Prey

Or should that be “Pray”. As in, you might really want to pray you have someone nearby with some hefty firepower if a cougar decides you or your children are the blue plate special.

Three cougars that appeared to be stalking people were shot in Princeton, B.C., during the last two weeks, and a veteran conservation officer says he’s never seen anything like it.

The first cougar was spotted lurking near a campground in the southern Interior town on July 3, CBC News has learned.

B.C. conservation officer Al Lay shot the big cat out of concern it may have been stalking people.

“It was close to residences and campsites on the other side, and it was just one of those situations where it is better safe than sorry…. We just can’t take the chance of someone being hurt. Sometimes it’s not pleasant but it’s something we have to do,” said Lay.

On July 10 another cougar was spotted in Princeton following two girls tubing down a river. A local resident was so worried he got his gun, according Princeton Mayor Randy McLean.

“The fellow noticed the cougar was crouched, observing the two girls as if he could pounce at any moment, and he shot the cougar,” said McLean.

A day later, a third cougar was spotted hanging around a softball tournament right across from the RCMP station.

“RCMP members went across the road and unfortunately dispatched the animal to prevent anything tragic from happening,” Cpl. Dan Moskaluk told CBC News.

That would be “unfortunately” for the cougar, one presumes. Or one hopes the RCMP is more concerned with the folks that pay their salaries than they are with carnivores who appear to be targeting said taxpayers. 

Pray you have some well-heeled folks nearby you or your children in a situation like this.

Enthusiasm Or Desperation?

Could it all be falling apart for Obama and the Democrats? Read this post and you begin to wonder:

As The Washington Post reports, Obama has begun lobbying Congress with a vengeance on health-care. Democrats are talking about wanting to have a health-care bill passed by the time of the August recess, though many are doubtful that this deadline will be met. Part of this urgency is due, no doubt, to the fact that members of the left have been dreaming for decades about some kind of “universal health-care” (or at least a nationalized system of delivering health-care, which is different from universal health-care). But part of it may be motivated by an anxiety that the Obama administration and, if they’re not careful, Congressional Democrats may be on a trip to the negative side of public opinion polling.

Consider this CBS poll, which may oversample Democrats, that shows Obama dropping six points over the past month, from 63% approval to 57%. CBS polling also showed Obama dropping five points from May to June (from 68% to 63%). So that’s an 11-point drop over two months. CBS is not an outlier in this; other polls have also noticed declines in support for Obama, especially among independents. Those polled also seem to have lost a significant amount of trust in Obama’s handling of the economy.

Fast forward to the middle of early part of September, when Congress returns to work. Say the economic situation continues to worsen. Say the exploding national debt begins to weigh more heavily on the minds of Americans. Say other controversies gnaw away at the administration’s public appeal. We could be seeing Obama’s approval numbers in the mid-40s (57-11=46). At that point, he could have significantly less leverage to apply to recalcitrant members of Congress.

Please go read the whole post, it is a very, very credible scenario. Obama’s political checks may begin to bounce as soon as the next unemployment report. If the White House was getting desperate to pass legislation before their poll numbers dropped to a point where their political checks were no longer good what would it look like? 

Maybe a lot like it does today?

The longer the public has to study the impacts of the Pelosi-born crap and tax bill and her health care “reform” the less likely it is that Democrats facing reelection next year are going to put their necks on Pelosi’s chopping block.

The more the public learns of the two bills, the more damage Obama takes in the polls. They are pulling out the stops to try to ram these pieces of legislation through before a critical mass of people read about the economy-killing details of the plans.

What would desperation on Obama’s part look like? Would it look different from what we are seeing?

$23 Quadrillion

Gee, things are getting expensive these days. Some 13,000 Visa card users all got charged (for making small purchases) the rather stunning number of $23 quadrillion each.

Visa representatives quickly blamed the notices on a technical glitch. The 17-digit charges were applied to holders of prepaid cards, they said, such as the Visa Buxx card, a service parents can offer teenaged children.

“Late yesterday, July 13, a temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services, caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted to a small number of Visa prepaid accounts,” a statement issued on Tuesday said. “The technical glitch, which impacted fewer than 13,000 Visa prepaid transactions, has been corrected and erroneous postings have been removed. Importantly, this incident had no financial impact on Visa prepaid cardholders.”

(And yes, I just checked my bank account that uses a Visa-logo check card to make sure I had not been dinged for this amount.) Stories like this make you feel real confident in the banking sector, don’t they?  

In fact, several big banks are reporting stunningly large profits this quarter.

Hmmm.

Your Only Value Is As A Taxpaying Asset To The Government

When you are old and sick, you are worthless and unworthy of any health care. I give you Peter Singer, a “bioethicist” who only considers you as a liability if you live too long and need expensive care at the end of your life.

The case for explicit health care rationing in the United States starts with the difficulty of thinking of any other way in which we can continue to provide adequate health care to people on Medicaid and Medicare, let alone extend coverage to those who do not now have it. Health-insurance premiums have more than doubled in a decade, rising four times faster than wages. In May, Medicare’s trustees warned that the program’s biggest fund is heading for insolvency in just eight years. Health care now absorbs about one dollar in every six the nation spends, a figure that far exceeds the share spent by any other nation. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it is on track to double by 2035.

President Obama has said plainly that America’s health care system is broken. It is, he has said, by far the most significant driver of America’s long-term debt and deficits. It is hard to see how the nation as a whole can remain competitive if in 25 years we are spending nearly a third of what we earn on health care, while other industrialized nations are spending far less but achieving health outcomes as good as, or better than, ours.

Rationing health care means getting value for the billions we are spending by setting limits on which treatments should be paid for from the public purse. If we ration we won’t be writing blank checks to pharmaceutical companies for their patented drugs, nor paying for whatever procedures doctors choose to recommend. When public funds subsidize health care or provide it directly, it is crazy not to try to get value for money. The debate over health care reform in the United States should start from the premise that some form of health care rationing is both inescapable and desirable. Then we can ask, What is the best way to do it?

More on Peter Singer from Wikipedia:

Peter Albert David Singer (born July 6, 1946) is an Australian philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics, approaching ethical issues from a secular preference utilitarian perspective.

He has served, on two occasions, as chair of philosophy at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996, he ran unsuccessfully as a Green candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004, he was recognized as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies.

Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement. Not all members of the animal liberation movement share this view, and Singer himself has said the media overstates his status. His views on that and other issues in bioethics have attracted attention and a degree of controversy.

He is described as a “utilitarian”. In other words, you’re worthless after you are no longer useful to him and those like him. You must be a productive taxpayer to be worthy of any expenditure from the government that has funded itself off the sweat of your brow.

Go read the whole thing. Then take a shower. Or several showers.

One simply cannot wait for Singer to confront his own state-mandated declaration of uselessness.

We have seen this exact, same reasoning before, but it wasn’t called “bioethics” then.

House To Middle Class: You’re Screwed

Keith Hennessey has delved into the House bill for health care “reform” and finds this astonishing bit of news. Some 8 million middle class Americans will likely end up with no health insurance and will get hit with a huge tax increase as well.

As expected, the House bill would mandate that individuals and families have or buy health insurance.

But what if they don’t buy it?

Then Section 401 kicks in. Any individual (or family) that does not have health insurance would have to pay a new tax, roughly equal to the smaller of 2.5% of your income or the cost of a health insurance plan.

[ Technical note: From the legislative language, it appears the tax = min( 2.5% * (modified AGI - personal exemption), average premium cost). In the examples below, for simplicity I assume modified AGI = AGI. ]

I assume the bill authors would respond, “But why wouldn’t you want insurance? After all, we’re subsidizing it for everyone up to 400% of the poverty line.”

That is true. But if you’re a single person with income of $44,000 or higher, then you’re above 400% of the poverty line. You would not be subsidized, but would face the punitive tax if you didn’t get health insurance. This bill leaves an important gap between the subsidies and the cost of health insurance. CBO says that for about eight million people, that gap is too big to close, and they would get stuck paying higher taxes and still without health insurance.

Go over and read the whole post. It is pretty ugly. Hennessey is using the CBO’s own numbers here, so you can bet he’s got this pegged pretty close. So much for Obama’s pinky-swear promise of no tax increases on people earning less than $250,000.

You know the House plan sucks when even the Washington Post calls it “bad policy“.  (Mind you, they are in favor of soaking the rich, it’s just that they want the money to go to deficit reduction rather than the spend, spend and tax plan the House is pushing).

The traditional argument against sharp increases in the marginal tax rates of a very narrow band of Americans is that it could distort their economic behavior — most likely by encouraging them to put more of their money into tax shelters as opposed to productive investments. This effect could be greatest in certain states, such as New York, where a higher federal rate would add to already substantial state income taxes. The deeper issue, though, is whether it is wise to pay for a far-reaching new federal social program by tapping a revenue source that would surely need to be tapped if and when Congress and the Obama administration get serious about the long-term federal deficit.

The Democrats controlling the House are assuming that their targets are fixed in place and will stand still for being milked to fund the Democrat’s schemes.

I’m betting on a slightly different scenario happening here. I think a lot of subchapter S corporations are simply going to cease to exist. Some will be reincarnated as subchapter C corporations, others will simply disappear, their owners will get out of business and their capital will be socked away. As a result, the number of “rich” are going to plummet – as will the number of jobs those small businesses created and sustained.

I live in an area that has been hit less hard than other sections of this nation during this recession. Yet even here, I am seeing small businesses simply close their doors. The town I live nearest to had three auto parts stores for all the years I have lived here. It now has one. A Local barber shop that had been here all the years I have simply closed one day – sign gone, shop empty.

Small business is in retreat – or rather is heading for cover in this climate of witch hunt taxation waiting for a victim to pounce on. The smart businessmen are deciding not to be victims of the House pitchfork mob, I suspect.

That does not bode well for the American economy or any economic recovery.