the pig resents it. They even resent it in Iran, where they don't know anything but tight authoritarian control and continuous badgering.

All God's children just want to be free, no matter how much health insurance, green cars, and moral sanctity you try to shove down their throats. In fact, government control of any kind only irritates them. Not that Americans will take to the streets unless they really have to. More like, the United Socialist States of America is just making itself irrelevant. We'll all just go underground.

The health of the state

First of all, let me say that the title of this blog, "The health of the state," has absolutely nothing to do with health care. It's a quote from a Machiavellian-type figure who noted that war represents "the health of the state." That is, a nation that more or less pro-actively goes to war is flexing its muscles. It's not an attractive thought, but then neither is socialized medicine.

OK. I got an email from Cato Institute, a free market think tank. They have launched a web site at: Healthcare.Cato.org, which offers a number of in-depth studies on health care in the USA and elsewhere, and also provides suggestions for positive real-world solutions to rising costs and all the other problems US health care and health insurance is supposed to have.

I got so fascinated with two of these reports that I never got around to reading the alternative solutions... Anyway, following are some well-documented facts from the Cato reports. And I strongly suggest that anyone who's really interested in this subject -- and all Americans should be right now -- that you go to the web site and download the full reports. They're PDF files and free of charge.

Let's start with any projected costs for socialized medicine. I wrote in another blog that Medicare costs were wildly underestimated in the mid-1960s when that system was first implemented. At the time I wrote that, I couldn't find the statistics. (They used to be at a government site, but darned if I can find them now.) Anyway, this is from Cato's "Obamacare to Come -- Seven Bad Ideas for Health Care Reform," by Michael Tanner.

However, cost estimates for government programs have been wildly optimistic over the the years, especially for health care programs. For example, when Medicare was instituted in 1965, it was estimated that the cost of Medicare Part A would be $9 billion by 1990. In actuality, it was seven times higher -- $67 billion. Similarly, in 1987, Medicaid's special hospitals subsidy was projected to cost $100 million annually by 1992 (just five years later); however, it actually cost $11 billion -- more than 100 times as much. And in 1988, when Medicare's home care benefit was established, the projected cost for 1993 was $4 billion, but the actual cost was $10 billion. If the current estimates for the cost of Obamacare are off by similar orders of magnitude, we would be enacting a new entitlement that could bury future generations under mountains of debt and taxes.

In the report, "The Grass Is Not Always Greener," author Michael Tanner reviews socialized health care systems from about a dozen nations around the world, including those most highly rated by the U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO.) WHO rates the US system about 37th or 38th, largely because it's not government-run, doesn't guarantee universal accessibility, and doesn't come as part of a package of other social programs. Apparently WHO doesn't put much weight on how effective a health care system is in terms of actually preventing and curing disease. Those other factors are more important -- which might actually explain why the world in general is such a mess. But I digress...

The US is first in things like treating cancer and other "incurable" diseases, is first in access to technological and pharmaceutical innovation, and in a number of other areas that most US citizens highly prize -- and prize above the system's egalitarianism.

Anyway, France took the #1 spot on WHO's Health Care Hit Parade. A few facts:

• French doctors have an average annual income of $55,000 (this was in 2008. They've gone on strike since then, so maybe now they make more.)
• French citizens pay 18.8% in payroll taxes for their health care system, yet still....
• Many French citizens also buy supplemental private insurance to cover the very extensive list of "co-pays" they must pay, even in their socialized system. The French manage their system and control costs by tacking on co-pays to discourage use of certain things -- like shopping around for doctors and fancy drugs.

In Germany, doctors typically earn 20% of a US physician's annual income, which Cato noted is about $146,000, and about $260,000 for specialists. German doctors also have threatened to strike for better wages.

In Norway:

Approximately 23 percent of all patients referred for hospital admission have to wait longer than three months for admission. The Norwegian government has responded by repeatedly and unsuccessfully atempting to legislate waiting lists out of existence. For example, under the 1990 Patients' Rights Act, patients with a condition that would lead to "catastrophic or very serious consequences" have a right to treatment within six months, if the treatment is available. In 2001, after several government reports had documented repeated violations of this policy, the government passed a new mandate requiring that a patient's medical condition be at least "assessed" within 30 days. Despite these paper
guarantees, waiting lists have not been substantially reduced.

In Greece, something like 45% of the health care system is funded by "informal payments" to doctors and health care providers. These are bribes.

On waiting lists in the UK:

Waiting lists are a major problem. As many as 750,000 Britons are currently awaiting admission to NHS [National Health Service] hospitals. These waits are not insubstantial and can impose significant risks on patients. For example, by some estimates, cancer patients can wait as long as eight months for treatment. Delays in receiving treatment are often so long that nearly 20% of colon cancer patients considered treatable when first diagnosed are incurable by the time treatment is finally offered.

In some cases, to prevent hospitals from using their resources too quickly, mandatory minimum waiting times have been imposed. The fear is that patients will flock to the most efficient hospitals or those with smaller backlogs. Thus a top-flight hospital like Suffolk East PCT was ordered to impose a minimum waiting time of at least 122 days before patients could be treated or the hospital would lose a portion of its funding.

In Portugal, the central government gives the various regions a block grant for health care, so care is very uneven from one area of the country to the other. In addition, you can't change doctors. So if you're unhappy with your doctor, or if your region doesn't have an MRI, for example, you just move to another part of the country.

Cato somewhat recommends the Swiss system, if you really feel you need socialized medicine after reading all this. In Switzerland, insurance is provided by private companies, and every citizen is required to buy a policy. Low-income individuals and families get government subsidies of some kind to pay for it. Costs in Switzerland are pretty well-contained because people actually have to pay for their own policies. That is, they have some idea of how much health care really costs.

If it seems like I'm quoting an awful lot, it's because these reports are so, so good and enlightening.

Don't listen to the pie-in-the-sky from politicians. Look up the facts! Go to:
Healthcare.Cato.org .

Then call your congressman and tell him to be very, very careful and to read the bill this time.

What's good about socialized medicine?

I've spent the last couple of hours looking for positive arguments in favor of socialized medicine. Apart from Michael Moore's "Sicko," which I discount, because Michael Moore is an idiot who doesn't seek facts but only tries to kick up dust (by the way, Sicko, you happy with the direction GM has gone?), I can't find any really strong arguments supporting the positive benefits of socialized medicine. That is, it doesn't seem to have many positive benefits, at least not as compared to the US "mixed" system.

People working from Sicko Michael Moore and Comrade Osama's perspective make a primary assumption that socialized medicine achieves certain benefits. That is, they ASSUME these benefits. They don't bother to provide any evidence to actually prove these benefits in fact exist. But here they are:

1.) Everyone gets "free," high-quality health care;
2.) Everyone gets the same "free," high-quality health care no matter their social or economic status;
3.) Socialized medicine is cheaper -- in the macro sense -- than free market care.

Based on actual human experience, none of this is true. It's a marxist pipe-dream.

1.) Socialized medicine is not "free." I've been listening to the current debates in congress about how to pay for coverage for an assumed 47 million Americans who right now are uninsured. Proposals include:

• a 10-cent per drink tax on sugary drinks, like Coke and Pepsi, and apparently Snapple and orange juice as well, since these also contain very high amounts of sugar;
• a 2% increase in income tax on high-income earners;
• a 3% tax on employers on the health care benefits they provide employees;
• an unspecified tax on health care benefits paid by employees -- that is, if a company pays $5,000 per year for an employee's heath insurance, that $5,000 expense would be counted by the IRS as "income" and the employee would have to pay income tax on it.

Hey, you know what? This isn't "free." And this is only to cover 47 million uninsured. As a matter of fact, in most cases -- that is, for the 200+ million Americans who do have health insurance, this means that they will pay much more for their health care.

2.) Everyone gets the same health care, no matter their social or economic status? Yeah, sure. According to an NBER paper by Sherry Glied, as quoted in a blog by John Goodman, who is promoting non-socialized medicine, in Canada, it's the highest income groups who make most use of the socialized health care system, and it's this same group who also has greatest access to additional care -- in the US, for example.

Additionally, in Canada and elsewhere where socialized medicine exists, a black market for health care services and dugs flourishes (this is not from the Glied paper, by the way, but documented by other souces, including people who live daily inside these systems.) You might compare this to getting a plumber to fix your toilet for cash after his regular working hours. He charges you less than union scale, doesn't apply for a municipal permit, and keeps the unreported and untaxed cash you pay him. You get professional-quality work at about half the "official" cost. Everyone gains.

That's the free market at work -- undercover, of course, and illegally, when the free exchange of products and services is banned by the government. Everyone involved could go to jail for this, or least pay a hefty fine.

And, of course, only people with cash-in-hand can afford black market services. People who are compelled to fork over all their discretionery income to the feds in taxes need not apply.

3.) Socialized medicine is cheaper, from the macro view. This is something that's just an outright lie. To hear people like Chrstine Romer (all she needs is a big red clown nose and fuzzy buttons to qualify for Barnum & Bailey) make this claim is just insulting. How can it be cheaper when, in addition to paying doctors and hospitals, the public treasury is also funding the enormous bureaucracy required to traffic hundreds of thousands of medical services, payments, and as Comrade Osama wants, a continually updated and always available bank of medical information?

This is just not even a remote possibility. Anyone who believes this should probably be kept under close supervision for their own good.

Right now, the proponents of socialized medicine claim that private and socialized health insurance can co-exist side-by-side. This is another, very obvious lie that should be apparent to anyone with functioning brain matter.

If an employer is forced to pay 3% more in taxes in order to provide employee health insurance, and then the employee has to pay income taxes on that insurance... what employer in their right mind would continue to offer health insurance? His employees might even beg him to Stop with the benefits! lest they be taxed into poverty.

So, what are the benefits again?

Apart from Sicko Michael Moore and socialist-leaning politicians, I haven't been able to find too many people who actually want socialized medicine in the USA. I haven't been able to find any real benefits that accrue to it.

So what the hell is this all about? It's starting to look like yet another way the buttheads in Washington are hoping to anihilate personal liberty. Once they get control of the health care industry, they can start dictating our behavior. Like already... If you're going to destroy your health drinking sugared Coke and Pepsi, then you deserve to die from diabetes.

And you want to do what on your vacation? What if you break your leg while rock-climbing? Should you be allowed to handle raw ground beef for that cook-out? Or would you have to somehow be bonded first to cover the additional cost should the worst happen? Or maybe you shouldn't be permitted that kind of dangerous behavior at all. It will cost the rest of us too much money.

So much to look forward to, huh?

The REAL problem

Spent some time looking at conservative blogs and publications, conservative mailing lists, discussion groups, etc.

So we have a marxist in the White House destroying the capitalist economy, and some people continue to worry about Comrade Osama's birth certificate. If he was born in Kenya or Hawaii, and what someone who claims to be his great-uncle says.

You know what? Who gives a damn? Prez Comrade is not going to be booted out of office on the basis of his birth certificate or lack thereof. Headlines at worldnetdaily. com screamed something about how shocking it is that "Americans don't care!!" about Comrade Osama's birth certificate. Right. It doesn't matter. It's a non-issue. He's not going to be kicked out of office for lying about his place of birth -- if he is lying. So get off it and move on to something that's really important, like, no matter where he was born, this sonofabitch is anihilating individual liberty.

Elsewhere, I invited some libertarian-leaning people to read my blog about socialized medicine (It ain't NICE.) What was the reaction? Something like seven out of nine comments objected to my calling Comrade Osama "Osama."

Yeah, they put their finger on the big issue there. Not that Comrade Osama is appropriating all the heretofore privately-owned assets of the US health care industry and turning medical professionals into slaves of the state, but that I call him "Osama." I must applaud their breadth of vision and their ability to identify priorities.

In the past, I've been a card-carrying Libertarian and it's worth noting, given a range of issues and activities to pursue, Libertarians will generally head straight for the small potatoes -- the tiny inconsistencies in the "other guy's" argument, the fact that the Reps and Dems omitted from their campaign platforms any consideration about who could "claim" the moon in the course of space exploration. They kinda remind me of that one character in the novel, Catch-22, whose eyes look in two directions at the same time and who was apparently unable to focus on any one thing at a time.

With friends like these, is there any wonder the nation is going down the tubes? Before we look at issues, let's make sure all of our speech is politically correct.

FYI -- I don't play that game. In fact, I believe that's only a tool that the addle-brained use to hamstring political discourse. I try not to cuss too much on this blog. Those who know me in real life might understand that this takes some effort. I tend to call foul people foul names.

Comrade Osama is Comrade Osama. Not an insult, merely an accurate characterization. He's a marxist and a terrorist devoted to destroying the USA. What would you call him?

Am I supposed to show him respect? That would be lying. I don't have any respect for him, or for Pazzo Pelosi or Magic Martian Abracadabrajab, who's just now breaking heads in Iran. Do you respect these people? If so, why?

I actually expected better things from Project 912's web site -- the one launched by Glenn Beck. Some posters there are pretty cool and savvy. However, literally hundreds of posts were responses to some guy who calls himself Elliott, who apparently is trolling the list. For the uninitiated, "trolling" means posting deliberately provocative statements and/or insults that, if they work, distract everyone from the real issues.

They are a key reason why mailing lists usually don't accomplish anything, and why most of them end up being little more than exchanges of personal insults, or "flames." I'm quite certain that Comrade Osama actively recruits his halfwitted minions to surf the web in search of derogatory mailing lists, discussion groups, etc., and has charged them with the task of trolling these lists to keep the legitimate participants unfocused and ultimately impotent and ineffective.

The best and only effective way to deal with trolls on any mailing list is to ignore them. Last I saw on the Project 912 list was that another hundred or so posts had been devoted to figuring out this very simple social principle. I mean, when I was in kindergarten, my mom told me to ignore the obnoxious bullies. They only crave attention, and the more attention you give them, the worse their behavior gets. They're like flashers. Is this a lesson of such profound depth and complexity that it requires a lot of study and commentary? Just ignore the twit and move on.

I may be giving away my age here, but I was around for the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago -- the one where the Chicago Police ended up breaking heads on Clark Street and then again on Michigan Avenue. I didn't go down there; I was actually trying to avoid the police at the time. At any rate....

Had a friend who was working undercover for the FBI at the time. He was a student himself and able to mix with other students in the radical groups. His job was to identify the rabble rousers and report them to the FBI. Added benefit, he was an artist. He could draw portraits of said leftists and pass those to the FBI, since the people who did the inciting moved from place to place and usually operated under a number of aliases. The info my friend provided was almost as good as getting photographs.

At any rate, something the FBI advised my friend to do to break up protests -- even legitimate ones -- was to raise so many issues that the dissenting groups couldn't concentrate their numbers around any one thing. So instead of organizing a really effective and representative group to give voice to protest, you ended up with a bunch of disgruntled and isolated misfits, each nurturing their own petty grievance and battling each other about what was important, while the "powers that be" swept into office on the big issues.

Sound familiar?

Comrade Osama is destroying the concept of individual rights in the USA. He's obliterating capitalism and the free market.

Is there anything more important?

And please, feel free to check my spelling. Then I'll edit your commentary for grammatical errors and misuse of the English language.

Meanwhile, Rome burns.

Not with a bang....

How depressing. Since the banks are giving back the TARP money, Osama has now devised a plan to nationalize the banking industry outright, and just about everything else.

He's really quite the vicious son of a bitch, isn't he? It almost beggars belief. I can't even see his charm anymore. He just looks lame to me.

And why ABC-TV is giving him two hours of prime time to sell his socialized medicine scheme to the American public is beyond me. Apparently ABC-TV is even refusing to run any ads that counter the socialized medicine plan during their soviet-style propaganda show.

Must say, I haven't watched anything on ABC for some time. The last time I tuned into Stephanopoulos' Sunday morning political show, it was so pathetic it was difficult to watch. I would happily boycott ABC, but I never watch it anyway. I certainly won't watch their socialized medicine -- or should that be "snake oil" -- show. I couldn't tell you what else they air.

But don't you see what's happening here? Don't you see, or is that you just don't care?

You just assume that the USA is a free country and look no further. Ha-ha! Have you got a surprise coming.

"That's the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper."

Guess we've got the answer

I started this blog by talking about Ben Franklin telling a woman that he and the other delegates had founded a republic, if we can keep it.

Guess we have the answer to that now.

R.I.P. to what was a really good idea -- the USA -- that spawned all kinds of prosperity, creativity, peace, and lots of stuff that was just plain fun.

Now time to hunker down and kiss the ass of the federal regulators. Just like The Third Reich, Soviet Union, et. al.

The market dropped more than 200 points over the last couple days. It's probably dropping even more now. Maybe it will come back up so I can cash in what's left of my IRA stock -- at least enough to fund my departure from Amerika.

Doubt I'll be able to sell this house for what I paid for it in this market, so that's a complete waste. At least I won't have to worry about the grass or cleaning out the gutters. The village can turn it into a parking lot -- their fondest dreams come true.

Now... where to go. Have to go check out some desolate islands in the South Pacific or someplace.

I'm glad I have less life to look forward to than to look back on. Most of my relatives are dead. So, not leaving a whole lot behind.

What bothers me the most is the death of what seemed to be a really viable ideal. That's just too bad. I had such hopes for the human race.