Completely random topic but…
I tend to use smiley faces when corresponding through e-mail.
I might drop a “:)” or a “:-)” and even the occasional “:-o”. As a guy who tries to be open and honest about my emotions, I’ve never found this to be a problem when speaking to male or female friends. However, a friend of mine asked me to stop using smileys because he didn’t think it was manly. He used a different phraseology but you get the picture.
What do others think? Is a guy using smileys not manly?
It’s called Universal Healthcare!!
Stay with me now. Representative Joe Wilson is taking heat – deservedly so – for saying “You lie!” to the president who was giving a speech on healthcare. Wilson was basically saying the President Obama is trying to include illegal immigrants as part of his public option plan.
Maybe he isn’t, but these guys are:
Fearful that they’re losing ground on immigration and health care, a group of House Democrats is pushing back and arguing that any health care bill should extend to all legal immigrants and allow illegal immigrants some access.
The Democrats, trying to stiffen their party’s spines on the contentious issue, say it’s unfair to bar illegal immigrants from paying their own way in a government-sponsored exchange. Legal immigrants, they say, regardless of how long they’ve been in the United States, should be able to get government-subsidized health care if they meet the other eligibility requirements.
Let me note for the record that I have very little problem with legal immigrants in a public option system, if one were available. Now that that is out of the way take a look at the bold underlined section. Illegal immigrants – commenter Joe Bernstein would say they are not “immigrants” – are committing a criminal act just by being here. Yes, they’re human beings but no we cannot just sing “Kumbaya” and establish no control over the boarders. Some liberals, especially the ones supporting the extension of “some” (read: all) health care benefits to illegal immigrants, don’t have the spine to say no to illegal immigration but they can certainly stand up and take money out your pocket. No problem there.
But I digress.
Another tenet that has been in the mix of this public option debate are fines for anyone who does not get health insurance.
Americans would be fined up to $3,800 for failing to buy health insurance under a plan that circulated in Congress on Tuesday as President Barack Obama met Democratic leaders to search for ways to salvage his health care overhaul.
We solve our illegal immigration problem in a round about way. Because most companies do not wish to break the law and hire an illegal immigrant, it’s highly unlikely many illegal immigrants would be able to pay for their own health care. Thus, they would be fined and that may spark inquiries into their immigration status.
Am I being facetious? Yes, so this doesn’t really solve the illegal immigration problem. But it does demonstrate some members of Congress’ willingness to burden the average American while placing no boundaries upon people here illegally. And that’s plain silly.
So we thought the difficult part was over once we got out of the hospital. As I drove my wife back home after learning more about car seat placement than I ever wanted to know, I thought to myself, “A year from now he’ll probably be walking. Two years from now he’ll probably be speaking to us.” I was definitely excited to have a small person in the world who looked like I “spit him out” according to friends and family.
The first few weeks were difficult as Don had some trouble laching & my wife struggled to be a homemaker while working from home. My job (remember the promotion) didn’t make things much easier by putting a lot of pressure on me to perform. Not that that’s bad, but when you’re also learning how to be a parent it’s draining.
To give you an example of how crazy things were we became what I like to label clean-o-maniacs. Everything had to be sterile from hands, clothing, bottles, etc. One day my wife fell asleep making the bottles exhausted with everything she was doing. Little Don must have noticed the smoke because he woke my wife up with a little crying – and he rarely cried. Little did we know how foreboding his lack of crying was.
UPDATE: Tonight the city council voted and approved this resolution. The only council members voting against the resolution were Councilmen Navarro and Lupino. I spoke with Councilman Livingston prior to the meeting and he expressed concern at that time and during the session. However, he voted in favor of the resolution ultimately. Score one for the taxpayer.
Cranston Mayor, Allan Fung, will be introducing a resolution against a proposal to utilize binding arbitration during negotiation with teacher’s unions. Before I get to the text of the Mayor’s resolution, can I just say that it is incredulous to think the General Assembly would pass such legislation and I would think that this Council, given their penchant to want to be intimately involved with the contract negotiation process, would never consider such a proposal. It makes no sense whatsoever to utilize an arbitrator when the city is paying people to fill such roles. This past August, however, House Majority Leader Gordon Fox gave a strong endorsement for binding arbitration when he said:
Any version of the bill that I would support … Would have a binding arbitration process that would save communities from spending money on attorney fees while eliminating the threat of teacher strikes or work-to-rule situations, which harm students
This just doesn’t make sense. Let’s say for sake of argument that binding arbitration does save taxpayers money what’s the point of electing officials when unions will have the ability to go to arbitration if they do not agree with the local city or town versus fighting it out through the normal legal process? Many credit card companies decided to go to binding arbitration versus the courts because:
[...] the credit card issuer is giving notice that if the cardholder has a dispute with the company (including identity theft, fines, penalty or late fee disputes, interest rate guarantees, etc.) he or she can’t sue the card issuer in court. Instead, they must take the case to a private arbitrator or judge.
And that makes a lot of sense…for the credit card companies and makes just as much sense for the unions. Unlike what Fox tried to spin, it doesn’t make sense for the taxpayer as you remove the checks and balances within the system and instead give overall authority to non-government people. They’ll decide what happens with your and my tax dollars in union disputes. At least with the current system if you do not like how a contract was resolved and you thought your local councilman had done the wrong thing, you could vote him or her out (same goes for the school board) but in this scenario it won’t matter who’s in office, it just matters who the arbitrator is. Ultimately, the Rhode Island taxpayer won’t control that process.
That, again, just does not make sense for the Rhode Island Taxpayer and has led Mayor Fung to present the resolution below at next Monday’s City Council meeting:
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED the Cranston City Council respectfully requests the Rhode Island General Assembly to reject any and all binding arbitration legislation currently being considered for teacher contracts.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the City is hereby instructed to submit a copy of this resolution to the City of Cranston’s State Senators and State Representatives in the Rhode Island General Assembly seeking their consideration and support of.
IMPORTANT MESSAGE BELOW
I’ve created an online petition as I plan to attend next Monday’s Council meeting. It would be interesting to get a lot of signatures for this and hopefully present it to the Council. Please sign if you agree with what I’m talking about here and also live in Cranston.
What happens when you don’t have enough money to pay your bills? You stuff gets repoed, your credit gets shot to H-E-double hockey sticks, and things you enjoyed before mostly like get cut. Facing a governor who was (finally) willing to say, “We can’t afford everyone, we either are going to have to ‘cut’ certain employees or you take this deal”, the Council 94 finally blinked and faced reality.
On Wednesday, the presidents of the 23 local unions within Council 94, American Federation of State County & Municipal Employees, rejected Carcieri’s proposal, urging the governor to return to the bargaining table.
But Carcieri refused, saying he had no alternative but to begin wide-scale layoffs. And on Thursday, the leaders of the state’s second-largest union — the Rhode Island Alliance of Social Service Employees [Local 580] — agreed to allow their members to vote on the proposal, putting pressure on Council 94 to reconsider in the face of hundreds of potential layoffs.
On Rhode Island’s best known liberal blog, RI Future, you can probably see the ever ‘interesting’, Pat Crowley, going bananas as Council 94 recognizes that it’s better to have a job than no job at all in a very poor economic climate.
Now the issue goes to the union members whom I hope will chose this plan over not having a job. It’s unfortunate the economy is this way, but it is what it is. The only thing you can do when you don’t have enough money to pay is cut out some of your spending. The union now has the choice of taking some paper cuts or facing the machete called wide-ranging layoffs.
I know what I would choose.
I’m a music lover, everything but country, so from time to time I may share some music. Today’s song is Paramore’s That’s what you get. Great guitar work.
Is there anything you wish got more coverage on local/national blogs, tv, or radio? I like research – at times – and there are many topics out there that are very interesting to me, but I’d like to know what things you find interesting.
One example for me is an interesting case of the Black Panthers intimidating voters but the case was thrown out despite video evidence (see below)! What’s up with that?
This will be a series on my autistic six-year old, Don. I’ll be writing about his triumphs, challenges, and everything in between. Autism is a challenging debilitation, but I think as you’ll read over the coming months, that with effort, love, help, and faith it’s not a challenge that cannot be overcome.
The date was May 23, 2003. At work, I had negotiated my way into a role I was not technically qualified for but was more than ready to take on. I left work early in order to take my wife to her OBGYN appointment. Married for a bit less than two years, she was three weeks from having our first child, a little boy. I figured we would go to the doctors and then go out to eat to celebrate my promotion. Well, that’s not exactly what happened.
The doctor did her thing and then said, “Mrs. Roach are you ok?” My wife felt fine. “Well, you’re eight centimeters dialated!!” Ok, now I was not the most up to speed on this whole birth thing but I did know that you needed to be at 10 centimeters to start pushing and that pain usually came around 3-4 centimeters. That my wife was sitting there as happy as a clam at 8 centimeters was shocking to both myself and the doctor. “You’re going to have a baby today,” the doctor deadpanned.
A few weeks ago, I visited a friend and we had a lively discussion about religion in politics. His position – and he is a Christian – was that everyone should check their religion at the door when it comes to politics. The public has no interest in anybody’s religion and because it is such a contentious issue for everyone it should be relegated outside the political arena. I took a contrarian, and in my opinion a more correct, position.
The first amendment clearly states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [...]
Thus, the framers did two things concerning religion:
What the framers didn’t do was to remove religion from the public sphere. On the contrary, the allowed for people to practice as they saw fit and promised to America that the federal government would not choose any on particular religion over another. England had gone through various twists and turns regarding religion and the framers weren’t going to make the same mistake.
There’s a fundamental difference between not establishing a religion and removing religion from the public sphere. We have things such as “In God We Trust” and “God bless America” that are a part of our every day lives. If the framers intentionally wanted “God” removed from politics why has God been such a preeminent position?
I contend that it is because we were founded by mainly Christian men holding to various Christian beliefs. That influenced the way our country was shaped and is still shaped today.
But, even with all of that my main argument wasn’t historical context but more personal relevance. I believe that your value system permeates through everything you do. If you believe in God or some higher being that definitely affects your actions, thoughts, and judgment for good or bad. Our morals come from somewhere and while the last 150 years have been a pursuit of empircal morality many people discover their morality through their religion.
And that morality plays out in the public sector everyday. For instance, if my religion states that on Saturday’s people should do two backflips then it’s likely I would introduce or support legislation requiring people to perform backflips on Saturday. Furthermore, if there was also an underlying reason for the backflips I would support similar minded legislation.
In other words, a person’s value system cannot be “checked at the door” nor should we want it to be when it comes to decisions affecting our lives. We are not automatons. We are complex creatures and for many of us we believe that there is something greater than ourselves in the universe.
Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum, my point is that by the very fact we call ourselves Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or whatever we bring that baggage into the public arena. And in the public arena, the people should decide their fate – if they like “In God We Trust” it will continue, if they are fine with abortion it will be acceptable, and if they like the definition of marriage the way it is so be it.
Religion doesn’t kill a governmental system but so long as there is one religious citizen it will continually play a part and have a significant role in public discourse. And the framers never intended it otherwise.
Froma Harrop is for me, the singular most frustrating writer within the Rhode Island journalistic diaspora. Yes, she trumps even Pat Crowley for me. In a recent Projo article, she writes:
According to the poll, some 55 percent of Americans want a public option, with only 42 percent against it. That level of support was actually up slightly from a month earlier.
Here we have two recent polls showing significant backing for the public option. Ordinary Americans are for it. And physicians — the group with one of the biggest stakes in health-care reform — are even more strongly in favor. (It’s odd how few polls have sought the views of doctors, those most intimate with the medical system.)
So how did the public option become such a boogeyman that even moderate Democrats feel they must run from it? Or are some of them also on the insurers’ campaign payroll?
Well, if you do just a modicum of digging you’ll find that support for universal healthcare has waned significantly since 2003. From the same pollsters who brought you the cited poll, they found in 2003 that:
In an extensive ABCNEWS/Washington Post poll, Americans by a 2-1 margin, 62-32 percent, prefer a universal health insurance program over the current employer-based system. That support, however, is conditional: It falls to fewer than four in 10 if it means a limited choice of doctors, or waiting lists for non-emergency treatments.
Americans express broad, and in some cases growing, discontent with the U.S. health care system, based on its costs, structure and direction alike — fueling cautious support for a government-run, taxpayer-funded universal health system modeled on Medicare.
It’s not lost on me that the questions asked in 2003 were different than in 2009 but we have an increase of 10% opposed to “universal healthcare” as well as a 7% drop in support while healthcare costs have not significantly dropped in the ensuing years. I’d argue the contrary.
I point this out to say, lefty types like Harrop (if one may call her a lefty type) are trying to say, “See the people want this!!” in order to dismiss the real problems that are inherent with a universal plan. As I posted earlier, we need to try alternative solutions before choosing the “public option”. Most of the concern regarding healthcare is not that Americans really want the public option, it’s that they really want to lower their healthcare costs and for the government not to take their doctor away. That’s it.
Yet, the overwhelming amount of rhetoric in the debate has been public option or bust, especially from liberals, and citing various polls showing public support for universal healthcare. I’m not trying to undermine the support, what I am saying is that that support should be leveraged to find the best solution and understood for what it is. It is Americans saying “we need lower costs” but it is not saying “give me universal healthcare or give me death!!”
To Harrop and others, I don’t think they are able to make that distinction.
© 2012 Don Roach. All Rights Reserved.
