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Men Of America – Canada Needs YOU!

August 11, 2009 By Joan of Snark

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As Mark Steyn so aptly put it at The Corner:   “The ultimate outsourcing” is occurring here in the United States.   That model of socialized medicine perfection, Canada, made it illegal to pay men for their sperm back in 2004, so today there are all of 33 legal (and, need we add, extremely busy) donors available for the whole country.  (The situation is similar in Great Britain, too.)

But wait!  Even if you are a minority couple looking for help, there is still choice.  One is South Asian!

Instead of the Mounties, following that most proper course of political hypocrisies, Canadians have called upon the American free-market economy to come to their rescue:

Doctors and patients have had little choice but to use sperm and eggs from south of the border.

One of the biggest suppliers of donor sperm is Outreach Health Services which imports and distributes semen for assisted reproduction clinics across Canada. The company imports sperm from an agency that collects primarily from men in Georgia and northern Florida, where donors are paid about $100 per visit.

With so much sperm coming from the States, some estimate that up to 80 per cent of babies conceived in Canada through donor sperm have American DNA.

This gives a whole ‘nother meaning to the term, “neighbor”.  Not to mention the potential DNA problems as cousins grow up and start marrying their cousins.  But then, that assures more patients needing government-provided medical care, doesn’t it?

Any wonder President Obama reassured Canadians that while their system works for them, it’s not necessarily what Americans want?

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Filed Under: Stoopid People Tagged With: Canadian health care, health care reform, Obama health care reform

People Unclear On The Concept

August 2, 2009 By Joan of Snark

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A New York woman, Trina Thompson, decided she’d be better off finally going to college and getting a degree, but after graduating in April and faced with the grim realities of the state of this Obamanation, is now suing the school she attended because she can’t find a job.

Here’s your sign, Trina:

idiot test

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Filed Under: Stoopid People Tagged With: entitlement mentality, New York, Trina Thompson

Keeping The Machine Oiled

August 2, 2009 By Joan of Snark

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So, you ready to trade in your clunker.  The federal government’s program gives you money – tax free – when you sign on the dotted line.  Because it is your money, after all.

Car dealers also get money on your deal from the federal government (to lower the price of the new vehicle) but they have to pay taxes on it as part of their business’ income (probably will be considered part of the customer’s cash down payment).

Wouldn’t it have made more sense and everyone’s life easier if the feds had just lowered the amount given to the car dealers and left it at that?  Isn’t that money – given to the government by paying business taxes – their money, after all?

Why do we have to spend the time and resources to amend the already labrynthian tax code for one little “stimulation”?

Oh, wait.

Federal job security.

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Filed Under: Stoopid People Tagged With: car dealers, cash for clunkers, IRS

You Lay In Your Bed

August 2, 2009 By Joan of Snark

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And it gets wrinkled.  

Like a California raisin wrinkled.

The discomfort of laying in a wrinkled bed seems to be wrankling the wanks…errr…ranks of the Service Employees International Union Local 1000 (SEIU) in California, who are claiming 74% of their 95,000 state workers have authorized a strike against the California state government.

The group’s labor contract with the state expired last year, SEIU spokesman Jim Zamora said. The union negotiated a new deal with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration in February, but the contract has not been ratified by the state Legislature.

Earlier this week, the Republican governor signed a bill that closed a more than $24 billion budget gap. Under the legislation, furloughs will continue for state workers for three days a month, cutting their pay by 15 percent.

“We feel that he (Schwarzenegger) really undermined any kind of a contract deal by pushing these furloughs on folks,” Zamora said.

Ya don’t think their insatiable salary demands have anything at all to do with the fact California’s broke, do you? On behalf of so many Americans working in the private sector who have had their employers cutting everyone’s pay in order to keep more people employed, welcome to reality, kids.

Be grateful you still have a job.

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Filed Under: Stoopid People Tagged With: California government, SEIU, SEIU strike

Pelosi Beats The Socialized Medicine Drum

July 31, 2009 By Joan of Snark

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CSPAN taped House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talking about the status of the “health care reform” legislation.  In it she states that the “glory days are coming to an end for the health insurance industy in our country.  Their profits are obscene, they have increased enormously over the past few years at the expense of America’s consumers.”

She goes on to gush about how wonderful things will be when the government takes over the business of providing health insurance:

“Think of what that means for the vitality of our economy!  So we can encourage entrepreneurship while people have the confidence they will have health insurance and can take more risk.

“There will be a cap on what you pay to the insurance companies each year, but no cap on the benefits you receive.

“And this makes all the difference in the world.”

That “difference”, dangled like a carrot in front of numbnuts suffering from liberal entitlement-derangement syndrome, is between profit and loss, sustainability and bankruptcy.  If you pay someone a dollar and they give you back ten, they are immediately out nine dollars.  If a hundred people pay someone a dollar and are given back ten, that person is then out $900.  If 1,000 people pay one dollar and get back ten, that person is out $9,000.  And if 300 million people pay a dollar and get back ten, that someone is out $270 million.

It’s a difference that, with the “President leading the way, with us being a drumbeat, an echo chamber of the President’s message,” will kill not only people subject to the government’s control of medicine, but the American economy.

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Filed Under: Stoopid People Tagged With: health care, health care reform, HR 3200, Nancy Pelosi

It’s A Clunker, All Right

July 30, 2009 By Joan of Snark

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“Cash For Clunkers”, the Obaminable little project to encourage folks (whose number include more and more unemployed every day so a fine target market…what?) to replace their “clunker” (read:  gas-guzzler) with a spiffy, new “green” vehicle, kicked off last Friday.

It’s just been reported the program is being ended. 

Tonight.

At midnight.

Through late Wednesday, 22,782 vehicles had been purchased through the program and nearly $96 million had been spent. But dealers raised concerns about large backlogs in the processing of the deals in the government system, prompting the suspension.

A survey of 2,000 dealers by the National Automobile Dealers Association found about 25,000 deals had not yet been approved by NHTSA, or nearly 13 trades per store. It raised concerns that with about 23,000 dealers taking part in the program, auto dealers may already have surpassed the 250,000 vehicle sales funded by the $1 billion program.

The government failed to fully understand the potential financial ramifications of this knee-jerk program.  They also seem to be having problems handling it on their end.  Now they’re rushing through “health care reform”.

You really think that could possibly work any better?

 

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Filed Under: Stoopid People Tagged With: cash for clunkers, Obama administration

Past Their Expiration Date

July 27, 2009 By Joan of Snark

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Here’s one way to tell when your unrepresenting representative is past their expiration date:

 

I’ll give you a hint, John.  You vote NO.

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Filed Under: Stoopid People Tagged With: John Conyers

How Liberals Propose To Make The World A Better Place

July 27, 2009 By Joan of Snark

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To those of us in the Midwest, this about sums up why things in California are such a mess.  And why with people like Pelosi and allegedly-Occidental-college-educated Obama in charge in Washington, we’re now heading to hell in the proverbial handbasket.

 

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

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Filed Under: Stoopid People Tagged With: liberals, Santa Cruz

Health Insurance Is Not Health Care

July 25, 2009 By Joan of Snark

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After spending the time necessary to digest the initial draft of H.R. 3200, that bastardizing socialization of American medicine the U.S. House is calling “health care reform”, not only do I find I have a severe case of heartburn, I am even more deeply angered at the state of this great nation under the current adminstration.  I am also flabbergasted at the depths of ignorance calculatingly displayed by those unrepresenting representatives in Washington and dismayed at the ignorance unintentionally displayed by Americans in general.

When you strip away all the rhetoric, a truth is that we are each responsible for our own lives.  You can’t spin the fundamental fact that, with the extreme exceptions of abortions and executions, no one makes our choices for us; all they do is offer us various options.  It remains up to us to take something or to leave it, or to take something else instead.  Speaking philosophically and literally, even choosing nothing is still having made a choice.

When it comes to our health, our choices in this country are nearly endless.  Every breath we take (or do not take), everything that enters our bodies through our mouths, our ears, our eyes, every movement or non-movement (as with tv-slothing or sleep) is a health-affecting choice on our part.  Sure, some things like breathing are, in the main, unconscious choices but remember the last time you caught yourself holding your breath in eagerness, anticipation, or fear and reminded yourself to breathe again?

Truly, all bodies are marvels in and of themselves.  They are an ultimate machine, capable of both creation and destruction even when simply existing, and such is mirrored every second through continuous regeneration at the cellular level.  But, like all machines, each one of our bodies was apparently designed for a limited period of service and as we age our regenerative abilities slow down until, in the end, it stops altogether and so we die.

There is nothing bad, nothing shameful in all of this.  It is, as in popular vernacular, the circle of life.  But Man sees himself in the mirror and believes that the recognition of Self somehow makes him superior to other species.  Yet the whispers of his instincts can never be suppressed for long, and it is those whispers – ever-reminding him that man, too, is ruled by natural law –  that cause him to vainly create a phantom, parallel world within his own species.  A world where his physical inferiority is replaced by some pseudo-intellectual or material superiority.

Life will never be anything more than a competition, a survival of the fittest.  Certainly, as a species man is more willing than some to assist others, to assist the collective but this latest Obamanation of forced equality, particularly this religious zealotry aimed at the idea of health care reform, will fail.  As it has forever failed.  For it goes against natural law and no matter how “smart”, or how much techology we can create, we are now and will be forever subject to our humanness.

Ask the antelope in the jaws of the jaguar if life is fair.  We would be better off to accept our place in this world and enjoy the fact we get a life at all.  Return to the foundations upon which this country was birthed and let its inherent support of natural law take care of things like the auto industry, the banks, people who bit off more mortgage than they can chew, and also take care of “health reform”.  Anything else will simply accelerate our inherent propensity for self-destruction.

If you take the time to read and to understand what is being proposed in H.R. 3200, it is clear that the Obama administration intends to wholly assume not the business of health insurance but to flat-out control every aspect of the practice of medicine in the United States.  The campaign rhetoric endlessly spewing forth vaccilates and confuses care with insurance and perhaps this is done on purpose, but without understanding the difference it is easy to get swept up in its destructive fervor.

It is well-known that health CARE in the United States is the best in the world.  As a result of our capitalistic, free-market economy, innovations in the field of medicine have resulted in understandings of human health and the manifestation of health CARE that allows us to live far more comfortably and far more productively than anywhere else in the world.  We have the best doctors, the best facilities, and the best equipment.  Period.

But everything comes with a price and medical technology is no different.  Whether it is a Viagra capsule that gives an old man past his reproductive prime the ability to pursue nothing more than simple carnal gratification or the MRI machine that gives doctors the ability to diagnose the presence and extent of a tumor in a young child, each and every thing we use or do has cost someone time and money to create.  They pursue these things out of a combination of altruistic and financial motivations and…you know what?  There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

With the help of more and more technology, the collective mindset of the modern era has served to steer us further and further away from the basic understanding of nature’s cycles and somehow given rise to a belief that we, humans, have a fundamental right to, for lack of a better term, physical immortality.  Or at least the right to die in a body that looks like a plasticized 20-year old.  Fearing death, we cling to the notion we are immune from the processes of aging, that we may exist above the mandates of natural law. 

But, again, the truth is that we are not now, nor will we ever be.  And the sooner we let go of this dangerous belief, the better off we will find ourselves. 

Now, this does not mean that if we get sick, we shouldn’t bother going to see a doctor.  It doesn’t mean that medical CARE should never be provided.  What it means is that medical CARE can only do so much for us and the responsibility to choose that CARE is entirely our own.  And this is where the business of health INSURANCE enters the picture. 

Health INSURANCE is simply a financial risk agreement between two parties.  It’s a lot like a bet.  One person bets that they’ll need expensive medical care at some point and the other is betting they won’t.  If the payer stays healthy, the insurer keeps their money; otherwise the insurer shells out what is needed to get the payer back on their physical feet.  Frankly, it’s a rather nifty and interesting arrangement.  The problem is that over time the payer has come to believe that the sum they pay to the insurer is a replacement for the choices that they make for themselves in terms of what they put into and how they treat their body.  Like les enfants terrible, it’s come to be expected that everything needed will simply be provided, promptly and without question.

Nice thought, but dangerously naive.  Everything comes with a price, remember?  If, for example, you ask me to watch your house while you’re away and agree to pay me to do so, the cost for me to stop by every day and bring in the mail is going to be a lot lower than asking me to spend additional time to water your plants, feed your cat, scoop its litterbox, etc.  If you travel a lot and want to keep the costs down, well, you won’t keep either houseplants or a cat, will you?  Health insurance works very much the same way.  If you want me to pay your doctor(s) for every little thing you want done, you’re going to have to pay me more money.  Now, it makes sense for me to help you pay for preventative-type screenings, those early warnings that you, the individual, need to change your couch potato, greaseburger, fries, and beer gut ways.  But if you choose to do or continue to do things proven risky to you, with your unique historical combination of DNA, then you’re going to have to pay me more to cover your body’s sooner-than-later eventual breakdown.

What we need in America is, in my mind, not health CARE reform but to take another look at health INSURANCE.  Medical CARE is available and, for the most part, guaranteed.  Sure, there are situations like in Chicago, where Michelle Obama’s infamous “Urban Health Initiative” was found to be turning away the poorer, less-insured patients in favor of the well-heeled genteel folks, but that’s a business and a moral problem, not a medical CARE problem.

Bottom line:  it’s more than time for the federal government to just get out of the way.  It’s time to stop unsustainable federal medical programs, cut out all the pork-funding taxes, and let Americans look for different and better ways to take care of themselves.  Let Americans place their own bets on what kind of medical care they may need; one thing that comes to mind is having more walk-in clinics or small general practices for all the garden-variety cuts-scrapes-sore throats and even preventative-type care (there is one here in my area that even without any insurance is affordable).  These old-fashioned, less-expensive, priced to pay-as-you-go practices could be combined with health insurance to cover only catastrophic illness, the kinds of illnesses that most of us never experience but that hurt families the most.  And then have a menu of available coverage running the gamut between the two for the more cautious and the hypochondriacs.  I suspect that tort reform would have to accompany such an idea since our sue-happy society has yet to get a grip and stop blaming everyone but themselves for their individual stupidity, but I know from talking to them that there’d be far more general practioners/family doctors if it wasn’t for all the stinkin’ government-related paperwork and the price of insurance against the constant threats of lawsuits.  It would also be good to quit advertising drugs on television with the insistent, cheery message that people should “ask their doctor” about them.  Someone savvy could easily set up an information clearinghouse that provides a searchable list containing all the same caveats as the commercials.  (Am I the only one who’s noticed that for some of the advertised drugs, the list of side-effects takes longer to read than the actual “buy me” part of the commercial?!)

I look at it this way:  doctors (and lawyers) practice.  To expect guarantees from their efforts, then, is ridiculous.  But they do serve a purpose, for the probability of healing as a result of their efforts remains higher here than anywhere in the world.  We should be encouraging doctors by taking back ownership of our health and working with them as our counsel, our partners, not handing the responsibility for our medical care over to the federal government and its proven track record of program administration failures.

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Filed Under: * Featured Posts *, Stoopid People Tagged With: health care reform, HR 3200, Obama administration

Michigan Demonstrates “Green Liberals & Math”

July 24, 2009 By Joan of Snark

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President Obama’s 15.2%-unemployment-rate-Michigan buddy-pal, Governor Jennifer Granholm, recently passed legislation to put 20% of the state’s electric grid onto renewable power by 2020 (please note for the record that a similar program in Denmark has nearly tripled power rates to 30 cents per kWh compared with Michigan’s current 8.5 cents).  Next on her agenda was to bless a 2010 ballot proposal that would require state utilities to reduce their rates by 20%. 

Let’s do some green math.

A 20% increase in the cost to utility companies who create the power we use in our homes and businesses every day is going to be countered with a 20% rate decrease in payments from their customers.  To use a very simple example, that’s like taking something that costs you $10 to produce today and increasing the cost to produce it to $12, then turning around and charging only $8 for it.  By my calculations, you’d be taking a 44% loss on every item.

A fine way to run a business, don’t you think?

But wait!  There’s more!

The Michigan Democratic Party has also announced they want input from “online Democratic activists” to help them decide what to pursue next:

  • Mandating all employers to provide affordable health care for their employees and dependents or pay a penalty.
  • Raising the minimum wage from $7.40/hour to $10/hour and covering all workers with no exceptions.
  • Increasing unemployment benefits by $100/week, making all workers eligible and adding six months to the time one can receive benefits.
  • Imposing a one-year moratorium on home foreclosures.

According to Michigan Democratic Party Chair Mark Brewer:

 “While the greedy corporate CEO’s of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, Detroit Regional Chamber, and Detroit Renaissance are worried only about their selfish interests, the Michigan Democratic Party is focused on helping all the people of Michigan get through these tough economic times.”

“The corporate special interests are using these tough times to advance the same tired old agenda – cut jobs, wages, and benefits; reduce services; and shift taxes onto the middle class and the poor,” observed Brewer. “These proposals put people first and will help millions of Michigan citizens.”

Ummm…aren’t those corporate CEO’s of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, Detroit Regional Chamber, and Detroit Renaissance the people who actually  work and give jobs to people in Michigan?

I know it’s been a cooler-than-average summer in Michigan, but apparently it’s cold enough to keep those Dove Bars from melting, too.

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Filed Under: Stoopid People Tagged With: 2010 ballot proposals, Jennifer Granholm, Michigan, Michigan Democratic Party

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