If one lone Republican supporting your socialist bill indicates “bipartisan” support, then Max Baucus and the Democrats got that yesterday as the first hurdle to a government takeover of our insurance industry was cleared.

Here’s Liberal in Republican clothing Olympia Snowe ruminating on whether a “public option” might be the thing to fix “what’s wrong” with accessibility to health care in this country:

“I think the government would have a disproportionate advantage” in the event of a government-run option, the Maine Republican said in a nationally broadcast interview. Snowe said “at the same time, I want to make sure the insurance industry performs, and that’s why we eliminate many egregious practices.“

Egregious practices, you say? Sounds serious. You’d think the AP would get right to telling us what those practices might be and why they’re so egregious. The AP of course doesn’t do that. We have to wait until paragraph 17 to find out what “egregious practices” this new bill is aiming to fix, which to me is strange. Burying them so deep in the story leads me to believe that they’re really afterthoughts. That the reason to support this bill that the AP really wants you to take away has nothing to do with the egregious practices at all, but has everything to do (as did Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize ‘victory’ last week) with…rooting for Obama (and maybe also re-making America into a socialist trough). See for yourself. Tell me if these “egregious practices” are really all that bad:

The measures would bar insurance companies from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions and for the first time limit their ability to charge higher premiums on the basis of age or family size.

Think about that. We’re about to embark on trillions of dollars of government spending over the next couple of decades at least because we don’t like the fact that insurers price their products differently depending on the risk they’re assuming.

Imagine you’re a skydiver with a bad heart. You’re attempting to set the new world record by Scotch-taping yourself to a 1968 VW Bus and parachuting out of a B-1 Bomber. Over the grand canyon. While on fire. You go to your local insurer and attempt to buy insurance. Would you reasonably expect to be charged the same for your policy as a healthy 25 year old non-smoking female Olympic swimmer? Would you really?

Insurance is NOT the same thing as “FREE CARE”. Too many people think it is and it’s this misconception that is driving this debate into the dirt. Insurance companies don’t have to offer you insurance in exchange for money. This (for now) is a free society. They could just as easily go make hot dogs or mow lawns. Instead, through their own free will, they have (thankfully) decided to offer a service to cautious people. In exchange for a monthly sum (called a premium), they’ll promise to pay you a set amount of money in the event that some event happens. As I’ve said in the past, it is a bet. You’re betting that the thing will happen and they’re betting that it won’t. Your death for example. Life insurance. You’re betting Prudential that you will die within the next 30 years. They’re betting you won’t. They’re so confident you won’t die that they’re willing to pay you a lump sum of a million dollars if you end up dying. And all that bet will cost you will be a monthly premium payment.

How big should that premium payment be? Let’s go back to our sky-diver. How big should his monthly premium be? How likely is it that he’ll be right and end up dying? Pretty likely, right? So of Prudential is going to pay him that million dollars for dying in the next 30 years, they’re going to require that the monthly premium be high, right? Higher at least than the 25 year old non-smoking female Olympic swimmer. She’s not likely to die at all. Their promise to pay that million dollars is then a safe bet.

People with pre-existing conditions, who are extremely likely to require care,  are by economic necessity going to be priced higher than people without those condition. Remember, it’s all about managing risk. Betting.  If insurers charged people with pre-existing conditions as if they were healthy, then when it came time to pay out benefits, insurers would take a huge loss. Multiplied over millions of policies, it wouldn’t be long before insurers went out of business.

This would be bad.

For everyone.

The same thing with premiums which “discriminate” by charging higher premiums to older people or to people with larger families. Whenever a party becomes “more likely” to receive a benefit, an insurance company must manage that risk by charging more. Low risk people mean low premiums. High risk means high premiums. All these “egregious practices” which have motivated the left to overhaul our entire insurance industry, are all founded upon basic economic principles. These insurance companies aren’t evil. Their practices aren’t “egregious”. They offer us ALL protection against unforeseen events and the current witch hunt against them is criminal.

Let’s get back to that word for a minute. “Unforeseen”. Health insurance, unlike life insurance, deals in things which are foreseeable, right? We know we want to go to the doctor twice a year and to get “routine” bloodwork done. We want  “regular” breast and prostate exams. Remember our sky-diver? His death was “foreseeable” in the life-insurance context, which means his premiums were adjusted up. Not much of a bet when it’s very likely you’re going to lose. To manage that (high) risk of loss, you charge a higher cost to the insured to play the game. Same with the sort of “regular” care most people want in the health-insurance context. If you’re telling your insurer up front that you’re going to DEFINITELY be making claims MULTIPLE TIMES a year to cover exams, shots, etc., then how can your policy be ANYTHING except EXPENSIVE?

This is what people on the Left just do not seem to understand, or if they do, they do a good job of concealing to perhaps realize their underlying objectives of a socialist government in general.

And this should all seem very familiar to you. This should all seem like deja-vu. There was a time when the government thought that more people should receive loans to buy houses too. Remember what happened there? Despite the basic economic principle that people should be given loans based on the likelihood of their ability to pay, the government forced lenders to lend to high risk people, then subsidized those loans and guaranteed them with Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac. What happened there? Do you remember? Look at the headlines if you’re unclear. Unemployment at 10%. No money to be found. Credit dried up. Housing market plummeting.

And we go blithely on pretending that THIS TIME the government knows what it’s doing and that THIS TIME they’ll get it right. Forcing insurers to make economically unsound decisions to insure high risk people at low premiums and then have the government guarantee those bad policies with tax dollars is ITSELF an “egregious practice”. Do we have to wait until it all blows up AGAIN before we realize it was a bad idea?

And this of course is not to say that high risk people should not receive care. That’s dumb. Of course they should receive care and of course they should be able to purchase some type of policy that insures the costs associated with that care. It’s just that government until now has stood in the way of private insurers working together to solve this problem via competitive markets. It is ILLEGAL for example to purchase policies across state lines and to buy policies that do not contain state-mandated things like prostate screening for women or breast exams for men. Because states require that all policies contain provisions for insurers to pay for these things, the costs of those policies (as we’ve seen above) rise unnecessarily. Astronomically. How about a sick person in NY being able to buy a stripped down policy covering only his immediate requirements via the internet from an insurer in California? He can’t. It’s illegal to do so.

That’s where health care “reform” should start. That it’s not, is all you need to know about Olympia Snowe and her “egregious practices”. Reform is not “reform” because someone tells you it is. Break it down. Look it over. When you do so, if it seems like it’s only really an excuse for another expansion of government, you know you’ve hit on something. You’ve hit on exactly why nobody on the left gets too into specifics when they talk about “what’s wrong” with the current system.

The Obama administration and the liberal controlled Congress are obstinately trying to impose their demonstrably inept socialist ideology on America. We’re resisting. This is good. If we hold out until November, we can sweep out the rats and permit US citizens to once again achieve a foothold in their own government. It won’t solve the problem entirely (that won’t happen until we toss the Joker out on his ear in 2012), but it will stanch the bleeding.

It’s important to always keep our eyes on the ball these next several months. As we saw with the economy, the neo-socialists do not want to make things better. First and foremost, they want to make things socialist. There’s lots of daylight between those 2 concepts, despite Obama’s full-court press to dim that light and hide the truth. We cannot assume that because he is our President and the liberals in Congress are our elected government, that they necessarily want to do good things. That is an antiquated notion and we must disabuse ourselves of it.

Quickly.

The socialists are not here to help. They’re here to remake America. They understand that this remaking will actually cause harm to America. They do not care. That is their point. By slashing our liberty, they will expand the power of the federal government exponentially so that it envelops all aspects of our lives and deprives us of every last scintilla of freedom. That is their goal. To beat America with a stick until we crumple at the feet of big government….bleeding and begging to be taken care of by the only thing left standing. Then they’ll crouch over us and drink our blood.

Too graphic an image for you? The socialists are conspiring to turn our health care industry into one based on UK and Canadian models. And what models might those be?  Consider these cold facts from Deroy Murdock today over at National Review Online:

Look what you’re missing in the U.K.:

Breast cancer kills 25 percent of its American victims. In Great Britain, the Vatican of single-payer medicine, breast cancer extinguishes 46 percent of its targets.

Prostate cancer is fatal to 19 percent of its American patients. The National Center for Policy Analysis reports that it kills 57 percent of Britons it strikes.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show that the U.K.’s 2005 heart-attack fatality rate was 19.5 percent higher than America’s. This may correspond to angioplasties, which were only 21.3 percent as common there as here.

The U.K.’s National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) just announced plans to cut its 60,000 annual steroid injections for severe back-pain sufferers to just 3,000. This should save the government 33 million pounds (about $55 million). “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients,” Dr. Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospitals Trust told London’s Daily Telegraph. “It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate.”

“Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets,” Daniel Martin wrote last year in London’s Daily Mail. “Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour [party] pledge. The hold-ups mean ambulances are not available to answer fresh 911 calls. Doctors warned last night that the practice of ‘patient-stacking’ was putting patients’ health at risk.”

Things don’t look much better up north, under Canadian socialized medicine.

Canada has one-third fewer doctors per capita than the OECD average. “The doctor shortage is a direct result of government rationing, since provinces intervened to restrict class sizes in major Canadian medical schools in the 1990s,” Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian physician and Manhattan Institute scholar, told the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee on June 24. Some towns address the doctor dearth with lotteries in which citizens compete for rare medical appointments.

“In 2008, the average Canadian waited 17.3 weeks from the time his general practitioner referred him to a specialist until he actually received treatment,” Pacific Research Institute president Sally Pipes, a Canadian native, wrote in the July 2 Investor’s Business Daily. “That’s 86 percent longer than the wait in 1993, when the [Fraser] Institute first started quantifying the problem.”

Such sloth includes a median 9.7-week wait for an MRI exam, 31.7 weeks to see a neurosurgeon, and 36.7 weeks — nearly nine months — to visit an orthopedic surgeon.

Thus, Canadian supreme court justice Marie Deschamps wrote in her 2005 majority opinion in Chaoulli v. Quebec, “This case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care.”

The socialist DOES NOT CARE about these awful results. He DESIRES to bring them about.

Has Obama rescued the economy? You very well may think that if you get your news from the NY Times or MSNBC or any one of a trillion other mouthpieces for the Democrat party, but reality (as it often does) has intervened to spoil the party.

Cast thine eyes on this from the indispensible Innocent Bystanders blog (I know, I’m late to the party on this, but well, I’m late to the party on lots of things and haven’t let that stop me before):

So Obama didn’t know what he was talking about when estimating the effects of the recession OR what he should do about it.

Do we need to trust him on anything else, particularly health care?

Sometimes an apt analogy is the perfect medicine for thick-headedness.

Check this out:

With the economy still faltering and jobs still being lost, Mr. Obama’s credibility is sinking and his job approval rating is declining along with the popularity of his initiatives. Republicans, who had insisted the stimulus was wasteful and wouldn’t work, are being vindicated.

The political fallout that mattered most, however, has been among Democrats in the House who will face tough re-election fights next year. They’re in a state of near-panic over the lingering recession. Their confidence in Mr. Obama is fading, and they no longer believe in quickly passing the president’s agenda. Cap and trade has been put off until the fall and health-care reform is starting to stall.

For Mr. Obama, this is all a potentially disastrous turn of events. On Capitol Hill, delay favors the opposition and tends to lead to defeat. The longer a bill sits around, the more its contents are dissected and the less likely it is to pass. Mr. Obama realizes this fact, which is why he is pressing for a quick vote on his health-care reform.

His plan has been to exploit the economic downturn to enact his entire agenda, not just the stimulus. The president’s position, which he repeated again this week, is that his health, energy and education reforms are necessary to create a sustainable economic recovery. It’s a clever political argument, but it makes little economic sense and few people buy it.

That’s not all. The stimulus is such a large increase in spending that it turned the deficit into a political issue. There is a growing national wariness to adding billions (or trillions) to the budget, even for a relatively popular cause like health care.

Had Mr. Obama and Democrats proceeded differently, they’d have better odds now for enacting their agenda. They are victims of their own tactics.

via The Obama Agenda Bogs Down – WSJ.com.

I disagree with that last sentiment, actually. Had he and the Democrats proceeded differently, they’d have succeeded in enacting “some” form of their agenda, but surely not the agenda that’s currently sitting like a steaming nugget on the floor of the American barn. It’s the nature of a radical agenda to be unpopular (thus the term “radical” or “outside the mainstream”), and that’s exactly what their agenda is—radical. The best chance they had of getting it through was to create a diversion and then force feed it down our throats before we had the presence of mind to snap our jaws shut. The economy presented the perfect distraction and the Democrats commenced with the force feeding. They got as far as they could before we caught on and gagged.

The NY Times doing its’ usual cheerleading:

WASHINGTON — Badly outnumbered and months behind in the debate on energy and climate change, House Republicans plan to introduce an energy bill on Wednesday as an alternative to the Democratic plan barreling toward a House vote this month.

How’s that for a lede? The Republicans have a plan, but they’re SO behind the times that nobody should really take them seriously.

The Republican proposal, drafted by a group led by Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, leans heavily on nuclear power, setting a goal of building 100 reactors over the next 20 years. No new nuclear plants have been ordered in the United States since 1978 because of the high cost of construction and uncertainty about regulatory approval.

Silly Republicans…they don’t realize that we don’t DO nuclear here in the US. Didn’t they hear? They’re expensive and the government won’t allow them anyway! Expensive…maybe. But relative to the Obama plan of cap and trade? Not so much. Obama is talking freely about his plan bankrupting the coal industry. Nuclear energy is clean and building and maintaining plants will create thousands of jobs. No go. Didn’t you see China Syndrome? Silkwood? There’s “uncertainty” about regulatory approval of new plants because the government passed these regulations in the 1970’s during the hysteria evidenced by these 2 movies. More people are at risk of dying by cigarettes than were ever at risk of being contaminated by a “meltdown” at a nuclear power plant. Those sure were good movies, though.

The bill also provides incentives for increased oil and gas production on public and private lands and offshore. It would also authorize oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, a focus of 30 years of controversy in Congress.

The Republican measure does not include any mandatory cap on emissions of heat-trapping gases, relying instead on nuclear energy, natural gas and renewable fuels like wind, solar and biomass power to reduce production of the gases, which have been linked to global warming.

No cap and trade? Will it must be half-cocked then. Said the buggy driver to the car dealer, “nice vehicle, but where do you put the horse?”. Cap and trade is the problem. That’s the very motivating factor behind the Republican proposal. The logjam in Congress these past 30 years prohibiting the exploration and recovery of our own natural resources has been caused almost completely by the Democrats being beholden to their environmental lobbyists and NOT to the American people.

“This is an alternative that takes us in the direction of energy independence and a clean environment without the national energy tax being offered by the Democrats,” Mr. Pence said.

Amen.

Can’t you hear Lonesome George Thorogood growling the good news?

Voters now [love] trust Republicans more than Democrats on six out of 10 key issues, including the top issue of the economy.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 45% now trust the GOP more to handle economic issues, while 39% trust Democrats more.

This is the first time in over two years of polling that the GOP has held the advantage on this issue. The parties were close in May, with the Democrats holding a modest 44% to 43% edge. The latest survey was taken just after General Motors announced it was going into bankruptcy as part of a deal brokered by the Obama administration that gives the government majority ownership of the failing automaker.

Voters not affiliated with either party now trust the GOP more to handle economic issues by a two-to-one margin.

via Rasmussen Reports™: The Most Comprehensive Public Opinion Data Anywhere.

I’m no expert. Far, far from it, in fact. I try to keep up with this stuff as much as I can, but it’s a constant battle and sometimes there are days and days when life intercedes and I simply do not have time to follow a House vote on this or an Executive Order on that. However, I would venture to say that I follow things more closely than say the average person. I know maybe 100 average people and of them, I probably follow things about as well as maybe 20% of them, less than maybe 5% and more so than the remaining 80%. Just a ballpark guess.

This all being said, while there have been Republican responses and counter-proposals to much of what Obama has proposed and accomplished, they’ve received very little press and given the numbers of Republicans in Congress, the party has trouble being heard consistently against the Democrat yammering.

In short, I follow this stuff, and I’d have trouble piecing together just what the details of all the Republicans’ plans for the economy are. I’d suspect that a large majority of those 45% polled would say the same thing. Therefore, I think we can take the following from the results of that poll—it isn’t that people are saying “wow, the Republicans have a better plan”, it’s that they’re saying “wow, the Democrats sure are mucking this up, so I trust the guys saying no to them.”

Which is nice. Except that to KEEP these polls in their favor, the Republicans need to aggressively go after these voters with simple, coherent reasons WHY they’re to be trusted over the democrats. There are several of these reasons. 2010 will be an excellent opportunity to let America know about them. If we can hold off the socialized health care debacle until the 2010 elections, it will be a wedge that Republicans SHOULD press through the hearts of the Democrats…AND force responsible Democrats to take a hard look about whether it’s worth their political future to back Obama on this monstrosity.

We’ve all seen the infomercials. The hucksters claiming that their extra special product “won’t last” or that their “supplies are limited” They tell us that their offer is only available “for a limited time” and as an extra incentive to get us to open our wallets, tell us that the “first 100 callers” get a free tote bag. They’re appealing to that base instinct within us not to be left behind and to avoid future teeth gnashing at having missed the greatest thing ever to have happened to mankind.

The thing is, if you stop to think about it, if the product were really that valuable, these salesmen would make it available FOREVER wouldn’t they? What thing of value is there in the world that is not available to you RIGHT NOW? Are there any? Bread, water, milk, an apartment, a lawnmower, hand towels, toilet tissue, nasal spray. Whatever. Nobody needs to create false demand for these things by hyping the uncertainty of supply.

It’s the truly worthless things that you have to worry about. These are the things that nobody wants, but which salesmen convince you are invaluable due to the supposed fleetingness of their availability. We buy these things not out of need but out of fear of “missing out” and regretting it later. It’s a scam.

It is in the spirit of these hucksters and the worthless products they connive us into purchasing that I bring you (who else?) the President of our great nation. Barack “Shifty” Obama.

Seems he convinced our legislature a bit ago that unless we “acted now!” that our entire economy would be up in smoke. Remember now, any real solution of value will stand the test of time and be as valuable after everyone’s digested its contents as before. Acting now won’t make a dog turd into a gold nugget, even though Shifty may want you to believe it to be so.

This from today’s Washington Post:

YOU MAY RECALL President Obama urging Congress to pass the stimulus bill immediately because the economy so desperately needed money. The massive recovery bill was passed, and, recently, a few “green shoots” have been popping up — indicating that, perhaps, the worst may be over. Is it a result of the stimulus? Tough to say, but, given the amount of money that has actually gone out the door, probably not.

Government agencies have thus far spent $29 billion of the $787 billion stimulus package, and less than that has gone out in tax cuts. What has been spent has mostly gone to Medicaid and unemployment insurance — real “shovel-ready” programs in that they are already in place. It is true that just knowing that money has been authorized ($88 billion so far) can allow projects to get started and jobs to be created. Nonetheless, of the $20 billion approved for spending so far for the Education Department, for instance, 97.2 percent remains unspent. Of the $10 billion approved for the Transportation Department, a full 99.7 percent is still left to be spent.

The challenge of getting government money out the door fast is one reason that some economists challenge the value of Keynesian stimulus policies. By the time checks are being written, they argue, an economic recovery is often underway. The result can be an inflationary waste of money.

So let’s walk through this one together.

When left alone, thriving economies like ours have a tendency to correct themselves. I know this. You know this. Obama certainly knows this. Only Obama’s got a problem. He was elected on the crest of a populist “gimme mine” and “soak the rich” platform. He’s got buckets full of special interest groups like unions, environmentalists, the poor, and generally any of a long list of groups that produce nothing in our economy except grievances. They take what you and I make. So what does he do? Instead of getting out of the way and permitting the economy to recover from the (government induced) trauma of the housing/credit crisis, he uses the crisis as an excuse to pay off his constituency.

$787 billion is authorized by Congress to be spent even though nobody outside of kindergarten seriously believes it will actually be in anyone’s hands before the economy rights itself of its own accord, or that it will help the economy in any meaningful sense. Obama doesn’t care. The stimulus package is a payoff. It’s retribution. It’s redistribution. It’s purpose isn’t to help the economy at all. It’s only purpose is to help Obama.

And we can see from the results that Obama knew exactly what he was doing. Of the total amount authorized to be spent, only 2.5% of that actually has been spent 3 months later.

Yet we had to “act now”. We couldn’t delay one minute. Supplies were limited after all.

Had we taken the time to think about this, we’d have seen that it was nothing more than a play by Obama to use the recession as an excuse to drench his pet projects and those of the liberal democrat legislature with our hard earned money. The economy would always fix itself. But to fix his political base, Obama demanded the stimulus.

Sure, lots of people got rich off the stimulus. Too bad you and I aren’t among them.

OK.

Imagine you own a business. Your object of course is to produce lots of quality stuff that people want to buy at prices that will permit you to make a profit. This profit will permit you to keep making these things, and keep selling them to people who want to buy them. If you were breaking even on these sales or losing money, there’d be little incentive to be productive. You’d cut back. You’d hire less. You’d make and sell less.

Quick, what is your overhead?

Among other things like rent and raw materials, 2 significant “costs” will be employee salaries and taxes. These are 2 expenses that you have to subtract from the gross price received from the goods you sell in order to determine your profit. The higher these expenses are, the less profit you make. The less profit you make, the less likely you are to continue producing. The less productive you are, the more likely you are to layoff workers.

So.

What do the highest unemployment states in the nation have in common?

High taxes and high union membership.

Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy has the details.

The six states with the highest unemployment rates are:

• 12.6% Michigan
• 12.1% Oregon
• 11.4% South Carolina
• 11.2% California
• 10.8% North Carolina
• 10.5% Rhode Island

In the six states with the highest unemployment rates, the average top state income tax bracket is 8.05%. All but Michigan have marginal tax rates of at least 7% (and Michigan has a very high unionization rate).

[ . . . ]

Further, union representation averages 14.1% in the six high unemployment states, with a median of 17.4%. All but the Carolinas are among the most unionized states in the nation (and the Carolinas have relatively high marginal income tax rates of 7% and 7.75%).

Putting this together, 3 of the 6 states with the highest unemployment (California, Oregon, and Rhode Island) have both high marginal income tax rates and high union representation. Michigan has high unionization but moderate marginal income tax rates, and the Carolinas have high marginal income taxes, but low unionization rates.

[ . . . ]

As with so many of the reforms contemplated in the budget passed a few weeks ago, we can’t know that they will be counter-productive, but the stated goals and the means to achieve those goals do seem to point in opposite directions.

Fascinating.

When you increase the percentage of a business’s profits that go to the government in the form of taxes, and you federally mandate that businesses must negotiate CBA’s with unions that result in their paying their workers more than their productivity is worth, you’re eroding the profitability of those businesses.

And unprofitable businesses, as we all should know by now, tend to lay off workers.

Why is this so hard?

What do you make of the fact that 50% of all home foreclosures last year happened in only 35 United States counties clustered in about 7 States?

35 US counties account for 50% of all US foreclosures.

Does it make you wonder whether this is a National Crisis or not?

It sure makes me feel that way.

Eventually, the responsible people of this country are going to learn their lessons. They’re going to bail. This will be the natural result of Obama’s policies which to this point have been directed at penalizing production and growth and rewarding complacency and failure.

You will always get more of the behavior you reward and less of the behavior you penalize.

Here’s another useful graph:

Does that really say that the top 20% of earners pay an effective rate of 25% of their income to the government, but the 2nd 20% pay only 10%?

Why don’t all tiers of earners pay the same percentage?

Does that really say that the top 20% of earners really pay 69% of all Federal income tax?

Why should 80% of earners pay only 31% of total taxes?

What’s that line from Boyz in the Hood? When Furious is waiting around for the cops  on his lawn with his son Tre after his house got broken into? When the cops finally come and Officer Coffey is obviously pissed at having to come out to write this thing up at this hour in this neighborhood, he detects some anger in Furious’ demeanor and asks sarcastically with a scowl, “Is something wrong?”

To which Furious, in his utter and complete coolness replies:

“Something wrong? Yeah. It’s just too bad you don’t know what it is, ‘Brother’.”

So if I may channel Furious, and answer my own question:

National Crisis? Yeah. It’s just too bad Obama doesn’t know what it is.

I don’t want to live in a country where the top 20% get tired of paying everyone else’s fair share and decide to just stop doing it.

Do you?