Things that make me all stabby in the morning

Eric offers a little help on how to be a political blogger. Hahahahahaha. Happy little penguin, happy little penguin, deep breath, happy little penguin. Just put the knife down and write the blog.

I so relate to that because I continually run into things like this. The whackaloon quotient goes up, again. I would say this is rank pandering, but I've come to realize these people actually believe these things to be true. And notice, this is a conservative who has finally admitted that he doesn't reach across the aisle. For all that blustering about "locking the Republicans out of the discussions," you now see the real cause. No matter how much the Democrats reached across the aisle, tried to include the Republicans, people like this made that impossible. You may remember several committees having to postpone and cancel meetings last year because they lacked a quorum. Guess which side was missing. Of course, the only reason he's admitting it is that he's under the impression the House and possible the Senate will swing back to Republican control. You remember those days. When John Boehner said, "50% +1 is a majority and a mandate" and proceeded to believe in the "permanent majority" and his actions would never come back to bite him in the rear and so shut out anybody not "pure enough" (you might remember the RINOs).

And a follow up on the Anthem rate hikes of last summer (hopefully they'll provide the whole transcript soon). You may remember that Anthem wanted to raise rates in California by 39%. Well, fortunately California has some strong regulations on rate hikes including a consumer advocate office that has to approve those rate hikes. You know, that godless commie idea the conservatives are all up in arms about and want to make sure our federal government can't do a similar thing for Health Care and now the Financial segments of business here in the US. Well, it seems Anthem had a little problem with their math, which the advocates called them on. So Anthem comes back with, and the advocates approved, rate hikes of only 13-18%. You know, only above the inflation rate by a factor of 10. To all who think that markets should regulate themselves without obstruction of the government (ie. the Free Market), and propose that companies have their consumers' best interests at heart, that should be a warning bell that they don't and that they shouldn't be allowed to regulate themselves.

More proof? Okay, see all those eggs being recalled? You may have missed that during the previous administration much of our food safety programs were gutted in favor of "industry self regulation/policing." You can see how well those programs have worked for us. Or say all the drugs now being pulled from the market that had FDA approval during the highly politicized and "business centric" years of the FDA. It's the liberal bias of reality rearing its head again.