QOTD

"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

--Senator Barack Obama

The Right Choice

I'm sure most everyone remembers the cavalcade of criticism when Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. In fact, we participated in it ourselves. Our opinion that the prize is a sort of sick joke has not changed much.

However, I find myself agreeing with Nick Gillespie that this year's choice for the prize plays up just what a bad joke last year's award was. Liu Xiaobo is out there trying to reform a government that has proven capable of slaughtering thousands engaged in non-violent protest. What he's doing takes far more courage than anything our current president has ever done.

Here's the statement he made upon being sentenced to 11 years in jail for "subversion of the state". Personally, it's a hell of lot more inspiring than anything the n00b ever said.

Back Off My Sandwich, Biatch

So, Michelle Obama has taken it upon herself to lecture us about what we should be doing about food. As the LA Times so snarkily points out, perhaps she needs to get her husband to give up the cigs before she nags us about what we're having for lunch. Since that's apparently too difficult, maybe she needs to have an ass that's NOT the size of two adult females before whining about obesity.

I think I'm just going to cherry pick stupid statements.

Together we have to do more.

Well, actually, unless she has a mouse in her pocket, "we" don't have to "do" a damn thing. What I choose to eat is about as much her business as how big her ass looks in any dress is mine. In other words, it's not. It's also not her business what restaurants offer on their menus. If she doesn't like their menu choices, she shouldn't eat there. If she wants a restaurant that offers healthy kid-friendly options, she should borrow some money from Tony Rezko and start one. If she thinks she's smarter than the rest of us and should dictate our food choices, she should piss right the fuck off with the quickness.

As a mom, I know it is my responsibility, and no one else’s, to raise my kids.

Well, then, get after it! What the hell is she doing bitching about the right menu choices? Go raise the sprogs! Oh, wait, she doesn't believe all the lumpy proles have the same responsibility? Or does she think they're too stupid? I'm betting on the latter, because, as she says:

many parents are finding their best efforts undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at our kids

Unless your kids came into the world with their own debit cards and checking accounts, Mommy and Daddy still make the purchasing decisions. Advertisements don't change that. If the parental units can't say no to the precious little snowflakes about a Chicken McNugget, they're all gonna have much bigger problems in life later on.

Oh, wait, here's another gem.

I’ve yet to meet a single parent who’s not eager to buy healthier products. They just need more information. They need easier access to those products.

Bitch, please. They have posters in the grocery store telling you how eating vegetables is good for you. The TV set has been pumping out eat healthy propaganda my entire life, and it was even aimed at kids! Somebody wants to know which choice is healthier? They have these neat labels on everything in the freaking store. And parents need more information? And easier access? Double you tee eff, Michelle? There's a big section in every grocery store I've set foot in that has all kinds of vegetable and produce. Admittedly, sometimes it was the freezer section, but still. How could she and some linty rodent possibly make that easier? Hand deliver the food?

Oh, wait, I forgot. We're talking about restaurants. Here's an easy one: stay home. Or better yet, quit trying to interfere in people's choices. Last time I checked, I had a mother and don't need Michelle Obama to try and take the job.

Of course, she's just a private citizen and isn't using the hammer of the state, right? Well, her and her pocket mouse have been busy.

It’s not enough just to limit ads for foods that aren’t healthy.

And we’ve started by requiring chain restaurants to provide calorie counts on their menus and menu boards.

we’re working with mayors and other local officials to make our cities and towns healthier

Yeah, that sounds like the state to me. Maybe I missed something in all the pertrouserating she was doing about how this is all voluntary. Right up until it's not, like calorie counts.

Seriously, is there any domain of modern life that some useless meatbag doesn't feel compelled to have the .gov stick their nose into?

ObamaCare Supporters Are The 3/5ths Who Shouldn't Vote

Well, I think I’ve calmed down enough to have this post not be just an endless tirade of profanity. What the hell, even the morons at io9 have chimed in on health care and how it will prevent possible future dystopias. If they can chime in with their completely asinine nonsense, I figure I’m entitled. However, if you, for whatever misguided reason, supported this monstrosity, you need to shut the fuck up. This is my little lesson to you and why, exactly, you bought a bill of goods with money that wasn’t yours and that you had no right to spend. More importantly, you won’t get what you want and it’ll cost even more than you were told.

So, what shall we tackle first? Let’s try an easy one. All you morons who thought this bill was “revenue neutral” or would reduce the deficit, raise your hands. Got them high up in the air? Good. Now bring it back down, as hard as you can, on top of your pointy little skull. Stings a bit, doesn’t it? It’s only what you deserve for being gullible. The bill will cost more than projected, which means it will be neither revenue neutral nor deficit reducing. I predict this with absolute certainty based on the knowledge that every other national health care entitlement in this country has done so. So, if we’re only off on the cost by as much as we were with Medicare, this goatscrew will cost us all a mere $8.6 TRILLION over the first ten years. Oops. Of course, if we did better on the math this time around, it might only cost us $1.8 trillion. I feel so much better about fiscal responsibility already, don’t you? The cost could be anywhere from double all the way up to 17 times the estimates, based on historical data. I don’t see any deficit reduction with those kinds of errors.

So, let me ask another dumb question. We’re going to give everybody insurance and then we’re going to make preventative care visits free for everybody. So, one might reasonably conclude the demand for health care will go up. That’s usually what happens to the demand for goods when the price drops, in case you were wondering how I deduced this. Is all this extra health care going to magically appear from nowhere? I don’t see any incentives in the bill to provide health care, and I certainly can see more than a few disincentives. So, if your head isn’t still sore from your self-administered beating in the last paragraph, can somebody who supported this crap explain where the actual health care to meet all the new demand is going to come from? I don’t mean the magical insurance talisman you managed to get everybody to pay for, I mean the actual doctors and nurses and facilities and equipment. Any provisions in the bill to address this minor, almost petty, issue? Any at all? Hmm. This might could be a problem.

Now, let’s be real about what this bill does. It’s a huge, brazen attempt to shift the cost of providing health care to anyone but the people actually receiving the care. Why anybody thinks this is a good idea is beyond me, since this usually means otherwise productive resources get wasted. One of the issues here, since a bunch of people apparently spent years taking the short bus to school, is transaction costs. Passing the money around from you to the insurance company to the doctor incurs costs every time the money changes hands. Add the government into the mix, and there’s at least another set (or twelve) of hands the money has to pass through before it gets from you, the recipient of health care, to the doctor, the provider. So, if we initially had a hundred dollars of purchasing power to spend on health care, by the time the money passes through all the hands in a complicated dance of regulatory legerdemain, how much is left? Here’s a hint: less than a hundred dollars.

How much less is the question, isn’t it? Who here thinks throwing government into the mix is going to raise the amount money that actually gets spent on health care? No, instead the money will go to pay salaries of GS-7s to shuffle around your doctor’s request for reimbursement and some other random pieces of paper until they’re all neatly paper clipped together and sent to finance where some other overpaid fed drone will enter the data into the system to send a check for the wrong amount to a different address. All of this activity, by the way, will be lumped under “health care’ in the budget, so “health care” spending will have gone up, despite you actually getting less health care for the same budget.

As an aside, I may start a tattoo shop that tattoos TANSTAAFL and Somebody always pays on peoples’ foreheads. I figure if you dolts see it enough, sooner or later it might just sink in. I figure if you supported the health care reform, you’re almost certainly not imbued with enough understanding to figure out why paying to get self-evident truths tattooed on your forehead is a bad idea. Really, you’re the perfect audience if I could just get a government subsidy for you to give me.

Now, let’s cover a few facts about insurance. This bill includes a version of shall-issue coverage. This means no matter what is currently wrong with you, an insurance company has to issue you a policy if you can pay the premiums. (If you can’t pay, you’ll get a subsidy, so don’t sweat it.) The insurance companies are not allowed to deny you coverage because of your medical history, gosh darn it! Because insurance is vital! And a right! Or some such bullshit. I admit, I don’t understand the deranged fantasy economics that make this a good idea. There’s also no lifetime limit on coverage. So, in our brave new Obamanation you can obligate some company to unlimited expense by buying a policy from them. Now, in a world where ignuts didn’t try to repeal the law of supply and demand, this would mean your insurance would be pretty damned expensive. Right? If I could obligate you to unlimited expense by writing you a check, that check would be pretty substantial, wouldn't it?

Now enter the notion of community rating, which is also in the bill. The insurance company doesn’t get to charge premiums based on the risk of something going wrong with your health. They are forced to charge the same premium to everybody. So if somebody has a really expensive policy while most people have much less expensive policies, guess what happens? The premiums level out until the same amount of money comes in to the insurance company. So for most people, the premium will go up. How special! But that’s okay, because you’ll get money from the gummint to pay for the premiums if you can’t afford them! How much money will this cost the government? Nobody knows! However, I’m going to boldly make a prediction it’ll cost more money than anybody projected, and will break the federal budget. At least, it's working that way in Massachusetts so far, so I've got a pretty good data point for my prediction.

Of course, maybe if we weren’t spending all our money on insurance, maybe some of the money could go towards the actual provision of health care. But I’m guessing none of you supporters understand the concept of opportunity costs. I recommend a primer that can be found here. I think the pull quote is right up front in the third paragraph:

the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil

Substitute “politician” for “economist” and the result is much the same. Seems like we got a bunch of bad politicians and shitty economists around here setting policy, doesn’t it?

Of course, that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. Short-sighted legislators made a bunch of bad policy decision, and kept piling on more in various misguided attempts to fix the unintended consequences. This kept up until all y’all fools felt Obamacare was somehow a good idea and not a clusterfuck. Let’s review the first law of holes, shall we? If you’re in a hole, stop digging. Likewise, if your well-intentioned, well-meaning government regulations are causing a problem, don’t add on more regulations. You just get more problems. Did this simple concept ever occur to any of you as the administration and his enablers in Congress led you by the nose towards disaster?

Finally, I’d just like to add one more thought: FUCK YOU. You’re so damned terrified something bad might happen and you might have to pay for your own medical care that you feel you have carte blanche to make the rest of us pay for your insurance. You think your desire for something is enough justification to get the government to take it from the rest of us. If the idea that you, and not me, and not the government, are responsible for your life, your health, and your destiny terrifies you that much, go get a lobotomy and have yourself institutionalized. You don’t deserve to walk the earth pretending to be a citizen of a free country. You think like a slave and you act like a slave and you want your master, the government, to protect you from the imagined horrors of the world. Well, guess what? Some of don’t think we’re incapable of facing the world without the government telling us how to manage our lives. Some of us don’t want the shackles you would so willingly place on yourself and everybody else. More to the point, we’re not going to wear them. Don’t think this over. You haven’t won a damned thing.

One Comment

So, there was a speech last night. Instead of being alternately amused and enraged, we watched The Hangover instead. I think we made the right choice as I read the transcript.

I'll highlight the first sentence that makes my blood boil:

The aspirations they hold are shared: a job that pays the bills; a chance to get ahead; most of all, the ability to give their children a better life.

Yeah. If that's true, and that's what we all want for the next generation, WHY ARE YOU RACKING UP UMPTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT FOR THEM TO PAY OFF?

My commentary pretty much goes downhill from here in terms of coherence and profanity, so I'm gonna quit now.

SOTU Drinking Game, YPS Edition

Every political junkie has their particular version of the game, and we at YPS are no exception. The usual game has all kind of topical buzzwords and complicated instructions. While amusing, it's always struck us as counter-productive. You spend more time playing buzzword bingo than actually listening to the content of the speech. Yes, we're the kind of people who watch on C-SPAN.

So our version this year actually requires a bit more thought and only has one rule:

Every time the President proposes something which is facially unconstitutional, drink.

With the exalted n00bliness at the podium, we expect to be hammered in short order.

Intentions Are Key

So, the n00b won the Nobel Peace Prize for... for... wait, what the fuck? According to the Swedes, it's

for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples

Seriously? Are you people on crack? He hasn't accomplished a bloody thing. Oh, wait, he didn't have to according to the committee. He got a Nobel for effort. When I was but a lower-case t, the prize for effort meant you were completely useless, but tried real hard. Are they going to apply this standard to the other prizes? Because, really, won't that make the prize way more inclusive? Maybe Pons and Fleischmann can get a Physics prize now, since they tried really, really hard to make cold fusion work. And they tried even harder to make people think they had. Surely that level of effort deserves some kind of reward.

For most of us, 1994 marks the nadir of the Nobel Peace Prize. When you hand out a prize for peace to a guy simply because he agrees, in theory but not in practice, to stop slaughtering people to achieve his goals, you've pretty much rendered it meaningless. I could also point out 1981 as a fail point, when they handed it to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. One could make the argument the completely ineffectual work the UNHCR has done with regards to the Palestinians has done more to prolong conflict in the Middle East than any other single organization.

Seriously, aside from the fact they give out big cash, why does anyone care about this award anymore? It's a sick joke.

UPDATE: I am allied with the GOP and terrorists! Or so says the head donk:

"The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists - the Taliban and Hamas this morning - in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize,"

The jokes write themselves. Or run political parties. Whichever.

Justice Isn't Blind

Well, in a historic ground-breaking moment of something or other, Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court. Me, I just wish they would have confirmed someone who understands the concept of a limited federal government. Alas, as always, I don't get what I want out of the political process. You'd think a minority of Americans shared my political views or something.

Actually, I think it's because I'm being oppressed. Or will be soon, if things keep going the way they are. Anyhow, enjoy the newer, more Hispanic SCOTUS - now with extra added empathy and wisdom. The n00b thinks it's a "wonderful day for America", but what does he know? Judging by the policies he keeps pushing, not a whole hell of a lot.

SCOTUS blocks the Auto-Rama

My initial thought: it is about time. Ruthie's going to get her 4 justices, and I hope it is the precise 4 that Teh Barackulous and his merry band of socialist flying monkeys doesn't want. I am feeling optimistic that there are 4 members of the high court who may jump on board just for the opportunity to strike down this, maybe TARP...and potentially all of this unconstitutional government intervention. Hey, maybe there's some hope & change for me after all.

One can only try to look for a bright spot, right? Needless to say, there are so many potential outcomes and ramifications here...and the Supreme Court could just be the ones to save us all.