In the recent primaries and elections, the Tea Party has proven itself a political force. I still don’t know what to make of them, though. They’s stated they don’t want to create another political party, but reform the ones we’ve got. I like that. Yet there’s something about their decked out patriot costumes and slogans that shouts Obama Birthers and 9/11 Truthers. What do you think? Is the Tea Party something to support?

Movements can be powerful. A powerful movement is good or dangerous – depending on your politics.

The Tea Party is a unique type of movement for the United States. It’s large and quiet. Most US movements are small and loud, representing specific minority issues, and are often organized and financed by unions and other organizations.

The Tea Party movement represents the general ideas of efficiently small government and personal responsibility, which are ideas held by the majority of working Americans, regardless of past voting habits. And the movement is ‘grass roots,’ meaning it simply sprang up comprising numerous like-minded people throughout society. That’s why Tea Party rallies are held on the weekend, so the whole group doesn’t have to get the day off, unlike the common Hippy-Liberal rallies that appear on weekdays intentionally to be disruptive.

You can tell the Tea Party movement is powerful just by how nervous it makes outspoken Liberals. And the Liberal criticism of the movement is weak at best. Liberals, including Obama, describe the Tea Party like they’re Anarchists, wanting no government – but the Tea Party just wants government to stop growing wildly. They agree government is a good thing.

Liberals describe the Tea Party as hateful and dangerous – but the Tea Party has harmed no one, committed no property damage (unheard of at Liberal rallies), don’t cause disruption, and even pick up after themselves. The favorite Liberalcriticism of the Tea Party, of course, is that Tea Party activists are anti-Obama racists – but the only examples of racist behavior has been by Liberals planting themselves at Tea Party rallies. There’s even a $100,000 reward for evidence of a Tea Partier using a racial slur – unclaimed!

The Tea Party has proven a strong force in the few special elections held since its appearance. And if you believe in its basic principles – not further growing/financing more government bureaucracies – then supporting it is natural. The few goofballs wearing the 1700s gear, birthers, and 9/11 truthers are few at most. As far as political rallies go, you’d expect to see more weirdos. But the average Tea Partier is the average working American. Don’t be fooled by the press and its tendency to show only the most eccentric or dangerous looking members of a protest in its news reports. Yeah, the Tea Party is mostly white, but so is America.

The real question is strategic: What will this movement mean for the direction of the country? Movements like this can be extremely productive in promoting their ideas – but can be equally as destructive to them.

Electing Brown in Massachusetts was an example of a productive direction of power. It stuck a republican into one of the most traditionally Democratic seats in Congress. An example of a possibly destructive direction was the Tea Party induced victory of Rand Paul over Trey Grayson in Kentucky’s Republican primary election for the mid-term Senate race. Grayson was the more electable candidate, the one establishment Republicans were backing. And Rand Paul, somewhat a radical, has since already said a few ‘unelectable’ things…

So we’ll see. If this were a Democrat upsergence I’d predict that the eventual result would be repetition of history: Dems splitting the vote and handing victory to the minority, how Lincoln got elected. But the Tea Party is mostly Republican and Libertarian. The Libertarians worry me, but Republicans are generally a big-picture type of people who will recognize the necessity of electing electable people, rather than ideal people.

And by ‘electable’ I don’t mean moderate. Indeed, America wants a moderate government, one that will provide expert non-ideological solutions. But that would require expert non-ideological people. And those kinds of people rarely run for political office and even more rarely are elected (they’re usually ugly and/or awkward). So we have to settle for electing the most reasonable seeming ideologs in even numbers on each side of the spectrum. Right now we’re dealing with a swinging pendulum in that respect.

The armed Predator carries two Hellfire missiles, a popular missile developed by Lockheed Martin for the US and her allies.  There are a number of variants of the Hellfire missile that allow it to be used in a number of situations and on numerous vehicles, the most frequent being the Apache helicopter.

The Hellfire II on the predator can be equipped with a few different warheads, including a 20 lb high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) shaped charge warhead, blast fragmentation, and metal augmented charge (MAC).  The MAC is a thermobaric weapon that utilizes a long pulse blast wave and uses surrounding air as an oxidizer.  The effect is increased damage and a lower probability for humans to survive the blast over a conventional charge.  The HEAT round is a shaped charge that uses the same technology the insurgents have been using in Iraq to penetrate our armor in roadside bombs.  It consists of a copper lined cone surrounded by a high explosive.  When the warhead reaches its target, typically the detonation system uses an internal device that is actuated at impact (think of a rod slamming into a detonator).  The explosive detonates and turns the copper into a supersonic jet of molten metal.  This concentrated energy can puncture most armor.  Contrary to popular belief, the copper does not melt its way through the armor.  Some HEAT rounds have a tandem configuration where two shaped charges are used on advanced armor.

The homing device is either radar controlled or is a laser-guidance system that uses a laser to reflect off its target.  Once fired, the missile locks on to its target and the pilot can forget about it, hence the “fire-and-forget” expression.  If laser-lock is lost, the missile guidance system can reset and re-engage.

Little performance characteristics are immediately available for the missile, as expected and desired.  Range is typically 8,000 meters, or 5 miles.  The speed given by some sources is Mach 1.3, or approximately 1500 ft/s.  This means the missile can travel its effective range in 17 seconds.  Although the service ceiling is 25,000 ft, the onboard sensors are more effective at 10,000 ft.

Predators, although they can be controlled from a small desert trailer in the US and flown in the deserts of the Middle East, are most effective when there are special forces on the ground near the target to verify intelligence and allow for minimal collateral damage.  Having the controller on the same side of the world as the drone helps to avoid delay in target acquisition as well.

Short answer:

The passenger is not being treated as a POW because he is not being tried for a war crime.  The Bill of Rights applies to the whole of the American system of government and justice.  Whether he is a citizen or not, he is being tried under American law, which means that he is entitled to certain protections including a presumption of innocence.  Anytime that you start willy-nilly doing away with core principles of the United States justice system just because you don’t like the accused criminal or the alleged crime is a huge problem in my opinion.  I applaud the treatment of this case thus far.

Obama’s no more of a left wing nut than Bush was a right wing nut (which he wasn’t). I’m not saying he wasn’t aterrible president. He just didn’t try Laissez faire capitalism or making unions illegal. No a right wing nut.

Obama is a liberal democrat, through and through. That doesn’t make him crazy. If he were a socialist, I would call him a left wing nut, but he isn’t.

From here out, I’ll use the following definitions, just to keep things clear.

Socialism: economic system in which the state owns industry, and resources are elloted equally among the populous

Democrats: American political party that advocates financing broad social programs with tax money (taken disproportionately more from people with larger incomes), and greater government control of industry

Now he is in office.  He has taken over 2/3 of the auto industry (aka gave the companies money so they wouldn’t go under and take the Rust Belt with them), huge swaths of the banking system (the same as with the autos, but in order to prevent total economic collapse in our country), forced an auto CEO out of office (not legally, just with pressure), blamed the Bush admin at every possible turn for everything that is wrong in this world when his own party is to blame as much as anyone else (he’s a politician), he has assigned “Czars” for just about everything (democrat thing), is currently masquerading a health care reform bill as innocent rather than socialist (not socialism; socialism would make private healthcare illegal; the bill is democrat is a vengance), has told the American people they can’t do things on their own without government help (I’d like to hear a quote), and has followed a laundry list of historical left-wing actions including taxing successful people (the rich) and cutting back on military readiness and pushed through an unnecessarily enormous stimulus package that was twice the size it needed to be and created half the jobs it could have (again democrat, not socialist).

Calling Obama a socialist (aka left wing nut) is horribly unfair. It’s as bad as calling Bush a war criminal.

There are a few glaring differences, besides the tax being levied during a recession. Sulfur dioxide and carbon are different. You can cut out sulfur dioxide by changing your process or use a scrubber to remove it. Carbon is released no matter what you do, unless everyone starts using not-yet-invented carbon capture systems and disposing of it through not-yet-created disposal system. It’s the difference in capping and trading poison emissions and capping, trading, and taxing energy emissions – plant food.

You might think this bill would spur the development of carbon systems – and you’d be right – and you’d also be right if you were talking about a simple cap and trade system without the tax. But you wouldn’t be right, right away because to sell this bill they had to give away numerous exceptions to different industries in certain congressmen’s districts.

Basically it’s the difference in the ideological approach. The sulfur dioxide cap and trade system simply added a mechanism to the open market system – sort of an artificial ‘shortage’ in the market – whichallowed people who find a way to emit less to save money and a simply way for people needing to emit more to purchase it – and created a new industry for removing it from emissions.

This carbon cap and trade is a tax on carbon. The government is then supposed to spend the money on reducing carbon. Rather than money just shifting in the economy in a natural way it sucks money out and relies on the wise decisions of election leaders and bureaucrats to spur innovation with the money shovel and punish carbon emitters with the IRS.

It seems similar but the economic mechanisms are very different.

I saw Howard Dean on Fox the other day. He cleared a few things up for me about the health reform bill. First, my big worry was a single payer system would simply and fundamentally take over the health insurance market. But as Howard made clear for us, “It’s not in the bill!”

And second, another concern, the “death panels”. He cleared that up too: “It’s not in the bill?”

Boy does that give me relief. I figured there was a line in the bill saying that the simple fact a government sponsored health insurance becomes available to everyone would make it impossible for a private system to compete with it. And I figured right after that there was another line that outlined how to build a big docket for a panel of bureaucrats to sit at while they decide who lives and dies. Or – possibly a line that says our society would use more healthcare than it needs, and that there would eventually be a challenge to our society that would sap resources usually used for healthcare. Because if there was such a line in the bill…

In a single payer option there would be no competition. That’s why it’s called single payer. That’s what Canada and Australia have. It only concerns the payment side, like Medicare. Obama did believe in this until just recently. I mean, that was one of the reasons many people voted for him. But now he no longer supports it.

He claims, from what I’ve heard, that he doesn’t think single payer is a good option for our country, not American. And the piles and piles of video clips the Conservatives are pounding him with – well he’s just pretending those never happened. More likely he’s either given up on it because it has totally lost popular support, or he’s still planning on getting it but – as he explained in a few of those videos – will have to start with the public option.

A public option is simply a government run or government controlled health care insurance provider. Single payer would kill – perhaps with direct legislation – any private competition. It wouldn’t directly affect the health care industry, but would almost certainly affect is through timeliness and size of payments. So – more than likely – new advancement would be slowed because – being new – the new advances would not be recognized by the single payer insurer. That happens with public insurance too, but there are options in public industry. You can leave, make demands, start a website, bitch to your employer, and all the other consumer things.

According to Obama a public option would simply add one more insurance provider to the market, and be good for competition. This directly contradicts the reasons for even having a public option though. There are uninsured people, people who can’t afford insurance, and people whose insurance doesn’t cover their illnesses. Those are the people single payer would be created to serve. To serve these people the public option would have to be comparable with the best common private insurance plans – the ones that actually pay medical bills – AND be super cheap. Great coverage at an affordable price doesn’t exist in the private sector because it’s not possible – forget about profit. Blue Cross provides great coverage, is non-profit, but still costs over $500 a month for a single person.

A public option would eventually become single payer because everyone would move there for the better deal, or be dumped there by employers looking to cut that cost. There’s no way around it, unless you have a lot of faith in complex regulations and piles of forms.

Socialized medicine is a HUGE step further – HUGE. That’s what the UK has. The medical industry its self is a government run entity. Achieving this just isn’t possible in our society. It’s also totally insane and actually against the constitution. Britain’s system was changed during WWII out of total desperation for survival.

Anyone seriously advocating socialized medicine in the US is either innocently confused about what it means or is just plain uninformed. A serious move like that could seriously cause a revolution. It would involve government taking over everything from publicly (public stock, not government) held hospital and university institutions to privately owned private practices and clinics. And the government would have to either steal them or buy them, and since the government only gets money from taxes, it would have to tax (steal) a big chunk of cash to do it. A lot. That boat wouldn’t float.

LOL England’s health system, with 1.33 million employees, is the fourth largest employer in the world behind the Chinese Red Army (2.25 million) Wall-Mart (1.8 million) and the Indian Rail (1.4 million). There are more managers than doctors.

The UK medical system is the envy of hard core Liberals. Unlike Canada where it is illegal to practice private medicine, the UK does allow its citizens to purchase medical care – but – once they do the public system won’t care for the illness treated. UK citizens are charged no money for medical care. Actually, the hospital pays patients money for the ride home and other incidentals. The trouble is the wait and quality. Everything is rationed.

This is only natural. The English didn’t sit down one day and decide their medical system should be government run rather than publicly. They had no choice. The system began during World War II while all of the British Empire was mobilized toward the war effort. Every aspect of civil life was being rationed. Numerous businesses were being taken over. The society was literally fighting for its survival.

So why didn’t the British simply revert to a more efficient system that delivers higher quality after the war? Well they simply can’t. The bureaucracy is so huge it represents a challenging voting block – 1.33 million people. If the US matched this ratio its government run health care system would employ 6.65 million people, and would take the place of the world’s largest employer, The Chinese Red Army, with three times as many people.

Thankfully Washington isn’t talking about socializing the medical system. Obama gave up on this one and focused on socializing health coverage. Then, he gave up on that.

The goal right now for Obama and the liberal Democrats is to push a government health insurance option through. As Obama has assured us over and over, this option will be a choice and won’t compel anyone to change their coverage. However, as he and others in his camp have explained numerous times, a public option is the first step toward socialized health care. A government option will unfairly compete with private options eventually killing them off, the ones Nancy Pelosi hates for turning a profit, and the ones like Blue Cross who are non-profit.

Even with the super majority that had all the Conservatives scared out of their minds, passing any type of medical system reform will be tricky. Why? Well – Obama and the Pelosi brigade scared the fur off all of us except for the most blindly staunch Liberals by blitzing that “stimulus” monstrosity through without reading it, then confirmed the precedent and our paranoia with the cap and trade / climate control bill – battering ram through the house.

Also, there was no Change®. After six months we’ve seen even less transparency and more belligerence than we saw with the Evil Bush. He seems to have plugged right into the old Washington partisanship and political lies. No bipartisanship to be found. Sure, there was the little show Obama had initially, the meeting all his Koolaid drinkers site when they talk about his graceful treatment of the vanquished dregs. But so far Obama has had the Democrats write the bills, and then force them through running political ads calling the Republicans the party of “NO”. Wow, some change.

And oh yeah, to top all this off Obama and his press secretary are dismissive and make fun of us – along with the rest of the pompous officials claiming that the public desent is manufactured – Astroturf® – by Conservative groups paying people to put on a dramatic show. Gee, where did those Conservative groups get that idea?

The fact is our health care system is the best in the world. People come here when they can afford it. When Americans want the best health care, they stay in the US and get it. But there are problems. There are also areas needing improvement and areas that could be improved. But it’s still really great. We are doing amazing things.

The trouble is paying for all these amazing things. Often people get sent to the poor house because of illness. And we have people without a way to pay who end up in the emergency room getting the most expensive last resort type of treatment – because they put it off.

There needs to be reform. The health care system is overstretched – we need more doctors and nurses. Any reform needs to recognize this fact.

(Photo credit:  The Doctr on Flick.)

Talk to some people, maybe some Canadian patients, doctors, or medical residents.  They would describe the type of health care system that drives doctors, nurses, and patients alike to move the hell off the maple orchard.

I agree wholeheartedly with American doctors on the annoyance with politicians talking as if doctors are tapping patients for cash – likewise beating down the medical community. That’s one of the reasons I was curious as to a physician’s opinion of Obama’s talk. He slapped the doctor profession around a bit with a humorously illogical scenario where a pediatrician might do a tonsillectomy on a kid with a sore throat for the money, rather than check for an allergy problem. How do you like that? The guy who wants to reform our healthcare systems thinks pediatricians do surgery.

Don’t worry about understanding the healthcare reform bill just yet. There are several versions and all are 1000+ pages long. I’ve been hearing a number of things in the news about what those peacocks have been doing – besides bashing the healthcare system.

I think what’s actually happening now is a bit of grid-lock between the moderate Democrats and the Pelosi Democrats. Single-payer is out – officially. But a government option isn’t, which if set up right, would result in single payer. No one wants to give details.

Here is the odd thing though: We all know once they do figure something out, the Democrats can pass it on their own easy and breezy. But, they are showing some subtle signs here and there of actual bipartisanship – if you consider Reid saying, “We’ll do what we can to make sure their [Reps] issues are not buried” – a glimmer of bipartisanship.

If the Dems do put together a supermajority and push a bill though, they’re going to be totally responsible for it. Even if it is a thoughtful plan, new programs rarely come out of the gate in a healthy stride. If they pass something that puts millions of people through a goofy transition, causes employers to shed their benefits, or sends uninsured people though loops with disappointing initial outcomes, like restrictions on doctors they can see – the Dems are going to look like clumsy bastards (Edit: and bitches).

I think that fact might be keeping some of the powerhouses like Pelosi and Emanuel from getting really ruthless on this one. That and some actual resistance congress is hearing from back home – from the 50% or so of Americans not liking “the bill”.

I think these guys need to remember the US healthcare system is worth that extra $6000 per year – regardless of their handy statistics on this ailment or that (all of which can be countered using other diseases). People come here all the time for our health system. If it’s not the best in the world it’s damn close. There are some real improvements that could make a real difference of course, like electronic medical records, or curtains without vomit on them. But I think the thing that needs reform isn’t the health care system. It needs to grow – yes – but what most people are worried about and talking about is paying for health care. But if we reform health care with the primary goal of making it affordable to all – and harm the quality – it’s not really worth it, is it?

Story quoting Reid:

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/07/23/2006490.aspx