Your Random Saturday

Jolly pumpkin day, everyone. Be good. And, uh, sorry about being behind on these.

Gee, commie Chavez (big fan of Obama and vice-versa) is ruining his country by trying to centralize everything...anybody surprised?

In his latest absurdity, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is dictating three-minute showers and no singing. Claiming it's to save water, his act is nothing but a "green" fig leaf to cover his socialist mismanagement...

But the water and electricity shortages are his own doing, and the scope of the crisis signals the systemic shortages of socialism.

There shouldn't be any shortages at all. Green, jungly Venezuela, with some of the world's most spectacular waterfalls, also boasts some of the best hydroelectric capacity in all Latin America.

In 1990, the fast-moving Caroni river created more hydroelectric power than in all of Brazil, home of the mighty Amazon. Today, one of Caroni's six big dams that supply 70% of Venezuela's electricity, the Guri, sits idle. And the others are stressed.

Yes, El Nino has lowered water levels. But the crisis has happened before, in 2002, and Chavez assumed control of five water companies a decade ago. With $600 billion in state oil earnings since, he's had the money to make badly needed investments.

In 2003, his government budgeted $500 million a year for investments to prevent a new crisis. Instead of spending it, Chavez politicized the work force and handed some water distribution over to community organizers. Price controls in 2003 cut revenues to just 80% of water company costs. Maintenance was neglected, leaving broken mains that now waste 62% of water produced.

"Conservation" it's not. The result is that 92% of Venezuelans have running water, but often get just air from their faucets. For the poor, it means buying water off tanker trucks at high prices in shantytowns.

According to Venezuelan newspaper Tal Cual, state engineers warned Chavez in 2002 that unless needed investments were made, the system would crash by 2009 or 2010. It's right on schedule.

Electricity is an even bigger nightmare. Chavez nationalized an electricity company in 2007 and this year Venezuela had five major blackouts and much labor strife over state-dictated wages and safety standards. It's affecting the pumps that supply water and heat...

Unaccountable to anyone, he orders citizens to pay for it. They do so not through higher prices, but through coercive means like rationing.

Laura Hollis sees communist people:

...These appointments are routinely characterized as amateurish leadership; examples of poor vetting. This would be laughable were it not so obviously false. How many of Obama’s advisors have to be exposed as communists and Marxists before some of the duller-witted among us admit not only that there is a pattern here, but that it is deliberate, and reflects the leanings of the White House?

Connect the dots, people. It’s not that Jones, Dunn, Sunstein et al were not properly vetted; it’s that they were. It’s not that Obama wasn’t familiar enough with their viewpoints; it’s that he was. These people were not chosen despite their views; they were chosen precisely because their views coincide with Obama’s own. If it walks like a communist, talks like a communist, and espouses state control in the name of “the people” like a communist, it’s a communist.

In February of this year, Newsweek giddily proclaimed, “We are all socialists now!” But Obama is no mere socialist. A socialist just wants your money; a communist wants complete control of your life...

Obama has nationalized banks and car companies, fired the chief executive of a major corporation, appointed unaccountable ministers to set salaries for executives in private industry, castigated and threatened secured bondholders and run roughshod over their contract rights in favor of political patronage, spent nearly a trillion dollars in “stimulus” legislation that was loaded with payback and pork, proposed “cap-and-trade” legislation that will confiscate American wealth and transfer it to third world nations, many of whom are run by leftist dictators. And his pièce de résistance would be a government takeover of the entire health care industry in the United States, the crowbar by which government will be forced into every aspect of our lives from birth to death...

And ultimately, it isn’t – or rather, it shouldn’t be – about Barack Obama the individual. He may be the kindest man one could hope to meet. But the drafters of our Constitution understood something fundamental: that the best protection against oppression lies in a government with limits, not the benevolent personality of whoever happens to be in office at the time. Throwing away our liberty hand over fist because Obama seems like a basically decent guy is precisely what the Founding Fathers warned against. (And for the record, I personally place no confidence in a man who views our Constitution as “flawed,” precisely because it limits his power.)

Ann Coulter pummels MSNBC over Willie Horton:

In the past week, both Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann have rolled out the Willie Horton ad, claiming that it marked the beginning of vicious personal attacks in politics, as opposed to what it was: The most devastatingly relevant campaign commercial in all of American history.

You can always astonish college kids by telling them the true story of Willie Horton. Among the jaw-dropping facts are:

In the '80s, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that a prison furlough policy had to be extended to convicted murderers, who were ineligible for parole.

Even the Massachusetts Legislature, which contained about three Republicans, realized this was insane, and quickly passed a bill excluding first-degree murderers from the weekend furlough program. But in a desperate bid for the ACLU's Brain-Dead Liberal of the Year Award, Gov. Michael Dukakis vetoed the bill.

Horton, who was later released under this program, was in prison for carving up a teenager at a gas station and then stuffing his body into a garbage can. (He had already been convicted of attempted murder in South Carolina -- through no fault of his own, the victim survived.)

Even after Horton used his Dukakis-granted furlough to rape and torture a Maryland couple in their home for 12 straight hours, the Greek homunculus issued a statement reaffirming his strong support for furloughing murderers.

The Bush campaign commercial about Dukakis' furlough program never showed a picture of Horton. In fact, the actors playing "criminals" passing through a revolving door in the ad were all white...

Every informed student of the 1988 campaign knows that the Bush ad didn't show Horton's picture. And yet in Keith's discussion of Bush's allegedly vile, racist use of Willie Horton, he used a phony version of the ad, doctored to include a photo of Horton.

Michelle Malkin would like to tell you about those "44,000" deaths from lack of insurance:

Two of the co-authors, Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, are avowed government-run health care activists. Himmelstein co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, which bills itself as "the only national physician organization in the United States dedicated exclusively to implementing a single-payer national health program." Woolhandler is a co-founder and served as secretary of the group...

At no time did the original researchers or the single-payer activists who piggy-backed off their data ever verify whether the supposed casualties of America's callous health care system had insurance or not. In fact, here is what the report actually says:

"Our study has several limitations," the authors concede. The survey data they used "assessed health insurance at a single point in time and did not validate self-reported insurance status. We were unable to measure the effect of gaining or losing coverage after the interview." Himmelstein et al. simply assumed that point-in-time uninsurance translates into perpetual uninsurance -- and that any health calamities that result can and must be blamed on being uninsured.

Another caveat you won't see on Grayson's memorial to the dubious dead: The single-payer advocate-authors also conceded in their study limitations section that "earlier population-based surveys that did validate insurance status found that between 7 percent and 11 percent of those initially recorded as being uninsured were misclassified. If present, such misclassification might dilute the true effect of uninsurance in our sample."

To boil it all down in plain English: The single-payer scientists had no way of assessing whether the survey participants received insurance coverage between the time they answered the questionnaires and the time they died. They had no way of assessing whether the deaths could have been averted with health insurance coverage. A significant portion of those classified as "uninsured" may not have been uninsured, based on past studies that actually did verify insurance status. But the Himmelstein team just took the rate of uninsurance from the original study (3.3 percent), applied it to census data and voila: More than 44,000 Americans are dying from lack of insurance...

Where's the White House health care "reality check" squad when you need it?

Fun little Ann Coulter column here:

While congressional Democrats act indignant that Republicans would intransigently oppose a national health care plan that now magnanimously allows states to "opt out," other liberals are being cockily honest about the "opt out" scheme.

On The Huffington Post, the first sentence of the article on the opt-out plan is: "The public option lives."...

In Democratic circles, the jury's still out on free market economics. It's not settled science like global warming or Darwinian evolution. But in the meantime, they'd like to spend trillions of dollars to remake our entire health care system on a European socialist model.

Sometimes the evidence for the superiority of the free market is hidden in liberals' own obtuse reporting.

In the past few years, The New York Times has indignantly reported that doctors' appointments for Botox can be obtained much faster than appointments to check on possibly cancerous moles. The paper's entire editorial staff was enraged by this preferential treatment for Botox patients, with the exception of a strangely silent Maureen Dowd.

As the Times reported: "In some dermatologists' offices, freer-spending cosmetic patients are given appointments more quickly than medical patients for whom health insurance pays fixed reimbursement fees."

As the kids say: Duh...

Not only do the free-market segments of medicine produce faster appointments and shorter waiting lines, but they also produce more innovation and price drops. Blindly pursuing profits, other companies are working overtime to produce cheaper, better alternatives to Botox. The war on wrinkles is proceeding faster than the war on cancer, declared by President Nixon in 1971.

In 1960, 50 percent of all health care spending was paid out of pocket directly by the consumer. By 1999, only 15 percent of health care spending was paid for by the consumer. The government's share had gone from 24 percent to 46 percent. At the same time, IRS regulations made it a nightmare to obtain private health insurance.

The reason you can't buy health insurance as easily and cheaply as you can buy car insurance -- or a million other products and services available on the free market -- is that during World War II, FDR imposed wage and price controls. Employers couldn't bid for employees with higher wages, so they bid for them by adding health insurance to the overall compensation package.

Although employees were paying for their own health insurance in lower wages and salaries, their health insurance premiums never passed through their bank accounts, so it seemed like employer-provided health insurance was free.

Employers were writing off their employee insurance plans as a business expense, but when the IRS caught on to what employers were doing, they tried to tax employer-provided health insurance as wages. But, by then, workers liked their "free" health insurance, voters rebelled, and the IRS backed down.

So now, employer-provided health insurance is subsidized not only by the employees themselves through lower wages and salaries, but also by all taxpayers who have to make up the difference for this massive tax deduction.

How many people are stuck in jobs they hate and aren't good at, rather than going out and doing something useful, because they need the health insurance from their employers? I'm not just talking about MSNBC anchors -- I mean throughout the entire economy.

Michelle Malkin finds Hope 'n' Change to be a lot like the Clinton's auctioning off the Lincoln bedroom:

A new report by Matthew Mosk of The Washington Times just confirms the gob-smackingly obvious: It's business as usual in the era of Hope and Change. O's wealthiest Democratic donors have received lavish receptions, golf outings, bowling dates and movie nights with Obama.

And internal Democratic National Committee documents acquired by the Times reveal that "high-dollar fundraisers have been promised access to senior White House officials in exchange for pledges to donate $30,400 personally or to bundle $300,000 in contributions ahead of the 2010 midterm elections." Yup, they're just haggling over the price.

Many Obama bundlers have secured slots on federal advisory panels and commissions. Still more have benefited from the time-honored patronage tradition of rewarding political benefactors with ambassadorships. Clinton did it. Bush did it. And despite all his fantastical, Balloon Boy-level rhetoric of bringing a "new politics" to Washington, Obama's done it, too...

In June 2008, candidate Obama railed: "We need a president who will look out for the interests of hardworking families, not just their big campaign donors and corporate allies." Immediately after the speech, he headed to a campaign fundraiser at the Manhattan headquarters of Credit Suisse, one of the major investment companies caught up in the subprime lending debacle. President Obama collected $3 million last week at another Manhattan fundraiser after carping about Wall Street's "self-interestedness."

Don't eat too much candy...