Author: Rapporteur

  This weekend has shown me a glimpse of how American medicine is failing its most important stakeholders – the patients – and how Obamacare is only going to worsen things.   My wife was admitted to the hospital on Friday. The details are unimportant, but the normal course of treatment involves IV fluids and pain medication; if she has an infection, the docs add IV antibiotics. Unfortunately, she’s proven to be a tough stick for the nurses who start the IV – sometimes they’ll have to try 5-6 times at different IV sites, and even if they do...

I absolutely admire the performance in office of Haley Barbour as governor of Mississippi.  Contrast Mississippi’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina with Louisiana’s — both states suffered about the same amount of damage, but MS bounced back further and faster than LA — and you’ll see why governors and the competence of their team do matter. Having said that, I absolutely disagree with Gov. Barbour’s article in National Review yesterday.  He writes in favor of the Marketplace “Fairness” Act (MFA), which would allow states to collect sales taxes on their residents’ purchases across state lines, mostly involving Internet sales.  Local...

Second in an occasional series, addressing some of the idiocy that pops up from time to time on Facebook … In the words of the great philosopher George Takei, “Oh, my.”  Let’s count the stupid in this one, shall we? Assuming the Romney/Ryan ticket is elected in November, they won’t even take office until 2013, and at the speed Congress runs, they’ll be lucky to have a budget passed by mid-April.  So either R&R are overachievers, and will kill a million jobs in eight months at most, or — as I think we strongly suspect — this is just...

One of my hot buttons is the pictures that liberal Facebook users share, thinking that words in a picture are somehow more persuasive than words alone. I’m not a fan of this form of advocacy – it takes longer to load, occupies more space, and, frankly, it’s manipulative in a way that text is not. I never respond to them, though, for two reasons: I’m friends with them on Facebook for reasons other than politics, and the relationship is more important to me than scoring points; and I’m not convinced that a political posting on Facebook has ever changed...