I took my bride to the airport early today to catch a flight and for purely selfish reasons I detoured on the way back to the home office to the county seat to absentee vote. Much as I’m curious about what the turnout is going to be 18 days from now, the well meaning folks in my local precinct are slow as molasses getting people through there so I opted out of that. But hey at least I voted.

What truly amazed me was that I found myself voting a straight Republican ticket for the first time in my life. Ordinarily I scatter votes around between Republicans and Libertarians. Because to me the Democrat Party represents the party of slavery to the state and death to the unborn, as a moral choice, I have only voted for a single Democrat since I voted for George McGovern. There’s a long story behind that one that I won’t bore you with but suffice it to say it includes the words “college” and “girl friend.” The other Democrat I voted for was a guy running for Indiana Secretary of State maybe 15 years ago whose entire campaign was based on eliminating the office. As he put it, why can’t the other state executive organizations file and keep track of their own blasted paperwork? Indeed!

What I was confronted with on the ballot today was amazing in the sense that there was exactly one, repeat one, Democrat running for a county job. And that guy won’t win because it’s one of those “vote for three” township races and the other three in the race are Republicans. There were only four Libertarians on the entire ballot as I recall. The only Democrats on it were the guy in the township race, Ellsworth who’s running against Coates for the seat Bayh holds now and the guy running for the IN-4 congressional seat, which is an open spot because of Steve Buyer’s retirement. I’d never seen that individual’s name before today and I’ll probably never see it again. Allowing for redrawing the district’s lines over the years as best you can, the last time IN-4 went for a Democrat … and I’m not making this up … Coolidge was president. I’m guessing the RNCC sees this as a “safe seat.”

Given that it takes some enthusiasm to make a race, particularly in a place like this where the odds are steeply against you, I suppose in this election cycle this is not too surprising. But it does make me wonder, where else have Democrats thrown in the towel? And it also tends to cement in my mind Rush’s recent contention that all the media happy talk about closing the enthusiasm gap is so much balderdash.

My sentiments exactly.

But then on the way home this afternoon I spotted a truly astonishing sign. It was a fresh covering for a billboard on the south side of Interstate 74 eastbound, about a mile inside the Illinois border just outside Danville, IL. The billboard was dominated by a picture of The One in sort of an ‘Uncle Sam wants you’ picture and next to him was the legend:

Obama's Regime
or
Your America
Vote November 2

Folks in the Land of Lincoln seem a little wound up. The irony to me was that earlier, I’d been thinking that the democrats are in such trouble, I have been a little surprised that the “it’s not a referendum on Obama” stories haven’t started yet …. I suppose I can expect to start reading them pretty soon based on the signage.

Thinking I’d find a simple explanation I followed a link to gobbledgook called ‘Statement of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee on the Determination of the Dates of Turning Points in the U.S. Economy‘ where I found this utterly fascinating statement –

The Committee does not have a fixed definition of economic activity. It examines and compares the behavior of various measures of broad activity: real GDP measured on the product and income sides, economy-wide employment, and real income. The Committee also may consider indicators that do not cover the entire economy, such as real sales and the Federal Reserve’s index of industrial production (IP).

Put another way — it means whatever they say it means. No fixed definition? HTH do you arrive at what passes for a mathematical conclusion about anything without starting from a fixed point? In other words, what we’re feeling is at least as statistically valid as what these guys say.

I got curious about who exactly this mob of geniuses is so I followed the About link and learned–

The NBER is the nation’s leading nonprofit economic research organization. Sixteen of the 31 American Nobel Prize winners in Economics and six of the past Chairmen of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers have been researchers at the NBER. The more than 1,000 professors of economics and business now teaching at colleges and universities in North America who are NBER researchers are the leading scholars in their fields.

Other than Tom Sowell, Walter Williams and members of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, your average Nobel Prize winning economist, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and other random “professors” don’t know doodly about the real world, IMHO. But I they did sell me that the books have been cooked to give democrats something to talk about. It doesn’t matter though. It’s sort of like Karl Rove’s blustering– sound and fury signifying nothing.

In my business life I have been told by clients, literally hundreds of times, that they “must have” 100% I/T systems availability. In practice no one does of course– things break and there’s little, realistically, you can do about it. But you can get pretty close. I always ask them first what they’re getting now and somehow even after years of having this discussion, I’m somehow always surprised at the answers. Most common answer? “I don’t know.” Most of the numerical responses… which is to say probably all of them … are also ultimately amended to “I don’t actually know.”

It hit me in considering public policy issues I’m also asking myself, against what baseline? In pretty much every case, the baseline in my mind is what the Constitution allows. It doesn’t allow for the gargolye we lovingly call Obamacare of course. Then you consider the definition of the desired end state and once you arrive at that, you can assess what it might cost and whether you can even get there from the baseline. My current client would say they have to have 100% availability because it costs them X millions of dollars an hour in lost business to be down. Even assuming X is an accurate number (whatever that number is and whomever the client is, it’s usually wrong), in this case when you tell them chances are they can actually tolerate 92% because they probably sell close to $0 worth of insurance between 1 and 3AM any given morning, their point of view changes.

Clearly in the case of Obamacare, you can’t get there from the baseline, but that hasn’t stopped ‘progressives’ from trying because they haven’t examined the real meaning of the desired end-state and they haven’t considered the actual practical ramifications of doing so. So that 50.7M represents 16.7% of the population. That appears to be bad — a prolonged system outage of some sort usually provokes the availability discussion– but is it really when compared to the total trend line? As the IBD points out “[o]bserved on a chart, the rate is a rather straight line that bumps up a bit in 2009 as the economy went cold.”

Looks bad anyway though, right? Well, back to the baseline–

While the ratio of uninsured remains steady, the number of Americans with coverage has increased by 22 million over the last decade. At the same time the number without coverage “only increased about 5.3 million.”

For this, the country has been saddled with socialized medicine that will cost trillions and erode the quality of treatment?

This is exactly the sort of thing that causes clients climb down out of the 100% availability tree. When they discover the massive I/T budget increase they’re going to get, the disruption implementation will cause, realize they won’t get stone-cold 100% availability anyway, that they can actually tolerate some down time because they don’t understand what down time really means, they look for a more practical answer– one that fits with their amended desired end-state. The insanity of Obamacare isn’t much different than a client that refuses all application of common sense to their problem and insists on “100% availability.” My whole life’s experience tells me that even given an infinite supply of time and money, ain’t gonna happen.

I thought, how pleasant– I haven’t heard her voice or seen her in months and then I remembered … It wasn’t that terribly long ago, maybe as little as a year, that there was periodic speculation (what I’d personally categorize as “wild eyed speculation”) that shortly after the now rapidly approaching mid-terms she’d quit her day job to run for president because by then surely The One would be so unpopular with democrats, and just enough of the electorate as a whole, that he could be unhorsed. With the republican party naught but roadkill, her coronation in 2012 would be assured.

And then reality happened of course. It hit me listening to her this afternoon that’s never going to happen. The tinfoil hat wing of the democrat party is no so firmly entrenched in the driver’s seat, they’ll let The One steer them right off the cliff (sorry for the mixed metaphor), in fact demanding he go faster. With good luck on our side democrats will suffer a true cataclysm in November and with hard work, The One will be demoted back to private citizen in two years. (How much the world can change in one lifetime: shortly before I was born Harry Truman packed up and went home to MO telling reporters he was glad to be promoted back to private citizen. I guess it’s fair to say the Ruling Class phenomenon hadn’t fully taken hold in 1953.)

If Hillary were an NFL team, I think it’s safe to say we’d categorize her position as one where her window of opportunity isn’t just closing, it’s nailed shut.

Then this morning I read this editorial on Investor’s Business Daily titled ‘How to Go Extinct’ and thought, yeah that about sums it up. However, it asked the rhetorical question in the final paragraph that bears a non-rhetorical answer: “Should a financially troubled state like Indiana now support those who willingly walk away from decent jobs?” In theory when the plant’s closed, they’ll be laid off and thus eligible to suckle at the IN state government unemployment fund teat. That ain’t right. I’m out of town today but will call my state rep for an answer on whether these deadbeats can be kept out of my wallet when I get home.

If any of you heard what I’m referring to you should know, the Allies in WW2 did not have an expressed strategic or tactical goal of “killing civilians.” On more than one occasion in fact air missions were altered or cancelled because of the possible effect on civilian populations. (In fact one of these situations inspired the storyline of the Jimmy Cagney movie 13 Rue Madeleine.) At the time of D-Day in fact there was a great deal of agonizing about the effects of the bombing campaign that went on to isolate the beachheads, and how it was effecting the French population. Rush specifically mentioned Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden as examples of the allies targeting civilians. In all three cases these were legitimate military targets and civilians were not the targets. (99% of what you’ve read about Dresden is wrong, incidentally, from the death toll of the attack in February, 1945, to the notion that the city had no military value. In fact, it was very much a high value target. Calling it a militarily valueless undefended city is as much revisionism as the spurious notion that Nazism wasn’t a left-wing movement.)

However it was also true that no one spent too much time worrying about civilian casualties as a rule of thumb. In fact you could make the case that the British night bombing campaign took a completely ruthless point of view in this regard. Although they did not specifically target the killing of civilians, the RAF was candid that among its objectives was “de-housing” the civil population, thereby negatively effecting munitions production. If the civilians didn’t take cover, too bad.

Rush’s contention that these attacks were specifically intended to incite enemy civilian populations to throw off their governments is wrong. He cited this as an objective of war aims in several conflicts. In point of fact, that thinking went out with Grant’s stated goal of “extermination” in the War Between the States. In WW2 the goal was to destroy the enemy’s capacity to make war. If having large collateral damage body counts forced regime change, fine. Whatever works.

Just before it passed I was perusing Facebook and saw that a friend who’d been obviously supportive of the bill had posted something to the effect that she hoped it got done. I commented “I sincerely hope you’re mistaken” or words to that effect; just a single sentence.

I got back a pretty lengthy private message detailing the medical issues her child has and prominent in her reasoning — candidly, the single biggest part of her reasoning– was being able to insure the kid. She said that her daughter’s insurance would run $2500 a month, assuming she could get it. I got the distinct impression that she was between policies since this was a sporadic condition her child suffers from. Now not knowing anyone’s finances I do know that this gal ranks pretty high in the hierarchy of our common employer and her husband also works for the same company. I don’t know it but I’d be dumbfounded if they couldn’t arrange their family budget to cover this. My point is, they’re not living under an overpass somewhere and in fact, she’s quite likely “evil rich.”

I refrained from replying with the simple, yet I believe truthful response, that she sounded like she was most interested in shunting the cost off onto someone else. Hey to me, this is almost the most common human reaction there is — maybe someone else will pay. I don’t necessarily think less of her for it. We originally became friendly from exchange on an inside-the-company discussion board, later on she was my manager, and for sometime essentially my mentor; she’s bright, energetic, fun to be around and articulate. Maybe most important for a boss, she was honest and had integrity. (Just realized I used past tense there… hmmm.) I thought a lot of her before she was my boss as well as afterward; anyone who’s ever found themselves working for a friend knows that that happy scenario doesn’t always play out. I’ve had it go both ways.

In my reply, my first statement to her expressed my genuine sympathy for her situation; any parent would feel the same. I really felt, and still feel, bad for her, but I also believe there are some things bigger than any individual and certainly the situation with this legal monstrosity is one. The second statement I made was to say I wouldn’t bore her with a recitation of the very obvious facts that make the bill baldly unconstitutional because I believed she probably knew them already, nor would I make the, also obvious, argument that there was no experience to support the notion that government was capable of runnng any bureaucracy of this magnitude (right, right, should have said “any magnitude”).

Instead, I limited my argument, in gentle, respectful style (which isn’t necessarily my default mode!) to three obvious– to me, anyway– points: first that there was simply no set of conditions that would allow any insurer to write policies for new coverage with, effectively, no underwriting standards and not do one of two things, either withdraw from the health insurance business or dramatically raise rates for all their policy holders.

So this morning I see in an AP story that “Some major health insurance companies will no longer issue certain types of policies for children, an unintended consequence of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law, state officials said Friday.” It goes on to say

Starting later this year, the health care overhaul law requires insurers to accept children regardless of medical problems — a major early benefit of the complex legislation. Insurers are worried that parents will wait until kids get sick to sign them up, saddling the companies with unpredictable costs.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida issues about 9,000 to 10,000 new policies a year that only cover children. Vice president Randy Kammer said the company’s experts calculated that guaranteeing coverage for children could raise premiums for other individual policy holders by as much as 20 percent.

“We believe that the majority of people who would buy this policy were going to use it immediately, probably for high cost claims,” said Kammer. “Guaranteed issue means you could technically buy it on the way to the hospital.”

Well, that’s QED for my first point. My second point to her was that given human nature, if medical care suddenly appeared to be “free,” suddenly forcing everyone without it to buy increasingly unaffordable insurance, then trying to freeze the costs, that the insurer of last resort– Uncle Sam– not raising taxes as promised, rationing care was inevitable. (Yes, there are a whole raft of arguments here that I didn’t bother with.) So, the QED on this one was in the London Telgraph this morning, “Axe falls on NHS services” which among other things says “Some of the most common operations — including hip replacements and cataract surgery — will be rationed as part of attempts to save billions of pounds, despite government promises that front-line services would be protected.” That is in your face rationing. Respecting her intelligence I refrained from making the obvious point that no longer would she be the ultimate arbiter of her daughter’s well-being due to the danger that some pencil pusher in DC might decide her child goes untreated.

My third point was a good deal more esoteric; I don’t have the evidence — yet– to back it up and that was that based on my long experience on the edges of the pharmaceutical business it was inevitable that less research would be done resulting in fewer life saving drugs discovered and ultimately, human beings would die as a result.

Her response? She never bothered to reply, she just “un-friended” me. Am I sorry? Yeah I am. Am I offended or surprised? No. In fact, all she did was prove a second cliche, as I mentioned up top– liberals are intolerant and brook no argument.