Reinke Faces Life

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2003/Jul-11-Fri-2003/news/21707576.html

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TAX TIME: So much for the suspense. The state Supreme Court announced Thursday that the Legislature, already in triple overtime, was free to ignore the constitutional requirement of a two-thirds majority to pass new taxes. The court ruled that, at this late date, a simple majority is good enough for government work.

Not that it should surprise anyone who has followed the tumultuous proceedings the past seven months, but the high court’s ruling is bound to generate all manner of litigation and citizen initiative petitions. Nevada Republican Liberty Caucus official Dan Burdish, acting in his capacity as the leader of Nevadans for Tax Restraint, wasted little time in bashing the court.

“The Nevada Supreme Court in an unprecedented usurpation of the Separation of Powers today threw out the Gibbons Tax Restraint Initiative,” he wrote in a mass e-mail. “Nevadans for Tax Restraint is considering a recall of these six Justices in addition to the Referendum we will conduct to overthrow the soon to be passed $1 billion tax increase.”

You didn’t actually expect the tax-increase critics to go away, did you?

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Well, “nice try” DOWGs. The Framers of the Constitution never expected that all three branches of gooferment to be in bed with one another.

But, we know better.

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I’m tired of voting in elections where my choices never matter. If I was King, I would decree that you only vote for your block captain. (If you’re in an apartment, then your floor.) And, the block captains elect a neighborhood ElCalde. Those votes would be population weighted. The the block captain would have 22 votes representing the people on my block. I’d pay taxes to the “block captain”. And, then I’d have some one to hold accountable for the abuses. Every thing would be organized geographically summing up to the next higher level. I’m sure that would be a much better system of representative gooferment. With a lot less fuss ‘n’ muss. And campaign cost would drop dramatically.

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http://www.freemindstv.com/ronpaulinterview.html

Ron Paul wins the NH straw poll and this short video shows why. No wonder the establishment want to ignore him. Truly smaller government, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and honest money. It would be the death knell of the warfare welfare state.

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FROM DICK MORRIS’ EZINE

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The public face of Hillary Clinton’s new health care plan is sunny, filled with choices for consumers and bright with promises for better health care for all. But a close examination of the proposal alongside other initiatives of Sen. Clinton in the past few years reveals a dark side she wants to hide from public view until after the election is over.

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Hillary speaks of the importance of stopping health insurance companies from raising premiums on those who are sick. But she does not mention the inevitable flip side of her proposal — to raise premiums on those who are well. On the one hand, she would cover all those with chronic conditions with low cost health insurance and, on the other, would stop insurance companies from “cherry picking” healthy and young people for their insurance plans. The net effect would be a major increase in health insurance premiums for the vast majority of Americans.
In effect, her plan would turn “insurance” into “subsidy.” The concept of insurance is that one pays a relatively low premium to guard against catastrophic expenses that are outside of our ability to meet financially. But Hillary’s program would really be nothing more than a cash transfer from the healthy to the sick, not an insurance program at all.

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Hey, if the bull doesn’t see the sword behind the cape, then he’s dead. Just as dead the American health care system, if the voting public can’t see thru the Democratic smoke ‘n’ mirrors around “free” health care.

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http://www.smartmoney.com/thenewretirement/index.cfm?story=september2007

The New Retirement
Don’t Believe the Hype on Medicare Part D
By Peter Keating |Peter Keating Archive |Published: September 10, 2007

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Try this on for size instead. Under Medicare’s drug benefit, you pay $4,270 of the first $5,871 in prescription costs you incur.

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Part D has serious problems beyond the doughnut hole. For one thing, it requires insurers to offer just one drug per therapeutic class, which means no plan may cover all of the specific blood pressure or anti-inflammatory drugs your doctor wants to prescribe. For another, Medicaid, state insurance programs and private employers are all dumping beneficiaries into Part D. That may save those plans money, but it costs seniors. In the first half of 2006, for example, low-income retirees and their insurers paid an extra $325 million to Pfizer because they lost discounts in switching from Medicaid to Part D. Most important, after a quiet period following the prescription benefit’s enactment, insurance companies got busy hiking prices: 78% of Part D insurers increased the price of their most popular drugs at least three times last year, according to a Consumers Union study of 225 plans in the five biggest states. About a quarter of them pushed prices up by 5% or more in just the first two months of this year.

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You really didn’t think that this was anything but WELFARE for the drug companies?

Why DO you think they make all those big campaign contributions to both political parties? It not out of principle but out of greed.

Argh!

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http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo128.html

Why the Military Fails To Protect Us
(And Lies About It)
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

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After five years, it is not even safe to drive to the airport from downtown Baghdad unless one is driving in an armored tank – and even that is not perfectly safe. This would suggest that the September 10 testimony before a congressional committee of General Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, should be taken with a grain of salt about the size of Texas. It would hardly be good for his career, and his legacy, to admit that the operation that he planned and executed has been a failure.

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Yup, the “perfumed princes of the pentagon” are politicians. And, to expect results from gooferment is the perfect definition of insanity.

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http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/09/10/american-poverty

September 10, 2007
American Poverty
By Lisa Fabrizio

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The Heritage Foundation’s Robert E. Rector has written a fine piece cataloging the Census Bureau’s statistics and linked to all the pertinent data. If you’re anything like me, some of the highlights might not surprise you:

* Forty-three percent of all poor households actu­ally own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

* Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

* Only 6 percent of poor households are over­crowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

* The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

* Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.

* Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

* Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

* Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

The point being, that the depth of poverty that exists in too much of the world is basically nonexistent here. But although our poor are better off than those in most of the world — so much so that millions of impoverished foreigners are willing to risk their lives and break our laws to join them — some Americans do live in unfortunate, if not dire, circumstances. Of course, the major difference is that the poor in this country have the opportunity to improve their lot.

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Here are two reasons why we have to get the gooferment out of the “war on poverty”. (1) Poor in the USA is not the same as poor elsewhere on the globe. (2) They demotivate people from working — both the takers who could work and the makers who say why should I bother to make more.

I learned this lesson when some TV show interviewed an illegal from Africa and asked why did he want to come to America. His astute reply “here poor people are fat”.

How “fat” we don’t ever realize.

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http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods81.html

What the Warfare State Really Costs
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

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Once again we are faced with opportunity costs. “The full costs of mortgaging the nation’s high technology policy to the Pentagon can be measured only by the lost opportunities to have done things differently,” writes Stuart Leslie. “No one now can go back to the beginning of the Cold War and follow those paths not taken. No one can assert with any confidence exactly where a science and technology driven by other assumptions and priorities would have taken us.”

If we are to come up with some idea of the impoverishing effects of the military establishment, it must include, at the very least, the factors we have described here. These additional costs of the warfare state help us to realize that it isn’t just war, but also the preparation for war, that is, in the words of Gen. Smedley Butler, a racket.

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So once again, we learn from Basat. What options were crowded out by the choice we made? In the Trillions of dollars spent wastefully on the Military Industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about, we can only imagine what could have been. Sigh! From Woods article, we can’t even begin to guess the miracles that could have been. Like abortion, it cuts off whole lineages of people and ideas.

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http://redstateeclectic.typepad.com/redstate_commentary/2007/09/ron-paul-rally-.html

It’s most interesting how energetic he is espousing the principles of liberty. Makes me think we are back in the Revolutionary War times. Call out the militia. It’s time to take back the high moral ground.

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FROM DICK MORRIS EMAIL

FRED THOMPSON: FIRST LOBBYIST FOR PRESIDENT
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on FoxNews.com on September 10, 2007

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Thompson was a lobbyist for 20 years before he was elected to the Senate, representing the Tennessee Savings and Loan Association, the deposed Haitian President Aristed and the National Planning & Reproductive Health Association.

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You have to like when the dirt comes out. Hopefully the voters can look past the Law & Order gig and see what they are electing.

A plague on all their houses.

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