if ever there was one!). Fits your wry post to a tee.

Walter, ever the pragmatist in his own mind, would have understood. Reminds me of Milo Minderbender's words, when Yossarian catches up with him in Rome. "His parents were very rich. Well then, they'd have understood...." The lad had been killed by German planes dropping cotton-coated chocolates Milo had exchanged with them, or some such crazy scheme. But his heirs were going to be members of 'the syndicate' in his place! Oh happy dispensation of Providence!

will do in the heads of the neo-Darwinists, who think there's nothing Darwin didn't 'splain. God's redundant. Big time.

No mistaking him for a troll, that's for sure.

It reminds me a bit of that song: They're coming to take me away.

refrain:

'And They're coming to take me away Ha Ha
They're coming to take me away ho ho he he ha ha
to the funny farm where life is beautiful all the time, and I'll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats
and they're coming to take me away ha ha.'

I looked at the complete lyrics of the song, and they were actually pretty sad. Kind of appropriate.

in relation to the earnings of entrance-level staff, akin to that imposed by MacArthur in Japan after WWII - not just here but in the UK and Europe.

If that means they can't finance their life-style with a dozen or so mansions, private jets, ocean-going yachts, etc, from their private fortunes, well they would have to sell what they can't afford, and live within their means. The tax-payers can't keep funding rich, welfare-queens.

I've ever read. I must print it out keep a copy of it.

This post should top the bill of fare.

in the bill that will promote competition, thus presumably driving rates down? If insurers continue to be exempt from anti-trust rules and there is no public option, do you believe there will be a significant increase in real competition?

Ezra Klein: The public option contained in the House bill, which is a public option that Dean and others would accept, would not have controlled costs. CBO estimates, in fact, that its premiums would be slightly higher than comparable private plans (though they also said the public option would have delivered slightly better services).

I don't know another way to say this than to say it clearly: The idea that the exchange-limited, non-Medicare public option was the central cost control mechanism in this bill was never credible. It was good policy, and I would have liked to see it in the bill. But the effort to secure it by pretending that it was somehow transformative ended up misinforming a lot of people about the nature of both the option and the larger bill.

Is it my imagination, or did Klein completely fail to address Lexington KY's question? Just answer the question, Mr Klein. Merely claiming the public option was inferior to the one under discussion, while implying that you're having immense difficulty putting it more plainly(!), as if it's the readers fault is a sick joke in itself.

Ezra Klein: 'If insurance is not affordable under the mandate, the mandate will be revoked or stronger cost controls will be added. But here's one cost control in the bill: if an insurer jacks up his rates, he can be decertified from the exchange. That is to say, an insurer who raises prices beyond what's reasonable would lose access to the market. That's a stronger cost control than anything we have now. So too is the excise tax, which slaps on a 40 percent tax if insurers let their costs rise above a certain level, and that level grows more slowly than cost increases do.

Kind of running repairs? On what basis, pray, has the public reason to trust that the word, 'reasonable', will be appropriately construed, by whom it will be construed and with what degree of urgency? That last word is of signal importance. Many Americans would not be in a position to tolerate an indeterminate period of 'commissioning', particularly since it would perforce be required on a permanent basis, since, in the US (and the UK, for that matter), insurance companies have historically been, when not wholly derelict, i.e. in the case of poor claimants, unlikely to be able to afford the kind of legal representation to take the behemoths on, and win. A specially-designated category, I understand, with its own cute, special little denomination in insurance jargon.

It all begs the question: what is the rationale underlying the Administration's tenderness and delicacy when it comes to imposing rigorous rules on the insurance companies from the start; thereby obviating all that nonsense about commissioning/running repairs.

Neoliberalism has been absolutely exposed as insanity, and/or criminal fraud, and yet still this persistent need to treat Big Business with kid gloves, as 'the goose that lays the golden eggs', instead of respecting Adam Smith's precepts, to the effect that its principals should be treated as untrustworthy and seditious in relation to the public good, and absolutely necessitating very purposeful controls on the part of government.

Like those villages in Vietnam burned down to save them. It's the new Monty Python paradigm.

But it occurred to me then that it's more like conscription into the armed forces - only you'd be fighting for the insurance companies, as a kind of penal battalion, like the Germans and the Russians used in WWII.

From Wikipedia:

'Penal battalions, penal companies, etc., are military formations consisting of convicted persons* for which military service in such units was either the assigned punishment or an alternative to imprisonment or the death penalty.'

So, you serve in the battalion, instead of - in your case - paying a fine. I don't know any more about the imprisonment, but I really don't think they would execute you for defaulting on your health-insurance payments.

* Convicted as known paupers.

'If you do not, you will be breaking the law and subject to a fine.'

Is this an accurate statement of the case in relation to the purchase of medical insurance or is it not? Actually, I thought you would be subject to imprisonment, but maybe they've just 'tempered the wind to the shorn lamb' by slugging you with a monetary penalty, when your breach of non-undertaking will in many cases arise from lack of funds in the first place. 'Tempering the wind to the shorn lamb' like that, is a Republican and DINO speciality. Think credit-card usury.

'You have no control over how much you will pay for that product.'

Is this really the case? I find it hard to believe. But right now, I'm more inclined to believe Olberman than you.

The government will have virtually no control over how much the company will charge for that product!"

Say it ain't so. But not with forked tongue.

as well as one your nation's Founding Fathers.

Perhaps you and the OP have forgotten his precept concerning the most basic civic duty:
'It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.'

Note that he did not qualify the questioning of authority as 'the second', 'third', 'fourth' or any lesser order of civic duty, but as the very 'first'.

Your invocation of a blind obedience to your leader/commander-in-chief (Ger. Fuhrer), does you no credit. Subject to the Geneva Convention and common humanity, 'Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die', may, be a legitimate tenet of an infantry soldier to live or die by, but it is not appropriate for members of civil society.

tricky?

Do you have any conception of the difficulties facing Aneurin Bevan, who was not PM, when he was setting up the free to all, NHS, in the UK? He even faced the opposition of the GMC and the vast majority of the doctors. It was at that time he called the Tories, 'vermin', which did not go down well with their knuckle-dragger base at all.

the Alice In Wonderland imputation that Smith was in favour of 'free markets' for business in the sense of Friedman's laissez-faire economic promiscuity?

In the words of Rick Wilson's article in the Charleston Gazette:

'Smith died in 1790, before the industrial revolution, mechanization, and the rise of large-scale businesses, let alone the government-sanctioned corporations, trusts, and giant global industrial or financial organizations that were light years from his world of small-scale competition. These often distort outcomes and result in what economists call market failures, such as monopolies, oligopolies and externalities that can cause a lot of damage to individuals and the public but don't show up on a corporation's bottom line.'

How topical and pointed that paragraph is. Why have they distorted Smith's message to a small remnant, totally alien to his views, instead of placing that remnant within the context of his humane and compassionate principles for the WHOLE of society, i.e. STARTING AT THE BOTTOM? Which distortion, of course, being the very reason the world is in such dire straits today. Not only are the most egomaniacal people running the world's economy, they are supremely well-served by the echo-camber of hireling policians and equally corrupt msm, who, by and large, appear to be as reluctant as ever to consider the main thrust of Adam Smith's words relating to an ethic of uncompromising social responsibility, in terms of a just redistribution of the country's wealth. Smith had enough common sense to realise that the more worldly truly need more than the majority of the people, but that that majority should, nevertheless, enjoy a just share of the country's wealth, an ample sufficiency.











'

debate, who, however well-intentionedly, would demean Intelligent Design by designating it as scientific, beggars belief (pun, noted, ex post facto).

It far more fundamental than empirical science will ever be able to penetrate. It's like 4 being the total of 2 + 2. But only the simpletons of Western civilisation cannot see it. It's too primordial to be provable. How can you prove you made a toy aeroplane? Only by replicating it. But you know someone made it. Someone not just in possession of intelligence, but also of a purpose, in the case in point, directed to a certain end. I feel like I'm trying to enlighten Forrest Gump here.