From the American Digest we get an inspirational commencement speech by Naval Adm. William H. McRaven, ninth commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, at the University-wide Commencement at The University of Texas at Austin on May 17.
Columbus RiverWalk At Night
We were in Columbus, Georgia, over the weekend. Our son is in the Army and his first assignment is Germany. He was flying out on Monday so we went down there to say goodbye. Being somewhat of a beer snob we went to the Cannon Brewpub for dinner. I got the sampler tray of the beers and several of the beers were stale. This is not what you expect to get when the brewery is this close to the table. The saving grace was that the food was much better than I expected. After dinner we took a relaxed stroll down the river walk and I took this shot of the river. Just over the railing you can see the old Columbus mill and to the left the old powerhouse. At one time that mill was the largest cotton mill in the United States. The company closed in 1998 and the mill recently reopened as an apartment complex.
Did The Bergdahl Trade Signal That Democrats Have Given Up On Trying To Woo The Middle Class?
Like most things with this Administration I do not understand the Bergdahl trade. If you have to make this deal the smartest political move would have been for the President to solicit support from the Senate and maybe get Senator Feinstein to explain the case to the public. If you do not have to make this deal then you should respect the wisdom of the Democratic Senators and Congressman trying to get re-elected this Fall and ask the Taliban for better terms. The clock was ticking and everyone knew that Bergdahl was damaged goods. There is a good case that he is a deserter. Desertion is a serious offense. Although the last deserter to be put to death was in 1945, I doubt the Army can be lenient since several people allege that Bergdahl was an enemy collaborator that caused the deaths of several soldiers. I suspect that several soldiers and some family members of the dead soldiers would be in favor of the death penalty. The families of the slain soldiers have to be wondering whether their son’s death was in vain? Even if Bergdahl is lucky and the courts are lenient, you have to ask the question why did the Administration go out of their way to make a trade for a person the courts are going to lock up for two years? This is an ugly deal which screams kick me, I’m stupid. With deals like this the best thing for the Democratic party right now is for President Obama to go to Hawaii and play golf for six months.
Obviously this trade will not play well with the military. The Duffel blog is all over that with their satirical Meteorologists Forecast Bowe Bergdahl Shit Storm piece. Less obvious but maybe more important is that this trade does not play well with the middle class. Unlike the rich and the poor the middle class has a vested interest in a government that works. The rich and the poor seem to do best when the government screws up. The middle class is stuck with the unenviable decision, do I go with the “stupid party” or with the party that says every scandal over the last six years was due to their stupidity. The Census data seems to indicate that the middle class got the message. As the Gateway Pundit points out in his article, EXCLUSIVE: Census Data Reveals GOP Is Party of MIDDLE CLASS by 2-1 Ratio, the party of the working class is the Republican Party. FDR’s New Deal coalition is unraveling and the Bergdahl trade shows that the Democrats have finally given up trying to woo the middle class. If the Democrats are going to win in the Fall, they are going to win without middle class votes. I can hear it already, we don’t need no mine workers in this new, improved Democratic party.
Hope and Change is just a bad memory now. The middle class is reluctantly going to the party that does the least harm. For all of those moms who voted for Bush in 2004 because he was strong leader against terrorism, the Bergdahl trade reminds them it is time to come home to the party who has not forgotten 9/11. I saw Mad Magazine’s new movie idea, Trading Private Bergdahl, over at Althouse. I have to concur with Meade who said:
If I’ve lost Mad, I’ve lost Middle America.
The Veterans Administration And The Chinese Economy Analogy
I was reading the latest Thoughts from the Frontline newsletter from John Mauldin and I was struck with the thought that if I substituted Veterans Administration(VA) for China in this passage I would be describing the current situation at the VA.
There is really no way to know what is happening in China today, much less what will happen tomorrow, based on widely available data. The primary data is flawed at best and manipulated at worst. Sometimes the most revealing insights lie in the disagreement between the official and unofficial reports… suggesting that official data is useful only to the extent that we think about it as state-sanctioned propaganda. In other words, it tells us what Chinese policymakers want the world to believe.
Over the last six years the VA has been held up as the model for the Affordable Care Act. I have no doubts that some of the stories about the VA successes such as using their purchasing power to drive down drug costs are true but I am increasingly suspicious of the rest of the data. When I try to balance the VA successes with the lack of transparency and accountability, I think they provide an ominous prediction for the fate of health care reform. Like we see in China, I think we are seeing that federal programs are more prone to state-sanctioned propaganda gambit than programs with a more distributed decision making and accountability process. In hindsight it probably took more work to make up the lie than to fix the problem but once they started telling the lie it looks like they failed to find sufficient motivation to change their ways until the scandal broke. Since the Administration knew about this problem six years ago and the problem remains unfixed, this is a good reminder why so few of the successful heath care systems are pure single payer systems. To err is human, to make a really big mess you need to get the federal government involved. So why do we expect to get smarter health care decisions in the future when our current system is stuck in the state-sanctioned propaganda mode?
RE: The Veterans Scandal: Socialized Medicine on Trial. Many have wondered about Barack…
From Glenn Reynolds we get this post by Roger Simon about the importance of the VA scandal to the healthcare debate and to a point I have made before. The Affordable Care Act is the best argument for smaller government since the founding of the republic. If our founding fathers could speak from the grave, I bet the first words out of their mouths would be I told you so!
ROGER SIMON: The Veterans Scandal: Socialized Medicine on Trial.
Many have wondered about Barack Obama’s prolonged silence concerning the disastrous situation at the Veterans Administration hospitals and then his odd detached demeanor (well, maybe not that odd for him) when he finally did discuss it at a press conference.
The answer is simple. His lifetime dream of a free public (single payer) healthcare system for all just disintegrated in front of him. Forget the wildly ambitious and pervasive “Affordable Care Act,” the government couldn’t even handle the health of our wounded servicemen, acknowledged for years to be by far the group most deserving of medical attention in our country. With veterans dying while waiting lists are falsified, it’s hard to see government healthcare as anything but incompetent, disgraceful and quite possibly criminal.
Government has failed utterly. Does anyone have any doubt that Halliburton or even the dreaded Koch brothers could have better handled the health of our wounded warriors? Probably almost any business would have. There at least would have been some accountability. (It’s interesting to see the quaint Bernie Sanders, the one self-described socialist in the Congress, as opposed to the closeted ones, being the most outspoken defender of VA malfeasance and urging us not to “rush to judgement” on a three page bill.)
But it’s not just healthcare, although it’s certainly prominent, important and symbolic. The Obama administration has been the best advertisement for libertarianism across the board in recent memory.
Yep. The “best and brightest” are neither particularly good nor evidently bright. We have the worst political class in our nation’s history, which is the best argument for taking power away from them, not granting it to them.
Will President Obama’s Legacy Be Worse Than President Carter?
It is probably a little premature to be discussing Obama’s legacy but I could not help noticing that his own party is starting to snipe at him. Democratic candidates are finding it very difficult to be loyal to the party and get elected in the Fall. They can see the writing on the wall. It is hard to talk about important political issues when they are spending most of their time trying to downplay the pratfalls of the Administration. The Administration has spent the last six years claiming that their policy failures were because they were stupid and not partisan. Now Democratic candidates have to go out and convince independents that Democrats are not as stupid as previously thought. Apologizing for policy failures is a ball and chain issue that keeps Democratic campaigns struggling with independent voters. Unfortunately Democratic candidates also have to explain why there are so few policy successes and it is not just the Republicans who are cynical. I think most people would not have any difficulty agreeing that killing Osama bin Laden was this Administration’s most important accomplishment over the last six years. The problem for the Democrats is that most people are hard pressed to identify the second or third most important accomplishment. I doubt anyone except the Democratic faithful or the chronically ill would try to say that the Affordable Care Act was a success. The health care lies by the President are still a bigger deal with most voters than the meager results. Arguably the biggest issue should have been the economy. Some years back the Clinton campaign probably won the 1992 presidential election by focusing the public on the saying, “It’s the economy, stupid“. Remarkably this Administration is still looking for a success in the economy that they can lay claim to. After six years most people still see an economy that looks like it is stuck in stall mode with a seriously ugly long term unemployment problem. Our foreign policy is a mess. What was our policy in Benghazi, Syria, and the Ukraine? No one seems to know. How is it that Sarah Palin seems to have a better grasp of Putin’s political objectives in the Ukraine than the State Department? This sure looks like a broad policy failure. You cannot get around the facts that the Administration has been short on accomplishments and long on scandals. Now the Administration is stumbling its way through the VA scandal in a way that is beginning to incense Democrats. After six years of one scandal after another even Democrats are beginning to wonder if this Administration will ever get its wheel out of the rut? The frustration level of the American people is rapidly approaching the level I last saw when President Carter was in office. For an administration unaccustomed to serious questions from their friends, this could get ugly.
Honoring Those Who Served
Several years ago my father was buried in Arlington Cemetery with full military honors. I took some photos and today I was looking for a photo that best expressed my memories of my father and the respect the military has for those who have served.
A Humorous Way To Tell The Difference Between False Positive and False Negative Errors
For the people who are statistically challenged this is humorous way to describe the differences between Type I(false positive) and Type II(false negative) errors. I saw this infographic originally on the Marginal Revolution blog. They think the original post was probably over at FlowingData website who gives credit to Jim Thornton’s twitter account. As a person who is seriously considering going without health insurance if the insurance rates go up too much, the question you have to ask yourself is whether you can do a better job minimizing the financial impact of false positive and false negative diagnosis errors than your insurance company. As an example there are a lot of false positives associated with prostate and breast cancer.
"Type I" and "Type II" errors, names first given by Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson to describe rejecting a null hypothesis when it’s true and accepting one when it’s not, are too vague for stat newcomers (and in general). This is better. [via]
I Thought Hillary Clinton And The State Department Were Brain Damaged When They Sent Ambassador Stevens to Benghazi!
All of this talk about Hillary having brain damage has me so confused. Bill Clinton says she is fine. So does this mean she got better because she hit her head?
The Most Popular Republican Talking Point On Health Care Is Wrong
The Federalist had an article that caught my attention, The Most Popular Republican Talking Point On Health Care Is Wrong. In that article Mr. Clancy says, “Of all the various Republican health care reform ideas, the most popular by far is letting people buy health insurance across state lines.” If this is the best the Republicans can come up with I think we are pretty safe from health care reform in 2014 and at least for me, that is a good thing. Here is my comment and a graph from a previous post,
As a healthy person who buys his health insurance in Ohio I doubt that I could get a more affordable health insurance plan from another state. Every year eHealth puts out a report on health insurance prices in the 48 states they sell polices in and as long as you are not living in Massachusetts or New York the costs are pretty close. You have to admire the rich irony of this Republican talking point. The people who stand to benefit the most are from those blue states, Massachusetts and New York. I think it is pretty safe to say that selling health insurance across state lines is not going to save me money and if this is the best the Republicans can come up with then we are pretty safe from more misguided health care reforms in 2014.
The most interesting thing happening in November is that we will probably know the insurance rates for 2015 and how many healthy people are still paying into the system. Unlike auto insurance health insurance has a very large redistribution and political component to it. That is its fatal flaw. Since 1976 when I started working I have seen large group plans struggle to work around this flaw. Over the years the large group plans became increasingly more stupid about health care until we got to the present situation where we lead the world in health care spending per capita. When I look at a graph health care spending per capita by various countries, we are off the chart bad. What does the future hold for us in health care reform? Politics and government incompetence are the most important drivers. If the Administration continues to postpone the Affordable Care Act taxes and healthy people seep out of the exchanges, the exchange funding question will rear its ugly head. Although politically inconvenient I expect based on past history that the Administration will kick this can down the road and postpone most of the Affordable Care Act through 2017. This is the politically smart thing to do since the Republicans do not have much of an appetite for health care reform. For people seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act this the next best thing but it does lead to an interesting endgame scenario. My health insurance policy is grandfathered and it costs me less than exchange plans since it does not cover maternity care and other things I have no use for. Since my insurance company does not participate in the exchange, I expect my insurance company will continue to do what ever they can to offer me the best rates to keep me from buying a plan on the exchange. This is good for me since I need affordable health insurance but bad for the exchanges since they desperately need healthy people like me. In this scenario I am best served if the Republicans and Democrats do as little as possible. Eventually the exchanges will suffer a TennCare-like funding breakdown. This is not pretty but it is the most likely scenario.