Read it.

Wendy Williams and her husband liked their health insurance plan.  The premium and annual deductibles made sense for them, and a more “gold-plated” plan was not worth the money.  Yet Massachusetts’ health care regulators disagreed, and forced the Williams to pay a $1,000 fine if they wished to keep their insurance plan — a plan they prefer to a comparable state-approved alternative.

Teachable moment: Stay out of Massachusetts.

It wasn’t always this way.  When the Massachusetts mandate was first adopted, their plan was just fine.  But then the rules changed.  The state no longer accepts their insurance plan, even though they are fully insured and are not imposing their health care costs on other taxpayers.

Well, that’s government for you.

Read it.

My species, and welcome to it.

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This pathetic outcome is all that is left of a federal prosecution that threatened Martinez with up to 20 years in federal prison, portraying her as a taxpayer-bilking drug pusher. The case, launched three years ago by U.S. Attorney James A. McDevitt, stemmed from Martinez’s willingness to treat people with histories of illegal drug use for pain, a practice that is not only legal but ethically required. In 2007 a jury acquitted her of prescribing narcotics outside the scope of medicine, failed to reach verdicts on related charges of unlawfully distributing narcotics, and convicted her on eight felony counts of health care fraud. After the trial, Judge Van Sickle dismissed the distribution charges and ordered a new trial on the fraud charges. The Yakima Herald-Republic reports that a medical billing expert hired by Martinez’s lawyer “concluded that the convictions were based on misrepresentations by government auditors.” According to the lawyer, “it gutted the prosecution’s case,” which is why McDevitt agreed to a plea bargain instead of retrying Martinez. As for Martinez, she wanted to keep fighting, but she “had run out of money” and assets, having “lost her home in the process of defending herself against the charges.”

Read it.

Read it.

Gosh, Microsoft wouldn’t lie to us … would they?

In any event, my “Launch Party” package is allegedly on its way. I’m hoping that there will be balloons. I can do some very interesting things with balloons. Some of them are even legal.

Read it.

Psychologists in Canada have revealed new research suggesting that people who become eco-conscious “green consumers” are “more likely to steal and lie” than others.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Today’s Wall Street Journal headlines that “New Math Boosts Health Plan.” Some new calculations claim that the Health Care Plan (whatever it is, since it’s hardly final) will reduce the deficit. Given that all the health care plans make some form of health care a free good for many new millions of people, the notion that it will save money is ludicrous, and it’s hard to understand how anyone would believe that for a moment. It’s going to cost money — every such plan always has. It’s going to cost a lot more than we project. Every such plan always has. This is the Bullwinkle the Moose principle: “This time for sure!”

And that about says it all.

Read it.

And why?

Since I care more about my country than my personal pride, here’s how I lost my insurance: I moved. That’s right, I moved from Washington, D.C., back to Massachusetts, a state with universal health care.

In D.C., I had a policy with a national company, an HMO, and surprisingly I was very happy with it. I had a fantastic primary care doctor at Georgetown University Hospital. As a self-employed writer, my premium was $225 a month, plus $10 for a dental discount.

In Massachusetts, the cost for a similar plan is around $550, give or take a few dollars. My risk factors haven’t changed. I didn’t stop writing and become a stunt double. I don’t smoke. I drink a little and every once in a while a little more than I should. I have a Newfoundland dog. I am only 41. There has been no change in the way I live my life except my zip code — to a state with universal health care.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Traditional children’s nursery rhymes such as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star are becoming so unpopular with parents that they could die out, researched suggests.

It highlighted gaps in the knowledge of different age groups, for example three quarters of those over 55 knew all the words to Little Miss Muffet, compared to just over half of those parents under 24.

The figures also show a gender knowledge gap: only 52 per cent of men surveyed knew all the words to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star compared to 83 per cent of women

Read it.

I’ll tell you. It feels bad. Being a libertarian means living with an almost unendurable level of frustration. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events. How does it feel to be a libertarian? Imagine what the internal life of Cassandra must have been and you will have a pretty good idea.

Imagine spending two decades warning that government policy is leading to a major economic collapse, and then, when the collapse comes, watching the world conclude that markets do not work.

Imagine continually explaining that markets function because they have a built in corrective mechanism; that periodic contractions are necessary to weed out unproductive ventures; that continually loosening credit to avoid such corrections just puts off the day of reckoning and inevitably leads to a larger recession; that this is precisely what the government did during the 1920’s that led to the great depression; and then, when the recession hits, seeing it offered as proof of the failure of laissez-faire capitalism.

Wisdom. Attend.

Read it.

Your tax dollars at work.

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We have the technology.

Read it.

But the high salaries of lawyers suggest that there is a genuine demand out there for all that lawyering. Quite simply, we need a lot of lawyers because we have a lot of laws.

Read it.

President and Mrs. Obama filled their speeches to the International Olympic Committee with references to themselves, their lives, their experiences, all because of their self-evident significance to the progress of humanity. “Both Obamas,” writes George Will, gave heartfelt speeches about … themselves.”

Read it.

“The middle class in Mexico is going down,” Arendondo told me in his office by the courtyard of the brightly painted school in the largely lower-middle-class Iztacalco, one of Mexico City’s 16 diverse delegaciones, or boroughs. “The middle class is predated by both the super-rich and the criminal poor. We are squeezed in the middle of the sandwich.”

Darwin Award nominee.

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Oops, sorry, it’s already happening here. Forget I even mentioned it….

Read it.

A more far reaching proposal to consider is limiting the claims of secured creditors to encourage them to monitor the riskiness of the financial firm.

This could involve limiting their claims to no more than say 80 percent of their secured credits. This would ensure that market participants always have ‘skin in the game’.

Unfortunately for Chairman Bair, the whole point of being a secured creditor is so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time monitoring the riskiness of a financial firm. Secured creditors charge a lower interest rate because they have a lower risk. As the government found out during the recent bailouts, secured creditors are the fly in the oinment of expropriation and restructuring to favor those whom the government chooses to favor, and so they want to eliminate it in the future.

Read it.

Of course there are exceptions such as the people who have invested both their money and their lives into the appreciation of art: people with Art History Degrees. But as you have probably noticed, they have very little value to both you and society. The latter is evidenced by their annual salary while the former is to be determined on a person by person basis.

Eliot Spitzer points a finger.

When even sleazeballs are calling you out, you’re in bad shape.

Read it.

Nancy Pelosi likes to brag that she’s “drained the swamp” when it comes to corruption in the House, but ethics problems could come back to haunt Democrats in 2010. Democrats are currently the subject of 12 of the 16 complaints pending before the House ethics committee. Two of the lawmakers being investigated—Reps. Jack Murtha and Charlie Rangel—have close ties to Pelosi, who has come under criticism for not asking them to resign their committee posts. Murtha, chairman of a key defense-appropriations subcommittee, is under investigation for his ties to a lobbying firm whose clients received millions of dollars in Defense earmarks. Rangel, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, is facing scrutiny for not fully disclosing assets. The ethics committee is also looking into ties between Rangel and a developer who leased rent-controlled apartments to the congressman, and whether Rangel improperly used his House office to raise funds for a public policy institute in his name. Rangel and Murtha deny any wrongdoing. (Another lawmaker under investigation: Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who, according to the committee, “may have offered to raise funds” for then–Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich in exchange for the president’s Senate seat—a charge Jackson denies. The panel deferred its probe at the request of the Justice Department, which is conducting its own inquiry.)

This in Newsweek — when the Crust loses its own cheerleaders, what next?

Read it.

Read it.

Medical researchers in Philadelphia have conducted out a study which indicates – according to their interpretation – that carrying a gun causes people to get shot more often. “People should rethink their possession of guns,” say the medics.

Oh, but wait – what’s this:

There didn’t seem to be any account taken of the fact that people with good reason to fear being shot – for instance drug dealers, secret agents etc – would be more likely to tool up than those with no such concerns.

It’s “research” like this that is responsible for all of the bad public policy foisted on us each year.

Steve Sailer takes a look at the Letterman imbroglio.

If David Letterman’s lady friend staffer had threatened to sue for sexual harassment, but her lawyer told Letterman’s lawyer that she’d be willing to sign an agreement promising never to say a word about the affair in return for a $2 million settlement, that would be perfectly legal, right? I mean, the law encourages people to threaten to sue their bosses for sexual harassment, right? And the law also encourages the parties to settle out of court, and promises of secrecy in return for money are legally enforceable, right?

What if the blackmailer instead of threatening to write a screenplay about a horndog talkshow host had actually written the screenplay and submitted it to David Letterman as a film to be produced by Letterman’s Worldwide Pants production company, and Worldwide Pants could buy up all rights to it for just $2 million. (It probably wouldn’t be that much worse a screenplay than the Strangers with Candy screenplay that Worldwide Pants did produce a few years ago.) I kind of seems like Mr. Halderman got himself arrested for being in a hurry to get paid, for not being suave about his approach.

Read it.

Conditions are still worse with the ‘stimulus’ than were predicted without it, much less than the predictions with it. When will people learn that elected officials and their court experts just don’t know what they’re talking about, and can’t be trusted with YOUR money?

Read it.

Read it.

Jeez, nobody’s got a sense of humor any more.

Read it.

Hey, I’m scared. Aren’t you scared?

Pakistan has warned the United States that it will not allow drone attacks on suspected Taliban bases in its troubled Balochistan province, military sources have said.

I’m curious as to what they plan to do about it. Sick the Taliban on us?

Read it.

It’s still a problem. As of a few weeks ago, the “hole”—which isn’t so much a gap in the ozone layer as an area of seasonal thinning—is even bigger than it was at the height of the ozone panic in the 1980s. (At the moment, it spans a patch of sky almost the size of North America.) That said, the ozone layer is in much better shape today than it would have been had the world not taken decisive action 20 years ago. It’s just that the damage we did in the old days is going to take a long time to heal.

And yet we don’t see anything about it in the news. Why not? Bush left office, that’s why not. Funny how all of these earth-shattering kabooms aren’t worth worrying about when Democrats are in office.

Forbes has its usual list.

Note that, of the top eight, seven are Democrats and one is a RINO.

Read it.

This is the car that Goofy uses to ride around Disneyland.

Read it.

It always astounds people when a Communist dictatorship acts like, well, a Communist dictatorship.

Read it.

Even Washington’s pet Republicans can’t stomach Obama.

Obama’s rhetorical method in international contexts — given supreme expression at the United Nations this week — is a moral dialectic. The thesis: pre-Obama America is a nation of many flaws and failures. The antithesis: The world responds with understandable but misguided prejudice. The synthesis: Me. Me, at all costs; me, in spite of all terrors; me, however long and hard the road may be. How great a world we all should see, if only all were more like…me.

Read it.

No surprises here. “Geeks” and “tough guys” share the characteristic of not having fully grown up. Adults (age notwithstanding) don’t get tattoos. They may have some from an earlier arrested-adolescent stage of life, but we all have skeletons in our closets. I suspect that if there were some quick and easy way to remove tattoos, we wouldn’t see so many of them.

Boris Johnson is not afraid to voice the unfashionable thought.

Well, if you want to see the other side of the story, and you want to meditate on at least one powerful argument for colonialism and imperialism, you must go to the British Museum, where they have just opened a magnificent exhibition of the life of Moctezuma. There, you are invited to imagine what it was like to attend the inauguration of the latest expansion of the Great Temple, in 1506, not long before the arrival of the white man.

First, you would file past the tzompantli, the huge racks of skulls, and then towards the reeking steps of the Templo Mayor. You would be led up the steps, slippery with blood, and at the top one priest would grab you by the hair, and four others would grab each limb. Then in an instant they would flip you expertly backwards on to the sacrificial block, and though your back would be very likely broken by the impact, the last sight to delight your eyes, before you lost all brain-stem function, would have been your own still beating heart, held aloft by the priest as the snows of Popocatepetl turned pink in the evening sun.

Steve Sailer is taken aback.

Wait a minute — “the need to have more people of color, gays …”

So, there aren’t enough gays in the media?

Who knew?

Read it.

England’s Children’s Minister wants a review of the case of two police officers told they were breaking the law, caring for each other’s children.

Ofsted said the arrangement contravened the Childcare Act because it lasted for longer than two hours a day, and constituted receiving “a reward”.

I am not making this up. (Children’s Minister? Children’s Minister?)

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in D.C.

Read it.

Robert Mugabe’s wife, Grace, who has taken over at least six of Zimbabwe’s most valuable white-owned farms since 2002, sells up to a million litres of milk a year to Nestlé, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

Read it.

Robert Mugabe has built up a secret farming empire from land seized from at least five white-owned businesses, a Daily Telegraph investigation has found.

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

Read it. And sing along with The Children if you dare.

Read it.

Eighteen months after being laid off, Judith Lederman, a 50-year-old divorcee who lives in Scarsdale, N.Y., is ready to consider jobs paying half the $120,000 she earned as a publicity manager at Lord & Taylor. That’s mostly because she’s desperate, but it also makes sense when you consider how this country punishes work effort. While the first $60,000 of her income would be lightly taxed, the next $60,000 would be hit with what is in effect a 79% tax rate. Given a choice between a part-time or easy job paying $60,000 and a demanding, stress-ridden job paying $120,000, Lederman would be wise to take the former. In the tougher job she would be contributing twice as much to the economy. But she wouldn’t be doing herself much good. It would make more sense to take it easy and spend more time with her high school senior daughter, Casey.

Just another fine day in the Obama Nation.

Read it.

The end of an era.

Read it.

And pretty perky those perks can be, too.

Dr Kealey’s piece – on “lust” – said: “Most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do? Enjoy her! She’s a perk.”

The comments were condemned last night by the National Union of Students who said they displayed an “astounding lack of respect for women”.

I don’t know which is more appalling – the professor’s omments, or the fact that Britain has a “National Union of Students”.

A bad experience with AT&T.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Two tin cans and a string give better service than AT&T, and cost far less.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line has a bone to pick with AARP.

My only regret about not being a “joiner” is that I don’t have many opportunities to quit organizations. I am a member of AARP, though, and this is looking like the perfect time to quit.

House Republicans have issued a report providing evidence that AARP is in a position to receive tens of millions of dollars in “kickbacks” if Democratic health care legislation becomes law.

Read it.

A steam train in south Wales is using coal transported from Siberia, rather than from its local mine three miles away, due to regulations about how the coal can be transported.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

Read it.

The problem is that we are in this awful in-between phase of our planets productivity curve. Technology has vastly reduced the number of workers and resources that are required to make what the planet needs. This means that a small number of people, the people in control of the creation of goods, get the benefit of the increased productivity. When we get to the end of this curve and everyone can, in essence, be their own manufacturer, things will be good again. But until we can ride this curve to its natural stopping point, there will be much suffering, as the jobs that technology kills are not replaced.

Say’s Law works, whether you like it or not.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

The Other McCain has an analysis.

Alas, Bush had a knack for surrounding himself with mediocre minds, to which category Matt Latimer clearly belongs (along with David Kuo and Michael Gerson).

An analysis with which I substantially agree.

So it can be said that Bush the son sought to redeem the family name by reversing what were widely considered two of Bush the father’s biggest errors. (Critics of the Middle East policies

Nevertheless, Bush 43 had that same New England WASP Republican commitment to “respectability” — the Politics of Niceness — which was the intrinsic flaw of his father’s politics, and which is why New England WASP Republicans are a dying breed.

And rightly so.

Read it.

Yet another reason to stay away from Facebook and other narcissism enablers.

The small-scale survey indicates that people who believe they have discreet online habits may still be making personal information about themselves public.

No shit.