Unlike Her Cohort, Susan Collins Makes Sense

Maine's other Republican Senator, Susan Collins, reacted swiftly to the pro-health reform vote of Olympia Snowe, who calls herself a Republican but says her party has changed for the worse.

Seeing through the Senate Finance Committee reform plan, Senator Collins said the bill not only does not lower costs but actually raises them:

The goal of health care reform must be to rein in costs and provide consumers with more affordable choices. Yet, many individuals and families would be forced to pay more for their health care under the Finance Committee bill, and they would have fewer choices. Our health care reform efforts should give Americans more, not fewer, choices of affordable coverage options.

She also lamented the gutting of Medicare for senior citizens.

It would be laughable if not palpably tragic to listen to Barack Obama and his Demo-cronies hail health reform as "deficit-neutral" and lowering costs for Americans.

Instead of my going on and on, however, read Senator Collins' perceptive comments here.

Must See in Germany: The OSH Museum

OSH stands for Occupational Safety and Health, and it's the name of both a Nixon-era law--the OSH Act--and an ongoing federal agency, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA). It's also the name of a museum in Dortmund, Germany.

I have no first-hand knowledge of the Occupational Safety and Health Museum, but since OSHA in the U.S. deals with a lot of workplace injuries and fatalities, I can imagine all kinds of grotesqueries in the museum, but that's evidently not the case. Here's a description for the site travelblog.viator.com:

Amongst the many, many things on offer are playful robotic arms, interactive games that mess with your visual perception, aircraft cockpits to sit in and mock-ups of a power station’s control room.

All manner of machinery is on display, from weaving looms and printing presses to helicopters used to repair power lines. There are lots of buttons to press, computers to play with and enormous contraptions to control. All information is in German, so you might not understand what’s going on most of the time if you don’t speak the language, but the sheer scale and ambition of the exhibition make it worth visiting.

Unfortunately, the site offered no pictures of the place.

Predatory Cell Phones Target of New Law

As I've mused before, why don't they just implant us all with mind-reading GPS devices at birth? They, of course, are our brilliant legislators in Washington, D.C., Sacramento (fill in your state's capital), and in every City Hall nationwide.

Now comes this gem out of a Republican Congressman from New York. His Camera Phone Predator Act (he wasn't watching his abbreviations here--this works out to CPPA and CREEP would be better) would require cell phones with cameras to make a loud noise every time a photo is snapped. This, he reasons, would alert women that they were being photographed up skirt, as it is called.

Presumably, another law covers the taking of illicit photographs of people's privates, but CPPA would make it a crime to disable or silence the camera tone.

Brilliant, isn't it? Barf....

Baucus Bill Saves Money by Spending It--Right!

Only in the nation's capital could this equation work: You save money by spending more of it.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has come out with an estimate that the Max Baucus Senate Finance Committee health reform measure will cost taxpayers $829 billion over ten years. Okay, the CBO is probably off by a full measure, and the subsidies and other costs in the measure will probably come in closer to $2 trillion in a decade.

But that's not the real problem with this equation. This is: In 2019, the CBO says the Baucus bill will start saving $81 billion a year. From what and how? Even if that's true, it would still take more than a decade to pay back the original 10-year outlay with no interest or accommodation for inflation.

Only in D.C. could such voodoo arithmetic be acceptable. After all, they're not spending their own money. They're just printing it and asking others to foot the bill through Treasury bonds. Or inflation. Or economic devastation.

Can I print my own money and issue bonds? I could live like a king (or Congressman) too if all of us were allowed to play by the same rules as those in power.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio Obamacized

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona (think Phoenix), has denounced the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for rescinding his 287(g) privileges, which allowed him to round up illegal immigrants for deportation proceedings. He now says he'll continue his raids under state law and drive the illegals to the border himself if he has to.

After Arpaio called officials at DHS "liars," Homeland Security spokesmen declined to comment, saying they are still reviewing their agreement with the sheriff’s department and the other 65 agencies that participated in the 287(g) program that allows local and state officers to make immigration arrests.

I'd call it being Obamacized as the new administration hopes to round up illegal immigrants into voting-rights citizens to produce what they hope will be an insurmountable Democratic super-majority for all time. The sheriff is just one more hostage along the way.

Immigration Reform: A Nation Without Borders?

The thinking goes something like this: In states where we can register Latin voters, we can increase the ranks of Democrats and elect more Democrats (hopefully, permanently), so why now legalize all the illegals? Hell, tear down that wall and let them all in!

Even the New York Times is writing about Obama's plan to legalize all those would-be Democrats, and the head of the United States Citizenship and Naturalization Service (USCIS), Alejandro Mayorkas, is already preparing for an onslaught of 12.5 million applicants for visas.

Planning has become so intense that the USCIS is setting up a system of what it calls lockboxes (sort of like stand-alone mail receptacles), so the illegals can mail in their applications. No word on what happens after that. Maybe ACORN will use their names and addresses and go register them to vote.

Meanwhile, USCIS head Mayorkas is the same Clinton appointee who, when Clinton issued his notorious midnight pardons upon leaving office, got a convicted Argentine cocaine smuggler named Carlos Vignali released from a 15-year prison term. Mayorkis was later forced to resign in shame from his position as a U.S. Attorney in California for his role in the pardon. Now he's the head of the USCIS, so expect more of the same. In short, money--and in this case, votes--talks.

France Telecom: 24 Suicides in 18 Months

Here's a case where a company weaned from a state monopoly--France Telecom--may have gone too overboard in management style, which a union leader labeled as "real indifference, no humanity."

A call center worker for France Telecom this week jumped off a bridge into onrushing traffic to become the company's 24th suicide victim in 18 months.

As that above-quoted union leader noted after the worker's death: "[A}ll they talked about was numbers and workers were treated like sausage meat."

When France Telecom's market was deregulated, stress levels began rising as management pushed to reach goals free-market style. As the stress rose, so did the suicide rate.

Maybe a little socialism isn't such a bad thing, after all. No one ever accused a socialized company of causing stress. Death by boredom, yes, but never suicide.