Dahlkemper Talking Political Vision Is Laughable at Best

I am always amused by how some politicians view themselves. I laughed out loud when I read accounts of former Congresswomen Kathy Dahlkemper’s announcement that she was tossing her hat into the race for the Democrat nomination for County Executive against incumbent Barry Grossman.

Dahlkemper laughably proclaimed that Erie County’s top job called for more visionary thinking on economic development, poverty and stemming the areas perpetual brain drain. My first reaction was what was her first clue? And the second was REALLY?! Political vision from a women whose only experience in public office came in her one term in Washington, where she served as a reliable rubber stamp for Nancy Pelosi and Barrack Obama.

Pardon me, but W T F?! How can anyone possibly take this women seriously? Her vote in the affirmative for Obamacare has saddled not only Erie County, but the entire United States with one of the most detrimental to business pieces of legislation in the history of the country! The economic devastation that this bill will cause to the country will only continue to grow as its multiple parts begin to take effect.

Talk about poverty…Ms. Dahlkemper’s vote will spur businesses that are teetering on the brink of insolvency to go under and others who have ability to choose to depart Erie County and take their business elsewhere. Imagine Erie without GE Transportation. Not a pretty picture as that proverbial snowball rolls down hill and comes to rest at Ms. Dahlkemper’s feet.

The biggest problem with economic development in Erie County has nothing to do with a lack of political vision on the part of its County Executive, but an unwieldy web of competing entities struggling for funding and trying to cling to their own piece of the turf. It’s pretty hard to be effective when you have more than 20 groups posturing for a place in the spotlight. No one wants to give an inch in their little fiefdom, so nothing gets accomplished.

Now imagine someone as clueless as Kathy Dahlkemper bumbling and stumbling into the mess. While Grossman hasn’t done much to fire innovation in his first term the thought of Dahlkemper in that role is a truly frightening thought!

Neil Barofsky – Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street (Free Press) Paperback Edition with new foreward

Washington never met an acronym or a program it couldn’t throw at a problem. If the problem is big enough, the remedy seems to be to throw more acronym laden programs at it; not in an effort to fix the problem, but more often than not to merely appear like the problem is being addressed.

Neil Barofsky was nominated as the SIGTARP that was nominated in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration in an effort to ensure against waste, fraud and abuse in the $700 billion TARP program. In English, Barofsky was the lawyer charged with unenviable task of trying to prevent politicians and Wall Street types who were largely responsible for creating the economic circumstances that created the financial mess that necessitated the Troubled Asset Relief Program; more correctly labeled the Wall Street bailout.

In Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street Barofsky tries to valiantly to detail the machinations and internal struggles he faced in the push and pull between Washington and Wall Street. The incestuous nature of so many former Wall Street investment bankers retiring to move over to government side of the street to take on high level roles in presidential administrations screams with a fox guarding the henhouse cartoonish quality.

The picture that is painted by Bailout and so many other Washington insider books really makes it crystal clear why the American people have it right when they show an ever increasing distrust and disgust with everything happening in our nation’s capital. Forget about the best and the brightest we are saddled with lowest of the low; people more focused self-preservation and self-promotion than with truly doing what it best for the country and its people.

The insights that Barofsky offers about the nomination process should sicken any taxpayer concerned with our future. Battling against the odds Barofsky, did his noble best to prevent total anarchy from setting in, in a scenario that had the potential to be fraught with fraud and abuse.

This should be treated as a clarion call that in order to truly clean up the mess that has been created by politicians and Wall Street insiders would be to bring in outsiders who are skilled not in the workings of Wall Street/Washington axis, but folks that are skilled forensic accountants and investigators who are focused on bringing real change to real problems. I’m not sure if I should commend Barofsky for his efforts or question his sanity for taking on this insurmountable challenge.

Betsy McCaughey – Beating Obamacare: Your Handbook for Surviving the New Healthcare Law (Regnery Publishing)

During the debate over the Affordable Care Act, which better known as Obamacare, then Speaker of the House and well known MENSA member Nancy Pelosi famously proclaimed “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.” Unlike the genius Pelosi and I would safely bet a preponderance of the then members of the House and Senate who voted for this legislation, former New York Lt. Governor and health policy advocate Betsy McCaughey has actually read the 2572 pages of this convoluted law in its entirety.

McCaughey was a tireless campaigner against the passage of this mess and as now delivered a concise rendering of what the law actually says and does to the American people and the U.S. healthcare system in Beating Obamacare: Your Handbook for Surviving the New Healthcare Law.

While the chatter leading up to the passage of the law painted a wonderful picture full of all of the tremendous benefits that the American people would reap under this new approach to healthcare. But like so much that comes out of Washington, the American people were sold a bill of goods and the promised savings and improvements to healthcare delivery have already been proven to be an outright lie even before much of the law takes full effect.

McCaughey spells out the reality of the healthcare law including;

• The implementation of the largest tax increase in the last 20 years

• The tremendous cuts to payments that doctors, hospitals, and many other healthcare providers will receive for care delivered to the elderly.

• Why a massive number of employers who currently provide healthcare insurance are considering dropping those plans or cutting down the number of folks who participate in the benefit by slashing workforce or the number of hours workers currently work.

• If you’re wondering about the huge growth in the number of IRS employees being added to the federal payroll that is the mechanism that will be used for reporting and tracking if you receive employer provided healthcare and how much employers contribute to the cost of those plans.

 McCaughey spell out the cold, hard, reality of Obamacare in direct, easy to understand language that arms readers with the truth about what’s actually in the law. Beating Obamacare: Your Handbook for Surviving the New Healthcare Law, should be required reading for so-called best and the brightest on Capitol Hill who foisted this 20 pound legislative turd onto the American people. I would hope that Ms. McCaughey would also be kind enough to send a personally signed copy over to Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts whose misguided vote allowed this nightmare to continue.

Marty Markary M.D. – Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care (Bloomsbury Press)

Full disclosure up front: my full-time career is in the health care field on the marketing side rather than the clinical. Even before I went to work in health care, I was fascinated by the reports of avoidable medical errors and the harm, if not outright death that they caused. The numbers that get thrown around are staggering, in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths per year according to some reports.

But what is at the root of those errors? In Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care, Dr. Marty Markary, a surgeon at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital would have you believe that it is a combination of contributing factors, but the blame rest solely at the feet of hospital administrators and the incompetent practitioners and unsafe practices that they allow to continue at their facilities.

While there is certainly ample evidence to support Markary’s claims, by the same token I think he is too quick to downplay other contributing factors including: ambulance chasing attorneys, the government at both state and federal levels, and even the patients themselves.

Markary claims that transparency would cure many of the ills in healthcare, but he neglects to account for the massive costs of litigation, risk management and the increase in costs that go hand in hand. Hospitals, both non-profit and for profit feel the need to circle the wagons to protect themselves from the vultures overhead.

While regulation is necessary to ensure competent care delivery, the government also contributes to the problem with its lack of uniform interpretation of its own regulations on the state level and don’t even get me started on the rules and regulations involved with Medicare, HIPPA, and the tangled mess of Obamacare.

While Markary is quick to indict the health care system he chooses to ignore the patient’s contribution to the problem of medical errors. I would have to bet that on more than a few occasions in his career Dr. Markary has been confronted by a problem that’s root cause can be traced to a patient that was less than forthcoming with information about their own health status or their own habits and vices. And if we are being truly honest, how many of us as patients haven’t told our doctors the whole story about our condition or maybe waited a little too long between visits to address a health issue?

Certainly there are incompetent, over-worked, under-staffed, situations that occur in healthcare that contribute to the problem Markary puts forth, but the issues are certainly much more global in nature than he would have you believe.

Michelle Rhee- Radical: Fighting To Put Students First (Harper)

The cliché is to judge a person by the company they keep. In the case of Michelle Rhee the saying may need a shift to judge a person by the enemies she makes. Rhee is either a heroic education reformer or an evil villain controlled by big corporations and out to get teachers and break unions depending on whom you ask.

In the book Radical: Fighting to Put Students First Rhee chronicles her path from being a short term teacher in the rough and tumble inner city Baltimore school district to the evolutionary process that moved her from teacher recruitment, to education policy and on to education reformer. Along that craggy path she has won friends and fans and stepped on some powerful toes in teachers unions.

While the problems with the U.S. education system are multitude and systemic, Rhee clings to the seemingly pie in the sky notion that every student deserves a first class education. While many decry the “lack of funding” or alleged cuts in funding, on average we spend thousands and thousands of dollars on every student in the public school systems. Rhee identifies many of the roadblocks that prevent the delivery of a first class education as being systemic issues that have built up over time and the difficulty of trying to eliminate those roadblocks as interest groups ranging from administrators to unions and even politicians cling to their turf and strangle reform.

While at times in the book and in real life Rhee can come off as a shameless self-promoter, she has also been successful in offering substantive solutions to try to reform what is all too often a lackluster education system that delivers a sub-par product. While her detractors are legion in the teachers unions, it is safe to conclude that unlike the unions Rhee truly has made a noble attempt to put students first.

Michael Savage – A Time For War (St. Martins Press)

If you like your thrillers with a dose of conservative doctrine served between the lines straight up, no chaser, then the latest from controversial radio host Michael Savage, A Time For War could be just the ticket.

While Savage’s hero, straight talking, truth seeking, hard edge reporter Jack Hatfield is back for another go ’round with the bad guys. While Hatfield tangled with stereotypical, Middle Eastern terror types in Abuse of Power, this time around Savage raises the stakes in the tilt between the United States and China, in the process breaking new ground.

 

Savage does a wonderful job of balancing and weaving the political debate into the storyline; walking up to, but never crossing over the line that separates a political screed from a political based thriller. The thriller fan in this conservative loved every minute of it!

Savage has made a career out ruffling the feathers of liberals and I have no doubt that while the mainstream media love to tout stories of the growth of the Chinese marketplace and the alleged cultural shift, A Time For War with it’s story of Chinese underhandedness will push some libs over the edge.

Melanie Warner – Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal (Scribner)

There’s an old saw that says hot dogs taste great, but you wouldn’t want to see how they are made. While working as a PR flack for a business association I helped businesses to celebrate major anniversaries by pitching stories to the media. I took a TV crew through a local meat product producer’s plant to learn more about how hot dogs are made.

Decked out in lab coat, shoe covers, head covering and even a facial hair mask, I got the full tour; from grinding, to stuffing to the smokehouse. While the TV crew couldn’t film everything due to proprietary processes, we got to see the whole story. While the gelatinous glop that gets stuffed into the casings was a pretty scary, it didn’t cause to stop eating and enjoying tube steaks on a regular basis.

The question becomes, if you know how the food you consume is made and what it contains, would you continue to eat it? In Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal author Melanie Warner explores the process and ingredients that go into processed foods. If you are at all curious about what it is that you are putting into your body, this is a great concept.

I went into reading this book with an open mind, but I have to admit that I chafe when food nannies like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and alleged “experts” from organizations from groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest try to jam laws down people’s throats trying to limit people’s freedoms when it comes to what they put in their mouths.

While the concept is a good one and the subject is important, it’s the delivery where it falls apart. It may be an attitude thing; with these food police taking a superior, holier than though, I’m better than you stance. Yes, the food industry is a BIG BUSINESS and like any business profit is important. Yet many comments that lace this book, like the “food processing industrial complex” and the denigration of profit tend to overshadow what could be important information.

To approach this concept from the point of view of the way things used to be, when Mom made things from scratch just isn’t realistic. With population growth and a shift in our daily lives, the good days of local markets and farms could not supply the demand. Processing of foods became a necessity to get things to the marketplace and in a volume to meet demand.

Price is an important factor. While U.S. residents are paying a smaller percentage of their disposable income for food, 9.8% currently, compared to 20.6% in 1950, the cost of other necessities has continued to spiral upward. The fact that food stamp usage is at a record high, in excess of 48 million Americans should put those numbers in a different perspective. There’s the ideal and then there is reality.

Whether it’s vegan’s, global warming alarmists, Prius drivers or food police, liberals lose the what can be important messages when they put their nose in the air and look down upon the lowly masses and in the process they lose the real story.

When Liberals Attack

It must be painfully lonely to be a Liberal.

For four decades Bob Woodward has been heralded as one of the true bastions of journalism for his work on the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration, as half of the dynamic duo of Woodward and (Carl) Bernstein.

Woodward has continued to crank out regular investigative columns and bestselling books chock full of insider accounts and sources. He has been a regular target for complaints from conservatives and often scorned for being a central figure in the liberal media.

Now that Woodward has correctly called the Obama administration on their ongoing lies about who is the responsible for the so-called “sequester” mess and then let it be known that senior administration officials had contacted him and suggested that he would “regret” making those comments calling out the Obama-ites, liberal are in full attack mode on their one-time hero.

Liberal media types and even Obama administration types have labeled Woodward everything from a liar, to old, and even suggested he is “senile.” I thought liberals we for protecting seniors? Apparently that kind, caring false-façade only matters until you piss them off, then all bets are off.

This is just another example of the true colors of a liberal; while they attack conservatives as being mean-spirited, it is they who would truly stop at nothing to attack those that they see as a threat. Once you've crossed that line, you are on your own!