Exactly a month ago, Democrats voted on the last piece of legislation they would take up before Scott Brown was seated:  Raising the debt ceiling from $12.394 trillion to $14.294 trillion.  Included in that bill was an amendment instituting PAYGO, or a pay-as-you go provision that requires that any new mandatory spending be offset by either a reduction in spending elsewhere, or a tax increase.  In order to circumvent this, a three-fifths majority would be required.

The vote was 60-40 in favor, strictly along party lines.  Republicans objected on that grounds that since spending is almost never cut, taxes would inevitably rise.

This idea was echoed by Glenn Beck in his CPAC keynote address:  Both parties will spend, but only the Democrats want to raise your taxes.

Jim Bunning (R-KY) has staged a one-man filibuster to block a bill that would spend $10 billion to extend jobless benefits for a month and keep other local projects running.  His objection is that Democrats are unwilling to make spending cuts in other areas in order to comply with the newly-passed PAYGO rules.

However, today reports have surfaced that Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) expects that the bill will pass, possibly as early as Tuesday.  That means that at least one Republican will vote in favor of the bill.

I assume that the traitorous Republican In Name Only will be one of the five who voted for cloture on the jobs bill:  Kit Bond (RINO-MO), Scott Brown (RINO-MA), Susan Collins & Olympia Snowe (two-headed RINO-ME), or George Voinovich (RINO-OH).

Glenn Beck, where are ya when we need ya?  There are Republicans addicted to spending who are in need of a spanking.

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Complaints can be sent to yourcomments@foxnews.com (Thanks, ShanPoe!)

Dear Fox News:

Red Eye — despite airing at 3am and STILL being more popular than the prime-time airing of Larry King Live — was preempted tonight for “breaking news” about an earthquake off the coast of Chile.

We know you’re looking for headlines about earthquakes, seeing as how the Haiti disaster has drawn worldwide interest.  However, many of us stay up late to watch Red Eye, and we really don’t give a crap if one person died and three buildings fell down as a result of a natural event.  Tens of thousands of people die every day in Africa, and you don’t interrupt Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly to report it.  Shit happens.

Instead, we were subjected to a massively FAIL phone discussion about the living conditions in Chile.

I’ll check the news about the “horror” tomorrow.  For now, I want my Red Eye.

Please direct your staff to remove their heads from their asses.

Thanks.

Sincerely,

Red Eye fans.

So it’s official — Andy Stern, head of SEIU, is now on the supposedly bipartisan Fiscal Commission that President Obama has created (via Executive Order, after the Senate failed to pass it) to examine the debt.

Let’s get this straight:  Obama spends money at a record pace, and then appoints a union chief to a panel to figure out how to fix it?  That’s sort of like overdosing on cocaine, and then asking your drug dealer to help examine what happened:  You might figure out the cause, but the drug dealer is still going to try to sell you more blow.

Remember when Obama told America that there was no place in his administration for lobbyists?  In the State of the Union, he said:

“We face a deficit of trust — deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years.  To close that credibility gap, we have to take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue — to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; to give our people the government they deserve.”

Let’s think about this.  Andy Stern’s sole job is to gain more influence for SEIU in the public sector.  He employs hundreds of lobbyists.  Hell, he’s THE lobbyist in Washington, the most frequent visitor to the White House during Obama’s first year in office.

So, in accordance with his pledge to “end the outsized influence of lobbyists,” the Teleprompter of the United States has bypassed Congress to create a Fiscal Commission to study why he’s addicted to spending — and then appoints the King of Lobbyists to help.

Pot, meet kettle.

President Obama has launched an all-out attack on the insurance companies in his new healthcare plan.  Unfortunately for Americans, the private insurance industry is the last thing standing between us and socialized medicine — and as a result, socialism.

In his first major legislation, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — i.e. the stimulus bill — President Obama created a couple of agencies that might have raised some eyebrows if anyone in Washington had read the bill before voting on it.

One, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, is supposed to help facilitate the computerization of medical records.  One mandate of the Office, though, is to provide “appropriate information to help guide medical decisions at the time and place of care.”

The other, the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, has a seemingly innocuous agenda:

SEC. 804. FEDERAL COORDINATING COUNCIL FOR COMPARATIVE
EFFECTIVENESS RESEARCH. (a) ESTABLISHMENT.—There is hereby
established a Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative
Effectiveness Research (in this section referred to as the ‘‘Council’’).
(b) PURPOSE.—The Council shall foster optimum coordination
of comparative effectiveness and related health services research
conducted or supported by relevant Federal departments and agencies,
with the goal of reducing duplicative efforts and encouraging
coordinated and complementary use of resources.
(c) DUTIES.—The Council shall—
(1) assist the offices and agencies of the Federal Government,
including the Departments of Health and Human Services,
Veterans Affairs, and Defense, and other Federal departments
or agencies, to coordinate the conduct or support of
comparative effectiveness and related health services research;
and
(2) advise the President and Congress on—
(A) strategies with respect to the infrastructure needs
of comparative effectiveness research within the Federal
Government; and
(B) organizational expenditures for comparative
effectiveness research

So, what is comparative effectiveness research?  It’s a framework for determining what works and what doesn’t, and leans heavily on Health Technology Assessment (HTA) to allow policy-makers and those directly involved in healthcare to speak a common language.  Liken it to a hospital administrator trying to figure out if an uninsured patient will receive a procedure or not — the doctor explains the procedures needed, and the administrator figures out whether the benefit to the patient is worth the cost to the hospital.

In HTA, the predominant language spoken is Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALY):

The QALY is based on the number of years of life that would be added by the intervention. Each year in perfect health is assigned the value of 1.0 down to a value of 0.0 for death. If the extra years would not be lived in full health, for example if the patient would lose a limb, or be blind or have to use a wheelchair, then the extra life-years are given a value between 0 and 1 to account for this.  The QALY is used in cost-utility analysis to calculate the ratio of cost to QALYs saved for a particular health care intervention. This is then used to allocate healthcare resources, with an intervention with a lower cost to QALY saved ratio being preferred over an intervention with a higher ratio. This method is controversial because it means that some people will not receive treatment as it is calculated that cost of the intervention is not warranted by the benefit to their quality of life. However, its supporters argue that since health care resources are inevitably limited, this method enables them to be allocated in the way that is approximately optimal for society, including most patients.

In short, if a liver transplant would give a patient an extra 30 years of life, it is considered a good use of an organ.  However, if the recipient is blind and in a wheelchair, his QALY might be reduced to 5 or 10 years.  A bureaucratic system provides “quantitative proof” that the liver should go to a more healthy candidate who won’t live as long, but will live a better quality of life.  That’s rationed healthcare at its best, and is surely where the United States is heading if and when we add 46 million uninsured Americans to the already overloaded healthcare system.

Now consider the areas that HTA covers:

Any intervention that may be used to promote health, to prevent, diagnose or treat disease or for rehabilitation or long-term care. This includes the pharmaceuticals, devices, procedures and organizational systems used in health care.

Finally, take a look at President Obama’s proposed healthcare plan.  Despite the fact that insurance companies have averaged only about a 4% return on investment over the past four years — in the bottom third of American industries — and is battling spiraling healthcare costs, Obama wants to set up a panel that will effectively cap or deny hikes in health insurance rates.  He wants insurance companies to be forced to provide insurance to people with pre-existing conditions; such plans cost insurers hundreds of millions of dollars every year.  Further, he is imposing large taxes and/or free-market restrictions on the exact same pharmaceutical and device-manufacturing companies that are “examined” under HTA.

The framework for universal healthcare was laid in the stimulus bill.  Government has access to your records and the records of people against whom you will compete, for lack of a better word, for rationed healthcare.  They are laying in place the QALY system to determine who will receive treatment and who will not.

The final brick in the implementation of Obama’s plan to socialize medicine is being blocked by those evil private insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers.  Once the government bankrupts these private sectors and jumps in with a “bailout,” they will have regulatory control over what medicines, devices, procedures, and care you receive.

(And in case anyone still wants to deny that Obama is a socialist, just read the  bottom of the second page of the letter he sent to Congress accompanying his FY2011 budget):

“In the aftermath of this crisis, what is clear is that we cannot simply go back to business as usual. We cannot go back to an economy that yielded cycle after cycle of speculative booms and painful busts.”

Obama is a Harvard-educated guy.  He knows that an economic cycle isn’t that May was good, but July was bad.

He’s talking about the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, the stock market boom of the 50s, the 1973-1974 crash that saw stock values fall 48%, the great years under Reagan-Bush-Clinton, the stock crash after 9/11, the meteoric rise to the Dow peaking above 14,000 under Bush in 2007, and the precipitous decline after the bank bailouts and TARP.  He’s talking about long-term, generational cycles, and that it’s “clear” that we “cannot go back” to that kind of economy.

In other words, say goodbye to capitalism and hello to socialism.