Cool Hand Lute goes cold

Too many changes. Too fast.

As the nation prepares to enter a dark and dangerous time, some of the remaining vestiges of a wholesome era begin to break free. Like in Atlas Shrugged and its multiple allusions to the wisdom and work ethic of previous generations -- virtues lost in the generation at the helm -- it somehow seems appropriate that Lute Olson would retire this week.

We all knew this time would come, as much as we tried to deny it. The turmoil of the past two years has clearly taken its toll. Frankly, it's probably been a long, lonely and punishing decline since his beloved Bobbi died. But I feel like the short-sighted avarice with which players began abusing the Arizona program pushed Lute over the edge. You could tell it went against his core beliefs as he even began speaking in favor of mandating a minimum recruit commitment of two years -- a position that other leading coaches shunned. In particular, Brandon Jennings jump to Italy in order to wait out his year until he's eligible for the NBA rather than at least take a year at school I think was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I can't help but imagine the Destroyer coming to take Lute to a better place. To be free of the whining and entitlements this society has fostered. You'll love Galt's Gulch, Lute, I promise. You'd fit in there perfectly.

Now, today, word comes that Arizona's three recruits for next year have all backed out of their verbal commitments. We Wildcats fans should actually enjoy this moment in time. Pay our humble tokens of gratitude to a man that forged a program for a quarter century. Stop and enjoy the spectacle of the lights that define the edge of the black hole. For very soon, we'll plunge into its crushing oblivion, hoping...praying...we come out in a better place on the other side.

Universal healthcare=universal nightmare

Here's compelling proof that nationalized healthcare WILL NOT WORK:

From FoxNews.com
Hawaii Ending Universal Child Health Care After 7 Mos.
Friday, October 17, 2008

HONOLULU — Hawaii is dropping the only state universal child health care program in the country just seven months after it launched.

Gov. Linda Lingle's administration cited budget shortfalls and other available health care options for eliminating funding for the program. A state official said families were dropping private coverage so their children would be eligible for the subsidized plan.

"People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free," said Dr. Kenny Fink, the administrator for Med-QUEST at the Department of Human Services. "I don't believe that was the intent of the program."

State officials said Thursday they will stop giving health coverage to the 2,000 children enrolled by Nov. 1, but private partner Hawaii Medical Service Association will pay to extend their coverage through the end of the year without government support.

"We're very disappointed in the state's decision, and it came as a complete surprise to us," said Jennifer Diesman, a spokeswoman for HMSA, the state's largest health care provider. "We believe the program is working, and given Hawaii's economic uncertainty, we don't think now is the time to cut all funding for this kind of program."

Hawaii lawmakers approved the health plan in 2007 as a way to ensure every child can get basic medical help. The Keiki (child) Care program aimed to cover every child from birth to 18 years old who didn't already have health insurance — mostly immigrants and members of lower-income families.

It costs the state about $50,000 per month, or $25.50 per child — an amount that was more than matched by HMSA.

State health officials argued that most of the children enrolled in the universal child care program previously had private health insurance, indicating that it was helping those who didn't need it.

The Republican governor signed Keiki Care into law in 2007, but it and many other government services are facing cuts as the state deals with a projected $900 million general fund shortfall by 2011.

While it's difficult to determine how many children lack health coverage in the islands, estimates range from 3,500 to 16,000 in a state of about 1.3 million people. All were eligible for the program.

"Children are a lot more vulnerable in terms of needing care," said Democratic Sen. Suzanne Chun Oakland. "It's not very good to try to be a leader and then renege on that commitment."

The universal health care system was free except for copays of $7 per office visit.

Families with children currently enrolled in the universal system are being encouraged to seek more comprehensive Medicaid coverage, which may be available to children in a family of four earning up to $73,000 annually.

These children also could sign up for the HMSA Children's Plan, which costs about $55 a month.

"Most of them won't be eligible for Medicaid, and that's why they were enrolled in Keiki Care," Diesman said. "It's the gap group that we're trying to ensure has coverage."

Re-read that third paragraph one hundred times.

I laud the quick action (by a Republican Governor.) It only took seven months of people leeching the system for a governor to say enough's enough. But think of that...it took seven months for people to start leeching the system. It took seven months for people to gravitate to the free ride. To forego personal responsibility in favor of a handout. To shift the burden of accountability from themselves to the shoulders of the tax payers. People who were already able to pay for coverage suddenly started limping around, pitifully saying "Look at ME...I need help..*cough, cough*" No, worse, "Someone help MY CHILD!" That's YOUR job, not mine!!! It's despicable.

So tell me, when a state as small as Hawaii can't run socialized medicine, how is there any way in HELL it will work for a country? And tell me how, if they start it, the national government would ever DREAM of shutting it off after seven months. It would not.

What's worse, when the Barackalypse consumes healthcare and we turn into a country of sniveling hypochondriacs and cancer and heart disease are supplanted by Munchausen by Proxy as the most costly condition to treat, we'll ALSO be watching mortgage payers shirking their ethical responsibilities. Because, guess what? Not only is RePO (Reid, Pelosi and Obama) going to let you get a free ride on medical coverage, if you're having trouble making your mortgage payment, no problem. They'll bail you out of that, too. Just stop paying your mortgage because it's too hard. (You probably never had the money in the first place when you faked your loan docs with a smile and a wink.) Hell, maybe you get a paper cut every time you send in your check or you don't like the taste of the envelope glue. Who gives a shit? Don't pay for an entire year and they'll just reappraise the value of your home lower until it's friggin' free.

Have another bonbon and enjoy the ride!

Worst Case Scenario worth sharing

I know I'm preaching to the choir with this meager blog, but if, someday, when power is restored after the Barackalypse and people relearn how to harness electricity, someone may emerge from his wasteland bunker and unearth a computer and reconnect the Internet and magically stumble across my blog and see how half the country understood the portent of electing the nation's Destroyer, then I need to document our descent into oblivion for future generations.

Good article in the Weekly Standard (good in a bowel-loosening sort of way):

Worst Case Scenario
What an Obama administration and a heavily Democratic Congress would accomplish.
by Fred Barnes
10/14/2008 12:00:00 AM

John McCain trails Barack Obama and shows no signs, at the moment anyway, of propelling himself into the lead. Democrats lead in eight Senate seats currently held by Republicans and are close in three others. In the House, Republicans once thought they'd lose only 5 to 10 seats. Now things look worse.

Thanks particularly to the month-long financial crisis, Republicans are in extremely poor shape with the election three weeks away. This means the worst case scenario is now a distinct possibility: a Democrat in the White House, a Democratic Senate with a filibuster-proof majority, and a Democratic House with a bolstered majority.

If this scenario unfolds, Washington would become a solidly liberal town again for the first time in decades. And the prospects of passing the liberal agenda--nearly all of it--would be bright. Enacting major parts of it would be even brighter. You can forget about bipartisanship.

Start with "card check." It would permit organized labor to unionize the private sector without winning a certification election by secret ballot. It's easy to get workers to sign cards saying they want a union, but it's hard to get them to vote that way when labor organizers aren't hounding them. Card check is labor's last hope for more dues-paying union members.

Unions simply aren't popular and neither is card check. But it passed the House last year, only to be blocked in the Senate by a Republican filibuster. In 2009, with Washington controlled by Democrats, it would sail through Congress and President Obama would sign it. After all, neither Obama nor congressional Democrats have bucked organized labor even once.

Then Democrats might go after a longstanding target of big labor, section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act. It allows states to enact right-to-work laws, which bar workers from being forced to join a union. Twenty-two states have right-to-work laws.

The liberal scheme for killing conservative talk radio--the so-called fairness doctrine--would stand an excellent chance of becoming law. It would require radio stations to offer equal time, for free, to anyone seeking to reply to broadcasts featuring political opinion. To remain profitable, many stations would have to drop conservative talk shows, a major medium for communicating conservative ideas, rather than give up hours of free time. Obama has said he opposes the fairness doctrine. But would he veto it? Not likely.

Obama would nominate liberals to fill Supreme Court vacancies--no doubt about that--with the strong likelihood they'd be confirmed. As a senator, he voted against John Roberts and Sam Alito. And free trade agreements would become a thing of the past, given liberal and labor opposition.

What about Obama's health care plan? He's described it as step or two away from a single payer, government-run health system like Canada's. While expensive, its chances of passage would be quite good.

A bad economy, however, might keep Obama and his allies in Congress from passing his entire package of tax increases and his "cap and trade" proposal for curbing the emission of greenhouse gases. Obama has called for increasing the tax rate on capital gains, dividends, and the income of top earners, and raising the cap on payroll taxes. But tax hikes would worsen, not stimulate, a weak economy. So that might make Democrats balk--except they might not. For liberals, requiring the well-to-do to pay higher taxes is a matter of ideology.

So is cap and trade. It would drive up the cost of energy, another downer for the economy, but Democrats believe it's necessary to save the planet. Besides, the environmental lobby would demand cap and trade's enactment. And environmentalists have as tight a grip on Democrats as labor does. Obama has never crossed environmentalists.

As for foreign and national security policy, there'd be nothing stopping President Obama from doing what he wanted in a liberal-dominated Washington, including a quick troop exit from Iraq and presidential-level talks with anti-American dictators. Congress would go along. The media would cheer.

But who knows? Maybe McCain and Republicans will rally their forces and keep the worst from happening--the worst, that is, from a conservative standpoint. The campaign has changed direction twice in less than two months, first when McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, then when the financial panic hit. There could be a third game changer.

If not, we face the liberal deluge.

Spread THIS around!

If Obama wins, consider this a historical document signifying the formal beginning of the Barackalypse:

FOXNews.com
Monday, October 13, 2008

Barack Obama told a tax-burdened plumber over the weekend that his economic philosophy is to "spread the wealth around" -- a comment that may only draw fire from riled-up John McCain supporters who have taken to calling Obama a "socialist" at the Republican's rallies.

Obama made the remark, caught on camera, after fielding some tough questions from the plumber Sunday in Ohio, where the Democratic candidate canvassed neighborhoods and encouraged residents to vote early.

"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" the plumber asked, complaining that he was being taxed "more and more for fulfilling the American dream."

"It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success too," Obama responded. "My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody ... I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Obama frequently rails against what he calls a Republican concept that tax breaks for the wealthy will somehow "trickle down" to middle-class Americans.

Obama says he will not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

However, McCain's aides and supporters argue that Obama wrongly wants to raise taxes on businesses in a time of economic distress.

Watch the video

True to form, he'll no doubt backpedal and say that he meant "the opportunity to make wealth" or "the opportunity to succeed should be spread around."

You and I know different.

Now if we can just convince 270 electoral college votes...

Atlas Heaved

Over the past three and a half weeks, I have doggedly finished the 1100+ page epic that is Atlas Shrugged. It's a book that I've contemplated reading for many years, my curiosity piqued by the Ayn Rand mystique. References to her philosophy had always intrigued me but, frankly, the gargantuan size of the book was more than a little intimidating.

Taking it upon sage advice that now was the time to read the book, I set nose to grindstone and plowed my way through. After about 50 or 60 pages of acclimating to Rand's very detailed, meticulous style, I found myself swept up in a tale that is frighteningly prescient. So much so that I found the book difficult to put down. It's been a long time since I've found myself dog-earing pages of a book so as to memorialize their gravity.

I won't venture into anything close to an analysis of what the book means or try to offer any insights that much smarter people than I have made a career out of cultivating. Suffice to say that the book details a United States that eerily mirrors today's imploding nation. The striking similarities have left me with a lingering sense of deja vu. Like I just had lunch with Nostradamus.

There's been a lot made lately of the roots of the left versus right battle in this country and the philosophical struggle's genesis in 19th century Europe. We're seeing all kinds of loose moral and ethical threads exposed in the past six months: military, political, financial and gender.

We're realizing that Depression-era fiscal experiments and the advent of Keynesian economics have conclusively proven that spending more than you have, while politically convenient, has slowly eroded personal responsibility and common sense. This mess wasn't Bush's fault. Or Clinton's fault. It's been a slowly mounting erosion of accountability for at least 80 years. Yes, we're reaping what we've sown. Yes, birds have come home to roost. All the cliches that the press have been tossing around lately are appropriate. But the truth is that it's going to take some legitimate scorched earth tactics to halt this country's retreat from integrity. And it's going to get ugly.

We're realizing that the women's movement championed by the NOW and similar shadow socialist organizations was never really about women's rights. It's about liberal women's rights. The days when Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell are considered more informed and virtuous than Sarah Palin is a scary day. (And that day has been virtually every day for weeks.)

We're realizing that the patriotic euphoria we were all bound by post-9/11 was not meant to last. While we all sang "America the Beautiful" out one side of our mouths, it was about March '02 when we started saying "it won't last" out the other. By the end of that year, the WTC conspiracy theories started flying. Exacerbated by the war in Iraq, the cynical left starting propagating the Great American Guilt Complex, trying like hell to make us all feel like it was our fault that terrorists hate us. That's been, perhaps, the greatest fallacy of the left during the past decade among myriad irrational fallacies.

This has paved the way for electing a black man with an Islamic name as the ultimate act of contrition -- regardless of his complete lack of experience for the position. Let me tell you, we're definitely going to be serving penitence under Obama...just not the kind the left thinks we will.

Prepare for the Barackalypse, my friends.

We're realizing that it's scary as hell when the media tries to soothe us by rationalizing how much worse the Europeans' tax rates are when discussing the imminent tax hikes Obama's veiling so thinly (and the media compulsively denies.) Like we should be happy that we have so far to catch up.

According to Joe Biden, paying taxes is patriotic. I'm not sure I've heard a more terrifying quote in my life. Plucked right out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged, I swear. What's worse, the media just glossed it over. That's the most insidious, unnerving thing I think I've EVER heard a politician say. Honestly. Good God, that horrifies me.

No one, right or left, has the courage to acknowledge that the top 5% of the wealthiest people in this country pay 60% of the taxes. The bottom 30-40% pay NO taxes. Someone, for the love of God, speak that truth. I can't believe the gall of Obama to defend his coming tax policies for small businesses by saying that 65% of small businesses in America don't make $250,000 a year, hence making them immune to his higher taxes. Like that's a defense! That mentality is unfathomable to me. Not only is he then discouraging businesses to be successful, he's also put some kind of stigma on them. Like when they magically cross that $250,000 threshold, they'll be part of the oil-mongering profiteers he so loves to demonize. It's the vacuous, liberal class warfare equation that being poor is virtuous and rich is corrupt. That IS straight out of Atlas Shrugged.

We're realizing that when the sensational, self indulgent, morally-bankrupt Hollywood media culture tries to dictate right and wrong, we've really lost our way. Actors and musicians vilify big business while they drive Hummers, own ten houses, and demand obscene amounts of money for pitiful skillsets. Adopting Malawi kids or coordinating photo-ops in the streets of New Orleans will never cleanse the soiled souls of the glitterati. Keep on biting that hand that's feeding you Sean Penn, Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Streisand, P-Diddy. You'll need some of that protein later to stave off the scurvy.

We're realizing that labor unions are simply unholy unions. Obama likes to talk so much about revising our financial policies to reflect a 21st century economy. Okay, put your money where your mealy mouth is, Barack, and shut down the labor unions. Shut down the Teamsters. Shut down the UAW. Shut down the Hollywood Writers Union. Shut down the teachers unions. Make them EARN every dollar instead of growing fat and lazy on entitlements. The vulture-like media of the 21st Century would love to show 12 year-olds making clothes for WalMart. They would never let industry return to the genuine abuses of the 20th Century, correct? So, there's no need for unions. Ban them first and then talk to me about change.

And I'm realizing that Atlas Shrugged is among the most important books I've ever read. Reading it at this time in history only magnifies its magnificence.

Buy a copy. Read it with urgency. Let yourself highlight passages. (I intend to share some in future blog entries.) You owe it to your country. Or, as I'm sure Ayn would insist, you owe it only to yourself.

Kind of ironic that the Ayn Rand Institute is but a few miles from here. Or providence.