What can you say?

What can you say to those "bleeding heart liberals" who throw the number of 47 million people in the US being uninsured at you? Especially when they add that 9 million of them are children and most of them are working families?

Well, first you can point out that the numbers are misleading. Of that 47 million, about 10 million aren't even citizens! Almost 18 million make more than $50,000/year; they can afford to have the insurance but they choose not to (more than half of 18 million make more than $75,000/yr.) It's not a money issue here. And 19 million are young people (between the ages of 18 and 34) who feel they don't need it right now. And finally almost half of 47 million are only temporarily uninsured, like for four months, because they're between jobs. Yes, those numbers and groups can overlap, but there is an exaggeration of lack of health insurance in the US. (I'm taking these numbers from "Next on the Statists' List: Health Care" by David Limbaugh, but I'd heard them before.)

Second, point out that lack of health insurance doesn't mean lack of coverage. The law requires emergency room care even when someone can't afford it.

Third, and most importantly, you can tell them government health care will do the opposite of what's intended. Government mandated health coverage will make people less likely to get health care. I know it sounds crazy, but it's a simple matter of economics.

Government control of medicine is price control. When the price is required by government fiat to be lower than the market dictates, you get more demand (more people taking advantage of the lower price) and less production. Fewer people will be encouraged to become doctors and nurses. So you end up with a shortage.

That's why the long waiting periods for care in Great Britain and Canada. Many people die while waiting for their treatment! That's why they need "advisory boards" to decide what medical treatments are not financially feasible. So they'll be weeding out the people who won't benefit enough from treatment (i.e., they're old anyway and will be dying soon) and weeding out the treatments that are too costly.

So the old man above will not receive much care in Obama-care. Too bad, huh?

With My Boots On

Latest reports are that Medicare has only eight more years. To be honest, I don't expect to be able to use any Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security.

For one thing, I can't imagine not working. Yes, I'm getting older, and a few times, my mind has wandered over the path of thought the word "retirement" leads it. Thoughts like how many more years? How will we be able to live? But I'm pretty sure that even once I retire, I'm not going to stop working. How boring would that be? How useless I would feel.

My dad worked up until he died. I guess you'd say he died with his boots on.

In the movie Secondhand Lions, Hub, one of Walter's great-uncles, is fighting the idea of growing old. He's used to a life of war and battle, having fought in two world wars and numerous other smaller wars. Now Hub keeps doing crazy, dangerous stuff and Walter's afraid he's going to die. At one point, Hub and Garth, his brother, use their money to buy a lion so they can have a lion hunt. But the lion is an aging lioness that won't even run. Walter keeps her as a pet. Then when the boyfriend of Walter's mother is beating up the boy, the lion attacks the boyfriend and dies in the fight.

"She died with her boots on," the uncles told Walter, "protecting her cub."

Later, Walter convinces Hub that he needs both his great-uncles to take care of him. Hub promises to lay off the crazy behavior until Walter has graduated from college. The movie ends (and begins) with the uncles flying a homemade WWI bi-plane into a barn. The sheriff telling Walter says, "They died with their boots on."

That's what I want. Let me die with my boots on.

My Prayer

Dear God,
On this National Day of Prayer, I pray for our leaders, for the people whom we put into power over us, starting with Barack Obama. I don't pray for him enough. Lord, be with him. Be that niggling little voice of conscience that never leaves him. Surround him with people who will tell him the truth, and help him to accept the truth. Even, Lord, if it's Your will, provide him a "road to Damascus" experience and a change of heart. I pray that Your will be done.

I ask the same for Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Let the believers in Congress listen to Your voice and act on Your directions in interactions with these leaders and other congressmen. Further, let the believers wake up to their true duty. And Lord, if they do not, help us to vote them out of office. Guide us in knowing the truth about our representatives.

Please help me love those certain people in our government that I have trouble loving. Show me again how to love with Your love those that I have, in my fleshly reasoning, written off as not deserving of respect or love. And forgive me for my arrogance of judging, better left up to You.

There are many more to pray for, but I wanted to start with these people. Thank you for reminding me that You, Father God, have the ultimate victory.

Connie

Don't Tell Obama about Quadrillion

I'm terrible with numbers. All my life, I've been strong with words, weak with numbers. For this reason, when my husband and I played darts, I'd be figuring out how much was left on my score, while others would be yelling out the number. I'd just shake my head and keep figuring. If I didn't do it for myself, how would I know it was right? And how would I learn?

Numbers tend to just have symbolic meaning to me. It's like the number 202 on an apartment. The number is a designation, but it doesn't mean amount of (as in two hundred and two apartments). So I find 300,000 to be quite similar to 3,000. To really know the difference, I have to think about it.

The budget that just passed Congress is $3 trillion. Just how much is one trillion?

According to one source, if you spent one million dollars EVERY DAY from year 1 (after Christ's time) to now, you would still not have spent one trillion dollars. It comes to about $734 billion.

Here's another way to look at it. One trillion seconds makes 31,546 years! But I can't really fathom that. A year of seconds becomes more than I can fathom.

This was the best way for me. If you stack up $1,000 bills, one million dollars makes about a four-inch stack. (I confirmed this with my husband who used to deal with stacks of bills.) Now to make one trillion dollars from a stack of $1,000 bills, you need to stack them up to (and over) 63 miles!

The Sandias are approximately one mile high from the valley floor. Sixty-three Sandias stacked up would be level with our stack of $1,000 bills that makes ONE trillion dollars. Triple that, and you've got three trillion.

WHY, WHY, WHY???

On Laws and Morality

Walter Williams, one of my favorite economists and columnists, finished his recent column, "Law vs. Moral Values" with these words: "Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we've become." Right on, Williams!

The other day, while eating Sunday dinner with my church's Home Bible Study group (several families), in giving examples of the "hidden" taxes already enacted of Obama's administration, I mentioned the cigarette tax.

"Oh, that's okay," said one friend. "That'll make people smoke less."

I was aghast at her comment. I hope that she didn't feel like I jumped on her with my response, but I feel very strongly about this subject. The government has no business in my (or anyone else's) morality. And killing oneself slowly is a moral issue.

When he announced he was switching parties, yesterday, Senator Arlen Specter said the Republican party has no more room for moderates. And callers on the talk shows explained that conservative Republicans (as opposed to moderate Republicans) means the "social conservatives," that is, those who want to make abortion illegal and keep gays from marital bliss. It's these people, they contend, that will kill the Republican party.

Now I don't care about the Republican party, except as a possible vehicle for getting into office truly good people. (The Republicans in office now do not fit that description.) And one way to know if people are truly good is if they have good morals, which, for the most part, means they have conservative values (and I'm speaking of "conservative" with a small "c;" the antithesis of "progressive," not Conservative with a large "c.") However, just because a person has conservative values and good morals does not mean he wants to force everyone else to have the same values and morals. In fact, I would say one of his values is respect of the individual's personal responsibility.

Truly good people for political office means those who thoughtfully support the Constitution as it was created originally, who believe the government must be limited to only its enumerated powers, such as to protect our country from attack, to print money, to be sure contracts are honored. Our founding fathers believed that, in order to have government thus limited and maintain personal liberty, the individual must be self-controlling based on his own morality. They actually expected a belief in God is what would guide the free people to do the right thing, NOT law.

I can find several good reasons the government should not be allowed to control our bad behavior.

1. The more government intrudes on our bad behavior, the more we tend to abdicate our own responsibility. It's much easier to say, "I didn't know it was against the law," than it is to say, "I didn't think about whether it was right or wrong." I have many students who believe that a behavior is not wrong if it's legal.

2. Who decides what is bad behavior? The Greens would have me believe that my cutting down trees is bad behavior. But I don't think so. Joe Biden says it's patriotic to pay taxes, and of course, he means those who are already paying 30% of their income in taxes shouldn't complain when their taxes are raised to 50% of their income. Obama's administration says that as a country we are immoral because of our "torture" of terrorists. But is it moral to allow further attacks to kill thousands of our people when we can avoid the attacks through waterboarding a few evil people?

3. As government gains more control of our lives, it becomes more corrupt. The more power it has, the more money it wants, and it finds ways to get both. This leads to two classes of people: those who obey the law and those in power who don't have to. Need I remind you of Tim Geithner's slide into office as Treasury Secretary although he hadn't paid his taxes until it became evident that his taxes would be noticed in the process of his confirmation hearings?

4. Government has a poor track record of managing anything. Anyone who has had to deal with Medicare or Medicaid knows what I mean. Heck, on the state level, just look at the department of motor vehicles. This is why peanuts tainted with salmonella managed to enter our food consumption. This is why my friend, Eva, cannot buy stuffed animals for the bags she makes to give homeless children. You see, Congress passed a law outlawing lead in children's toys, and requiring all stores reselling children's toys to test those toys to make sure they don't contain lead (that's the good behavior). Thrift stores are unable to afford the costs of testing just to resell a toy at a dollar, so they refuse to take children's toys anymore.

The only proper place the government has in regulating our behavior is when our behavior interferes with anyone else's rights, that is, those God-given rights that cannot be separated from us: our rights to freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and press, our rights to redress and to bear arms, our right to life and property.

We have, folded into all those rights, the right to fail. We have the right to do stupid and immoral stuff, as long as our actions do not interfere with others' rights.

The Mirror Demonstration!

I had never seen anything like it.

I wasn't a complete demonstration neophyte. I had "marched" with about five friends in the CNM teacher's union in front of the building where the CNM board was meeting to decide on salaries for CNM security. We had signs ready made. We marched in a circle and sang, "We shall overcome." (Don't get on to me for being in the union and doing this. I had my reasons, which I thought were very good at the time.)

Then there were anti-war demonstrations that I happened to drive through on my way to Wal-Mart. Those made me very nervous. The vitriol of the (small) crowd was palpable, even with me protected in my car. I'd just focus my gaze straight ahead and try to get through without running over someone mad enough to jump out in front of me. It never happened but that was my fear.

So at the Albuquerque Tea Party, I could very well relate to the few drivers who focused straight ahead and white-knuckled their way to the center lane. But there were so few of them.

A counter demonstration marched somewhere around Smiths, I heard, but I never saw any of them. Only one or two "nuts" wandered through doing their own thing that might have been contrary to us. I really couldn't tell. One guy dressed in a red t-shirt with a yellow hammer & sickle on it paused every few feet and waved a kind of anti-American flag. That is, its blue and white bars were vertical and the blue field with white stars on the American flag was on this thing a white field with blue stars. We ignored him and he wandered on.

Of the drivers, a few people shot us a finger as they passed. We just laughed. Actually, I had to keep asking the guy next to me which it was, a finger or a thumbs up. The clouds had dimmed the sunlight enough that without my glasses, my vision wasn't good enough to determine which was which. But during the entire three hours, Dale counted only three or four middle fingers, and maybe five thumbs down.

That left everyone else in the thousands of cars, SUVs, and trucks passing by, approving of what we were doing. It was a 5:00 rush-hour traffic jam until after 7:00! People reported that to get onto Montgomery from Carlisle and San Mateo, it took 15 minutes!

Did I say thousands of vehicles? Or were they the same ones on a loop, going round and round and round? Quite a few began to look familiar. We finally figured out that people had driven by, perhaps as a result of their daily tasks, gone home, collected their kids, flags, dogs, and quickly-scrawled signs. Then driving up and down the four miles of Montgomery, honking their horn, waving flags, thumbs up, and showing signs to the people they passed, they served as a kind of mirror demonstration for us.

One little girl had scrawled on her lined notebook paper, "Obama sucks!" She flattened it against the window as her mother drove slowly by us so we could read it.

Another lady held up a sign that said, "This is all the change Obama gave me!" Huge coins were plastered on it, one fitting within the O of Obama.

People perched in the opening of a Hummer-type search and rescue vehicle waving a full-sized "Don't Tread on Me" flag, the Army Rangers flag, and Old Glory, while the airhorn of an 18-wheeler sounded.

Children waved flags and sticks with teabags on them out the windows of their cars.

One driver jumped up and down in his seat, waving both arms, and grinning.

One old guy had four flags, one for each of his windows, sticking up around his car.

There were elderly people in Cadillacs, young parents with babies locked into carseats, Hispanics, blacks, and whites, men dressed in grungy t-shirts, men dressed in business suits, ladies in classic power suits, ladies in scrubs, trucks pulling trailers with motorcycles and trucks pulling trailers with landscaping tools. My daughter noticed that the driver of nearly EVERY truck or van that had a business logo on it went crazy honking, grinning, and giving the thumbs up. "It's because they're working," she deduced.

The numbers were hard to determine. People came and went on the sidewalks on both sides of Montgomery. Since the numbers seemed to come out as between 5,000 and 10,000, I'd just go with the more conservative 7,000. But that's just counting the people who stood on the sidewalks, not the mirror demonstration. What a boost we got out of the support we received.

Young Man on a Bicycle

My sign at the Albuquerque Tea Party read "BASTA!" because I wanted to make a unique one for New Mexico, so I figured the simple Spanish word for "enough!" would be good. It was funny when I was drawing it out at the sign-making party. I drew B-A-S-T, and my daughter started asking, "What are you writing? Don't you know this is a family friendly thing?"

Well, it looks like not as many people knew Spanish as I expected. Several people asked what it meant. My daughter enjoyed waving the sign for awhile. With her body-modification -- tattoos, piercings, and brandings -- she figured people would take her as an "infiltrator." And if they didn't know what the word "basta" meant, then they might really take her as an infiltrator.

But there came a time when I had the sign.

A young man on a bicycle was passing behind us (we stood right on the edge of the curb to get the drivers' attention) and he stopped suddenly and asked me, "What does your sign say?"

"Basta. It means 'enough.'"

He nodded and started on his way, but turned back. "Enough . . . what?" He was taller than I and had to lean his head down to hear me with all the yelling and cheering going on.

"Enough spending. You know, the budget, stimulus, all that." I was yelling over the noise.

"So the spending from the previous eight years wasn't enough to justify protesting?"

"Oh, we didn't like it. We were pissed about that, starting with the prescription drug thing. My husband even changed parties over that."

"But you didn't protest."

"No," I agreed. "But Obama's spending was just SO much and SO fast, we had to do something more."

"If it hadn't been Obama, would you have protested?"

I tried to answer him honestly. I mean this young man was listening to my answers and asking good questions -- something I crave to get from liberals around me. So I said, "I think whoever it was, if he went more slowly, we might not have protested. We would still think we could do something about it. But this happened so fast."

"So if Obama had spent more slowly, you might not have protested?"

"Possibly. If he'd spent more slowly and not so much at once."

He nodded and thanked me, mounted his bike and rode on.

But now I have more to say. You know how it is. Only hours, if not days, after the event, you think of what you should have said.

I would have said, had I had my wits about me at that point, that we conservatives don't protest. That's the domain of liberals. They'll protest and demonstrate at the drop of a hat. I bet they all have a protest kit made up and sitting next to the door just in case they decide to protest and get the call. We conservatives, on the other hand, call our representatives, write letters to them and to the editor of local papers, send emails, voice our opinions on talk radio, and try to make changes through the voting process. We don't even think of protesting. That's almost as foreign to us as suing someone for offending us, as foreign as using the courts to make social and legal change.

When Heather Wilson supported the SCHIPS bill and was on Jim Villanucci's show, people blasted her. I blasted her in an email.

I can't tell you how pissed I was that Bush went ahead and signed the TARP bill, in spite of the "no" vote of Congress. This was stomping on the constitution, as far as I was concerned. But he was on his way out. No use "firing" him! I had to focus my energy on what was happening after that.

The fact that there were . . . it seemed like 5,000 conservatives (pretty much all fiscal conservatives -- some Republicans, some Libertarians, some Independents, even some Democrats) there doing something they don't usually do should say we're really, really mad. And we're serious. And when our usual methods seemed to have no effect on the conduct of Congress and the White House, we were driven to protesting.

Not that I regret it. It was a blast. But I wonder if our politicians heard us, or if they're covering their ears with their hands and going, "La, la, la, la, la!"