Charlie's Chatter

Darn it. I had heard about a new program called “Cash for Clunkers”. At first I thought that this program might allow me to “trade in” congressman Barney Frank, or at least my current representative in the United States Congress, Gene Green, for cash. (I was hoping it would allow me to trade in president Obama for cash, but I knew that that was just wishful thinking.)
      As I guess most people know, the “Cash for Clunkers” program is just another government boondoggle, one that will cost taxpayers money while destroying some of our wealth. Trade in a low-mileage vehicle, which will then be destroyed, (thus destroying some of our wealth), and get a new car which gets good gas mileage. You will then get $3500 to $4500 off of the price of the new car. Taxpayer money is used for that, of course.

Good grief, have we not had enough of this health-care “reform”? Obama is going at it again, continuing his quest to boost support for healthcare “reform” with a “tele-town hall” at AARP. With Obama’s drive for healthcare “reform” stalled in the Senate and the House, the president is looking to ordinary Americans to push harder for an overhaul of the “system”. Democrats have backed away from a vow to take a vote on the legislation before the month-long August recess but lawmakers in both chambers are still working on the health-care bill. I live in Houston, Texas, which has a renowned collection of hospitals, medical clinics and doctors in what is called the “Medical Center” area. According to this recent article, Texas Medical Center leaders Monday sent a message to Congress as it tries to reform America’s troubled health care system: slow down. The article continues:   Appearing at a news conference sponsored by U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, many of the medical center’s biggest names said the issue is too important to rush through legislation that could have unforeseen harmful consequences. “This is a monumental piece of legislation that is going to impact people for many years, both the 300 million people who have insurance and the 47 million who don’t,” said Dan Wolterman, CEO of the Memorial Hermann Health Care System. “The priority should be, let’s get it right, not let’s get it done fast.”
      My question is – Why do it at all ?   All we will get from the US Congress is a big boondoggle, an immense law which will make health care worse and increase costs. Sure, there will probably be a few people who will benefit, but at the expense of almost everyone else! At least until early this year, a few politicians, pundits and other people appeared to say that so-called health-care “reform” legislation would never pass. But no more. Now it appears that the only “doubts” remaining about this is when such legislation will pass and what will be the exact contents of this legislation. This all frightens me.
      Some details on health care in the United States, and the reasons for its high cost, can be found on these web pages. Also discussed there are the reasons why the federal government can do nothing that will improve health care in the United States, let alone lower its cost. There are several pages to read on that web site, and if you say that you do not want to read about 10 pages, well then, consider this:   During a speech at a National Press Club luncheon, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers questioned the point of lawmakers reading the health care bill. He reportedly said, “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’. What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” Yes, the last version of the House health-care “reform” bill was over 1000 pages long. And here we have a House member who, along with many of the other members, can not take the time to read and understand the very bill that they are responsble for, a bill which will have an absolutely huge impact on our lives! By the way, at least the web site I referenced has no difficult-to-understand legal writing in it, which will not be the case with at least parts of any health-care legislation.

Yesterday evening president Obama gave a press conference which was widely televised. The main purpose of the press conference was to give Obama another chance to use his rhetoric in an attempt to get his administrations’s “health care reform” plan passed into law as soon as possible. My objections to this so-called “health care reform” have already been given in a previous blog post of mine, to include the references therein, (although this newer opinion piece also gives arguments with which I agree). Therefore I did not watch the press conference. I already knew that it would be a bunch of bullcrap, and from all the news articles and opinions pieces that I have read about it today, that is just about all it was. This “opinion” piece describes very well some of what I would have said about Obama’s press conference. This man Obama is a disaster. I can no longer watch him.
      From what I read this morning, I also learned that Obama had some words to say near the end of his press conference about the incident involving the black Harvard professor Henry Gates. I mentioned this incident in yesterday’s blog post. According to several articles, including this one, Obama said:

“I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three — what I think we know separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.”

Well, Mister Obama, another fact is that African-Americans and Latinos do commit a disproportionate number of crimes in the Unites States. Given that fact, it makes sense that law enforcement would then “stop” African-Americans and Latinos in about that same proportion. And here I thought that one of the things president Obama was supposed to do as president was to help “heal” the so-called “racial divide”. Instead these remarks of his aggravated it. Also of note here is that Obama’s words implied that Gates was arrested despite the apparent fact that the policeman already knew that professor Gates was inside his own home. But given the circumstances – professor Gate’s loud remarks to the policeman and his at least occasional refusal to comply with the policeman’s orders, the policeman could not be 100 percent sure of that. In any case, Mr. Gates was not arrested for burglary or “breaking and entering”, but rather for disorderly conduct. It is becoming more and more clear that professor Henry Gates conduct was foolish, and that he probably did deserve to be arrested for disorderly conduct. As I said in my previous post, professor Gates is a man who is very proud of his black ethnicity, who publicizes it heavily, but who behaves as though he has a chip on his shoulder. A good article on this incident, which gives a few more details, is given on this web site. (Yes, that latter article is written by an African-American, but since he is Larry Elder, a conservative, I suppose that most of the media and all liberals consider his writing to be highly suspect.)

The prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is an African-American, has always struck me as having a “chip on his shoulder”. By that I mean the following: Several times I saw him on televison, and a few times I read something written by him, or something written about him. In most cases he almost always struck me as being a very proud black man who was not at all bashful about publicizing his ethnic roots, emphasizing the long past history of slavery, and showing his belief that racism is still a large problem in the United States. One time, for example, I watched a television program on Africa, a program apparently designed to inform the public of the current state of Africa, with only a few references to history. Professor Gates was the host and the announcer, and he spent much time showing ancient slave collecting points and shipping ports, and discussing them and their history. I had thought that I was going to learn something about modern Africa, and instead I was often subjected to a history lesson about slavery as practised in Africa and the United States well over a century ago. I was, to put it mildly, turned off.
      Given all that, this latest incident in which professor Gates was arrested, and his reaction throughout and after the incident, did not surprise me at all. There are some conflicting stories in the news about what happened, so it is impossible to say for sure exactly what happened. However, given what I know about professor Gates, I tend to believe that he was at least somewhat disrespectful to the police, and that he was slow to follow at least some of the orders given to him by the police. At the same time, it would not at all surprise me if the policeman Sgt. James Crowley on the scene was a bit wary about professor Gates before he really knew who he was, and his wariness was due to the fact that he was an African-American found in an expensive house in a high-class neighborhood of Cambridge. (Although I do not know for sure, I strongly suspect that the proportion of robbers and burglars in that area of Massachusetts tend to be blacks – at a proportion higher than the population of blacks in that area.) I also tend to believe the police report, part of which states: « Gates refused to step outside to speak with the officer, and when Sgt. Crowley told Gates that he was investigating a possible break-in, Gates opened the front door and exclaimed, “Why, because I’m a black man in America?”. Sgt. Crowley said, “While I was led to believe that Gates was lawfully in the residence, I was quite surprised and confused with the behavior he exhibited toward me”. ».   That kind of behavior on the part of professor Gates is something that fits the man, given what I have learned about him from my previous experiences which I mentioned above.
      NOTE: In a later article written by Sally Quinn of the Washington Post, she wrote, “I don’t know anything about Crowley, except that his colleagues seem to support him and that he once taught a class for fellow police officers on racial profiling. But I do know about Skip Gates. What nobody will say publicly, for fear of being called a racist, is that he is notorious, especially among many of his colleagues (black and white) at Harvard, for being short-tempered and arrogant. I have had personal dealings with him in which his behavior was not honorable.” Well, her words give evidence which support my opinion of the man as a man with a chip on his shoulder who is very proud, and according to Ms. Quinn, to the point of being arrogant.
      (In another news article, it was said that Al Sharpton will make an appearance in the Boston area to show his support for professor Gates. That does not surprise me at all because Al Sharpton is a bad man – a race-baiter and a race-monger; he is a man who makes his living by publicizing the grievances of African-Americans, whether real or imagined, and he also makes his living by catering to these real or imagined grievances.)

Given all the huge steps that have been taken by the federal government during the past couple of years, by Bush and his administration and now by Obama, I and a few others have sometimes wondered if all of this is constitutional. Billions and billions of federal dollars (taxpayer money) have been spent to “rescue” financial institutions, automobile companies, and other people or groups who were said to need help. In addition, Bush and his administration pushed through a “stimulus” package to “help” the economy. Obama followed suit with a larger “stimulus” package. And now Obama and his administration want a “national health care” law passed which will have a huge effect on our medical and health care system. Obama and his administration also want a “cap and trade” law passed, supposedly to “protect the planet” by reducing global warming. Is any of this constitutional? After all, the federal government, to include the United States Congress and the laws that it passes, is supposed to be bound by the United States Constitution, to include its Bill of Rights. I suppose that it does not matter anymore. At least it appears not to matter anymore according to this article written by Walter Williams.
    As Walter Williams says, “The Ninth and Tenth Amendments [to the US Constitution] mean absolutely nothing today as Americans have developed a level of naive trust for Congress, the White House and the U.S. Supreme Court that would have astonished the founders [of our country], a trust that will lead to our undoing as a great nation”. These Amendments clearly limit the powers of the federal government, but they are now often ignored. I’m afraid that Walter Williams is correct, and I find this frightening.

During the past two to three months we have been bombarded with political news items about so-called “health care reform”. What a crock. Our very proud and confident president told the nation that his health care overhaul is financially sound and Congress should not squander the chance to make meaningful change. (There is that one ridiculous word again – “change“.) In his weekly radio address Obama said, “This is what the debate in Congress is all about: whether we’ll keep talking and tinkering and letting this problem fester as more families and businesses go under and more Americans lose their (health) coverage. Or whether we’ll seize this opportunity — one we might not have again for generations — and finally pass health insurance reform this year, in 2009.”
    What is it with this guy and his administration? Yes, health care in the United States is expensive because of the advanced technology, and because it is the best in the world, or darn close to the best. Yes, many people can not afford to pay for all of it because they do not have enough money. So where is Obama going to get the money? Not from his own pocket. Oh, we must “reform” health insurance. What does that mean? Make it less expensive? How? Good and advanced health care, which we have in the United States, costs a lot of money !   And what’s with this rush to pass a “health care bill”? So that the quicker it gets done the less time people will have to finally see that it is all a bunch of bull? I understand that at least one version of a bill has over one thousand pages in it! What a crock this all is.
    So what are the Republicans doing? Why they are just proposing their own version of a “health care” bill. Jerks. I am sick and tired of Obama, his administration and the US Congress. They are interfering more and more in our lives and in our economy, spending massive amounts of money that they do not have, but which will eventually have to come from all taxpayers. I’m afraid that I am losing confidence in the electorate – the citizens who elected all of these guys. I know that at least some of the electorate believe that so-called “health care reform” is necessary because they think that it will improve health care, but not really at their expense. Many of them think that they will get at least decent health insurance at no cost to them, or at a reduced cost. What ignorant people.
    For an explanation of this entire health care situation, I recommend that you read these paragraphs. Or you can read the entire article.