Universal Health Care

Ya know, one of the reasons I didn’t want to vote for Hilary Clinton was that her solution to Universal Health Care was to simply make it a law that individuals without healthcare go ahead and purchase some.  Now here is Obama proposing the same stupid solution.

Why can’t we have the same health care as Canada, Britain, & France?  I recently found out more info about those countries’ health care systems by watching Sicko, by Michael Moore.  Yeah, yeah, some people don’t like Moore and claim he makes stuff up, but there has to be at least some truth to what’s in this movie, and even if just some of it is true, it’s still better than what we have.

I don’t know how we can achieve what those countries are doing, but I’m embarrassed that we’re not already doing it.  Apparently there was a bill in Congress, but the last action on H.R. 676 was in 2006.  I’ll write my Congressman and ask.  I’m sure the response will be amusing.

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Hero Pushes Suicide Jumper

Passer-by pushes suicide jumper in south China – Yahoo! News.

Chen Fuchao, a man heavily in debt, had been contemplating suicide on a bridge in southern China for hours when a passer-by came up, shook his hand — and pushed him off the ledge.

Daily Reflection

Thought I’d share one of my personal fave quotes that I’ve referred to often over the last several years.  It’s from the AA “Big Book,” but don’t let that put you off:

Daily Reflections    1990 AA

May 1        Healing Heart and Mind

Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact
nature of our wrongs.
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions p.55

Since it is true that God comes to me through people, I can see that by keeping people at a distance I also keep God at a distance. God is nearer to me than I think and I can experience Him by loving people and allowing people to love me. But I can neither love nor be loved if I allow my secrets to get in the way.
It’s the side of myself that I refuse to look at that rules me. I must be willing to look at the dark side in order to heal my mind and heart because that is the road to freedom. I must walk into darkness to find the light and walk into fear to find peace.
By revealing my secrets — and thereby ridding myself of guilt — I can actually change my thinking; by altering my thinking, I can change myself. My thoughts create my future. What I will be tomorrow is determined by what I think today.

The 401(k) scare

Do not be afraid.

Supposed “news” items on the internet regarding a recent hearing in Washington have been scaring everyone by saying that the government — most likely implicating the upcoming new Obama government — wants to liquidate your 401(k) and roll it into Social Security.  If you look closely enough at these news items you’ll see that they’re not news reports but blogs. Most of them are pretty fancy, leading you to believe that they’re reliable, but they’re just blogs like this one, espousing a personal opinion.

The Great Downturn of 2008

The Great Downturn of 2008 ™ doesn’t have quite the ring of The Great Depression of the 1930s, but I’m trademarking it, just in case.

Some of us have been thinking that if these big companies and CEOs suffer greatly from bad decision-making and global mismanagement, not to mention the cheating and lying, that maybe they deserve it.

diversions

Some stuff I found interesting over the past few days:

Uppity

On Sept. 4th, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Grantville, Ga, talking to reporters, called the Obama’s “uppity,” and then the accusations came flying that he was using it as a racial epithet.  I was raised in suburban Chicago, and always heard the word used as a synonym for conceited, so I assumed this was just paranoid fantasy, but

School Vouchers / Tax Credits

08/03/2008

So, the question came up: Does Illinois have a school voucher system? The idea of sending your kids to whatever school you want is cool, most of the time, except that it overcrowds the good schools and depletes the bad ones. School Vouchers allow money–usually for people near or below the poverty line–to send kids to private schools. I think that’s a bad idea, since it takes money out of the tax pool away from the public school system. Citizen Joe on School Choice

Anyway, Illinois doesn’t have a voucher system, instead they have a tax-credit law, that appears to have failed miserably, since it’s only $500 per child and only applies when you send your kids to private school, which costs considerably more than $500. What’s the point then? I guess they tried to help, but as usual, got it wrong in the details. How the Illinois School Tax Credit Works

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