12 Reasons why the U.S. government should not mandate clean water or clean air.

12 Reasons why the U.S. government should not mandate clean water or clean air.

1. Clean air and clean water are not a right. As such, they not the responsibility of government. 2. Government efforts to mandate clean air and clean water do not in practice guarantee universal access clean air and clean water. Many countries have laws to require clean air and clean water but don’t actually have clean air and clean water. 3. Eliminating the profit motive will decrease the rate of innovation regarding clean air and clean water. 4. When a government mandates clean air and clean water, it slows down innovation and inhibits new technologies from being developed and utilized. This simply means that technologies regarding clean air and clean water are less likely to be researched and manufactured, and technologies that are available are less likely to be used. 5. Publicly-mandated clean air and clean water leads to greater inefficiencies and inequalities. Government agencies promoting clean air and clean water are less efficient due to bureaucracy. Universal clean air and clean water would reduce efficiency because of more bureaucratic oversight and more paperwork. 6. Converting to a national clean air and clean water system could be a radical change, creating administrative chaos.

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Who would Jesus insure?

Who would Jesus Insure?

That was the slogan on a placard that stole the show at a tea party attended by Michael Krantz yesterday:

[T]he Medicare recipients who want nothing to do with government-run health care [were] one of the more amusing right-wing cliches of this long hot August. There were no doubt plenty of them yesterday among a crowd that was predominantly older, overwhelmingly white and, I'd wager, heavily evangelical, a combustive demographic that didn't exactly cotton to the gutsy girl who kept pacing around trying to yell "Health care for everyone!" loudly enough to drown out the repeated death threats and off-topic anti-abortion catcalls that greeted her homemade "Who Would Jesus Insure?" sign. Her question, in fact, was quite a bit more piquant than the ones I was asking.

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Proposed Amendment

I've been mulling an idea for an amendment to the U.S. constitution that probably won't have as much a chance as the failed Equal Rights Amendment, in which persons of the female persuasion would have been defined explicitly as full fledged people with the same rights as the white male landholders for which the constitution was originally penned. How's this?

"Government shall pass no law abridging the right of any person to decide whether an organism living within his or her own body is a harmful parasite or a welcome guest, and to respond accordingly."

A lawyer could probably tighten up the wording, but I think the gist is there. This amendment might save oodles of money on government health care in ways such as:
  • It would limit the ways in which lawyers determine what medical procedures are prohibited or required, and the associated overhead in managing those decisions.
  • It would remove the bureaucracy necessary to separate funding for procedures that everyone accepts under government insurance from those protested by a vocal minority.
Discussion?

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Heck of a job, CIA psychologists!

Who were the psychologists who created and oversaw the U.S. torture of its prisoners? Consistent with much else that occurred during the Bush Administration, it turns out that even though they were psychologists, Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were shockingly unqualified, according to the NYT:

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.
According to the NYT article, Mitchell and Jessen now face a possible criminal inquiry.

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John Yoo is haunted

Remember John Yoo, the Bush Administration lawyer who was willing to drag his Yale J.D. through the dirt by writing government memos that justified torture? If Yoo thought he could simply walk away from all of the commotion and hide out far away, he was wrong. Here he is (believe it or not) teaching law at Chapman University in Australia. During a recent class, Yoo was haunted by an old "friend" (the video is less than two minutes long): My question: Is this an improper disruption of a classroom, or is it just desserts?

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