Friday, March 26, 2010

Winget on Leadership


Service must be the ultimate motive of your life. Your work is the way you perform the service. Success, happiness, and prosperity come from having served well.


- Larry Winget

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Busy Times

Busy week in politics; busy week for me at work. Will get this blog back on track soon.

Monday, March 22, 2010

IT Passed

This week's CNN versus Fox News:



-------------------------------



CNN as usual does the straight news better but Fox News asks the questions of the key news-maker. Bart Stupak comes across as pretty slimey.

Advantage this week: Fox News.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Tracy on Leadership

When you create a clear mental picture of where you are going in life, you become more positive, more motivated and more determined to make it a reality. You trigger your natural creativity and come up with idea after idea to help make your vision come true.


- Brian Tracy

Health Care Endgame

The process by which the Dems hope to pass their bill has become more fascinating than the substance of their bill itself. Five things to ponder:

1) nobody knows what's inside it yet. The Democrat leadership will unveil it later today or this week. They promise it will be made public 72 hours before folks can vote on it. Now just stop for just a minute and ponder the significance of this.

- A major piece of legislation, under discussion for over a year.

- A "reconciliation" of bills that have already passed both houses of Congress.

- Possibility of major innovations being put into it that were not in the original bills that passed.

Has there ever been a legislative process like this before?

2) What's up with that "reconciliation" buisness anyhow? Remember at that Health Care Summitt, where the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared that no one is talking of reconciliation?

3) This voting to "deem" to pass instead of just voting for a bill: did you ever hear of such a thing? I must admit that this came as a complete surprise to me. Is there any precident for this?

4) Under the circumstances, the word "pass" takes on a whole new meaning. The Democrats may declare the bill passed. The President may sign the bill. The MSM may tout the bill as having passed and signed. But will it have actually been passed? Will it actually be enacted into law?

5) If the Democrats can pull this off, then why cannot this same kind of process be used by the Republicans in some future time when they're in the majority to pass conservative legislation?

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Life on Earth?

Advanced life (shrimp) was discovered under a vast ice sheet, miles from open water. How did it get there? How does it survive. If it can survive in a cold, sunless place like that, then does similar life exist on similar moons orbiting Jupiter and Sature?



Surprising discovery. Here's the AP story.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Foreign Policy 2010

The Foreign Policy Institute has developed a wonderful briefing book on world affairs. You can read it online here for free. Just click the link.

Anybody who wants to learn about foreign policy ought to read this book. It is filled with wonderful articles about every area of the world from many of our country's leading thinkers.

My own highlights:
Decline is a Choice, Charles Krauthammer
FPI Fact Sheet: The case for a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan
Iran Outlook: Grim, John R. Bolton, National Review
A Road Map for Asian-Pacific Security, Gary J. Schmitt, American Enterprise Institute
Center Stage for the 21st Century, Robert D. Kaplan, Foreign Affairs
Open Letter to President Obama on Central Europe, Multiple Authors,The Foreign Policy Initiative
The Colombian Miracle, Max Boot and Richard Bennet, The Weekly Standard
Pirates, Then and Now, Max Boot, Foreign Affairs
Obama and Gates Gut the Military, Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt, Wall Street Journal


These are just a few among the many wonderful articles in this book. Must read! (And it's free!!!)

Sunday, March 14, 2010

CNN vs Fox on the Texas History Story





Fox had much more coverage of this subject, so this week they win.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Words of Wisdom

When you create a clear mental picture of where you are going in life, you become more positive, more motivated and more determined to make it a reality. You trigger your natural creativity and come up with idea after idea to help make your vision come true.


- Brian Tracy

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Mitch McConnell Fact File

Republican’s Senate Leader

Born: February 20, 1942. Age: 68 years old.

College: 1967 - University of Louisville, honors. Student
Body President, Student Bar Ass’n President.

Intern: 1967 John Sherman Cooper, U.S. Senator.

Legislative Assistant: Senator Marlowe Cook.

Deputy Attorney General: in Ford Administration.

County Admin: 1978 – 1984 top political office of Jefferson County (which includes Louisville.

1984 – Present: U.S. Senator from Kentucky.

Only major Senator to oppose campaign finance reform on Constitutional grounds.

Republican Whip: 2003 – 2007; Republican Leader 2007 – present.

Married: Elaine Chao, Secretary of Labor under George W. Bush.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

My Health Care Bill

If I could do my own health care bill, here’s what it would have:

1) Lawsuit costs lowered. Limiting the scope of lawsuits would have an impact beyond just the costs insurance companies have to pass on to doctors (who pass those on to consumers). It would lower

.. a)health insurance costs because less medical care costs the less the insurer has to pay – and the less premiums they would need from consumers.
Defensive medicine (i.e. the extra treatment doctors/nurses have to do to cover their butts in case they are sued.)

.. b) Legal fees. Even when patients win lawsuits, you know who wins really, don’t you? The lawyers, of course.

2) More medical schools to address the doctor/nurse shortage in America. We’ve been covering that through our immigration policies but every doctor we steal from the rest of the world means that someone out there has to do without. There’s plenty of Americans who want to be health professionals, who would be good at it, but there’s no place for them because our nation’s medical schools are so limited. That’s the bottleneck.

We can build more – lots more – but that costs money. Spending health care money on doctors and nurses instead of lawyers and bureaucrats is a spending program we can understand. It puts our health care priorities right.

It will also ultimately address doctor fees. - Law of supply and demand: shortages drives prices up; abundance drives them down.

3) Insurance portability across state lines. Maybe the Department of Commerce will have to do some regulating but the ease on the insurance pressure on a mobile America will be worth it.

Now for something really, really radical . . . (Drumroll!)

4) Start New Health Insurance Companies. Why not? This is something those limosine liberals could easily do. Obama wants to give the insurance companies some “competition”. he calls their profits “obscene”. Then just reducing profit margins to the “spectacular” level so they can produce more generous insurance provisions would quickly transform the industry. – And they wouldn’t have to worry about Republicans, filibusters, or even Senate reconciliation provisions.

Icing on the cake (listen up Charles Rangell, Christopher Dodd, et al) you can make yourselves a whole pile of money, to boot! - Of course, this last presumes that Obama’s rhetoric against the insurance companies were true.

- Alright, so 3 out of 4 ideas isn’t such a bad batting average!

Non-Political Jack 3/10/10

When (like most people) I stop thinking about politics, I write about other things. For example,

Twitter eye-opener
Can Sam Sloan ever be respectable?
Foundations of Investment
Herodotus in Egypt

These are linked here.

and don't forget my first Youtube video ever!

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

What's the Goal in Space Now?

Obama’s policy is most notable for the lack of his visibility in it. One gets the sense that his officials came up with it and he just went along, if indeed he gave any attention to it at all.

One has to wonder about a “Progressive Movement” that just wishes the entire Space Age would just go away. “Hope and Change” for space policy seems to have become “give up and stay the same”.

The one big advancement (no not the Mars manned landing – that’s just a mirage) is the commitment to encourage commercial space launches. – But to what purpose? What is the goal here?

More information: Space Policy Institute

Sunday, March 7, 2010

CNN vs Fox 3/7/10

Tonight, the Oscar Awards:





I liked the back stage info from Fox, but once again CNN does the better summary.

CNN wins!

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Krauthammer 3/6/10

Obama's Last Desperate Healthcare Push


My take on Charles Krauthammer's latest. His column was published in the Washington Post.

Summary: The Democrats are reversing their previous positions on reconciliation and are going to push the bill through on a straight party-line vote while ducking questions of its cost.

Quote:
Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health-care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.

Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.

My Views: It is a shame that they could not do something to pass a common-sense bill than going for the big ideological rush. The basic problem isn't all the complexity; it is the lack of trust, something which Obama first began to loose when he changed his position of campaign finance to grab that big money in the spring primaries of 2008. People have to wade through the conflicting claims of the two parties. They would side with Obama and the Democrats, if only they could trust them more.



Charles Krauthammer is a more establishment columnist. He came to punditry by way of psychiatry (at Massachusetts General Hospital) via the New Republic Magazine. He appears on TV where you never see his wheelchair. Here's his Wiki bio.

He wrote a book which is pictured at the right. I am drawn by the substance and the thinking than any particular writing flair.

Monday, March 1, 2010

The New Season by George Will


A Spectator's Guide to the 1988 Election

ABOUT
Written before the election began, here are the large issues facing the nation in 1988.

WHAT I THINK
This is one of those unfortunate books that are timeless in their wisdom but, because they ostensibly covered a specific event, public interest waned. - Wasn't 1988 a long time ago?

Will's thoughtful comments on such topics as social divides, the national debt, and national security - together with the pressures politicians face, are as current today as they were then.

QUOTE
Prometheus had a hard career. An egal nibbled his liver for thousands of years. Running for President is sort of like that.


AUTHOR'S APPROACH
5 Chapters: Introduction, Ronald Reagan, Republicans, Democrats, and Conclusion.
The middle 3 chapters approach the election from their respective points of view. The Ronald Reagan chapter talks about his legacy in history as well as the impact of that upon this particular election.

THE GOOD POINTS
The timeless nature of the content. How this election related to elections that came before and speculations on future elections.

THE BAD POINTS
Social issues did not get the treatment they deserved. Spending programs got all lumped together. Not enough on what programs mattered and what did not. Also, government overhead was hardly discussed at all.

CONCLUSION
I've re-read my copy every few years since I bought it in 1988.