Matt Margolis

This fascinating Guardian article discussed the British media’s yearly horror stories about the shortcomings of Britains NHS, and attempts to drum up a fake fixable crisis to distract the British public from the inevitable seasonal scares. Despite the article’s focus on the attempt to drum up a fake problem, some of the other statements in it were illuminating, and show why it would be senseless for the US to adopt such a system.

Remember the Daily Mail’s “third world NHS” claims inspired by Whipps Cross hospital’s, east London, then chaotic accident and emergency department?

I don’t think even Democrats would publicly advocate that we adopt a “third world” health care system, even though they still claim this system would be an improvement.

The Intensive Care Society warned in November: “An intensive care bed crisis this winter is inevitable.” Despite an increase of a third in critical care beds in the last four years, most have been for high-dependency rather than intensive care, the society claimed, and problems persist.

If they still face crisis after increasing their beds by a third, then they must’ve facing truly staggering bed problems even in the late 1990’s. Not the 1890’s. The 1990’s.

Better cooperation with social services is gradually cutting delays in discharging fit patients so fewer awaiting admission are left on trolleys. More elderly people - and more NHS staff - have flu vaccinations.

I guess being left on a gurney is an improvement on being left on a park bench, given the easier mobility the gurney provides, but this still doesn’t sound like a 21st century hospital system.

Perhaps more worrying, some trusts have begun to close beds to save money. Queen Elizabeth hospital, south London, has shut a 28-bed surgical ward in the face of a �4m deficit. Manchester and Bristol both have massive financial problems. If that trend develops, this winter in the NHS could be reminiscent of the 1990s whatever the weather.

Oops. Looks like the trend of providing more beds might be reversing. It would seem that government funded health care doesn’t magically remove financial problems after all.

Reuters reports that we’ve freed some of their journalists involved in the Kiowa incident near Fallujah.

The story just gets stranger. We’ve already heard that our soldiers were taking RPG and light arms fire from people who’d were labeled as “press” during the incident with the downed Kiowa helicopter. Now we hear from some journalists the US forces detained.

Reuters driver Alaa Noury, who was working with the Reuters team near the crash site, said they had been fired on by U.S. troops earlier as they filmed in the area. They drove away at speed and were unhurt.

Maybe they should dress like guerillas, since apparentely the guerillas are dressing like journalists.

EU Commision President Romano Prodi says that a politically united Europe could’ve prevented the war in Iraq.

“If Europe had been present and united, I believe, we would not have seen the war on Iraq,” Prodi said, adding “Then we would have managed to find a solution to preserve the peace.”

He means the EU could’ve preserve murder, torture, death squads, kickbacks to EU leaders, and the onward march of National Socialism. However, even had Europe been united, the war would’ve occured, either without the contributions from the UK, Spain, Poland, and other European countries, or with contributions from them all. However, in response to his comment and noting that there was no way Europe would’ve been united on the issue, I’d just like to point out that if worms had machine guns then birds wouldn’t fuck with them.

Anyway, speaking of the European fondness for National Socialism, Chirac has invited the Germans to attend the 60th anniversary D-Day celebrations.

A German Government spokesman said the invitation from French President Jacques Chirac was “a sign that the times have indeed changed”.

With anti-Americanism running so high in France, I’m sure by the 70th anniversary they’ll be talking about the American “invasion” of France, which ended the glorious Vichy government that represented the bright hope of National Socialism, just as our invasion of Iraq extinguished part of the Arab branch of the party.

Hello, I’m George and I’ll be sitting in for Matt all week. The style may be a bit different, but it should still make for good reading while he’s off soaking up the sun.

The AP reports that the watchdog group Committee to Protect Journalists listed 36 journalists killed in 2003. 13 were killed in Iraq, the rest elsewhere. Iraq had the highest journalist deaths since Algeria in 1995, where 24 jounalists were killed, almost twice as many as in Iraq.

CPJ said it was particularly troubled by the deaths of four journalists in Iraq killed as a result of U.S. military action. It has called on the Pentagon for a public accounting. Three of the four were killed in April, when the buildings they were in came under fire from U.S. forces; the fourth died in August after being shot by U.S. soldiers.

I think we should instead demand an accounting of which side the journalists are on. Obviously, the CPJ is particulary troubled because, well, they were killed by the evil American BushRove fascist hegemonic oligarchy’s vast war machine, gosh darn it!!! Maybe the journalists will learn that putting a big camera on your shoulder and aiming at US troops who face ATGM and RPG attacks is a really stupid move. However, since this is obviously going to be an ongoing problem, it would perhaps be wise to find a way to make journalists clearly distinguishible from combatants. I suggest having them wear a bright yellow conical hat, at least three feet tall, and clearly labeled with the word “DUNCE”.

Of course, we also face the problem of identifying journalists from guerillas, now that guerillas are posing as journalists, or journalists are acting like guerillas, whichever the case may be. As has been reported today in several places, after one of our helicopters was shot down a group of either guerillas or journalists fire on the US troops guarding the crash site.

Soon after, five men “wearing black press jackets with ‘press’ clearly written in English” fired on U.S. paratroopers guarding the crash site, Kimmitt said. He said it was the first time he had heard of assailants in Iraq posing as journalists

I’m not sure whether the guerillas are working harder than the journalists at attacking our forces, with the respective tools, but both need to start believing in the goal of creating a functioning Iraq where people aren’t summarily executed.

Howard Dean is in trouble, and he knows it.

Recent attacks by his Democratic rivals have caused Howard Dean to whimper like a small child running to his mother about the neighborhood bullies. Dean, who wants to remove Terry McAuliffe from his position as head of the Democratic Party, has now been whimpering at McAuliffe’s feet, asking him to stop the attacks on him by his rivals.

The man who wants to President can’t even take criticism from the same people who he’s attacked throughout his campaign. Desperate Dean seems to realize now that his mouth has been getting him in trouble. His inexperience in foreign policy and lack of genuine leadership abilities have put him in a vulnerable state. Dean’s recent comments about Saddam Hussein’s capture not making our country safer, and his unwillingness to judge Osama bin Laden guilty (even after we have evidence of bin Laden admitting to his role in 9-11) has his trailing rivals taking the bait he has left for them.

FoxNews reported last Tuesday:

[t]he front-runner’s complaint has had the effect of increasing those attacks. Some of Dean’s rivals for the Democratic nomination say the former Vermont governor has been relentlessly negative — calling his rivals “cockroaches,” the Democratic leadership in Congress “prostitutes” and Democrats who support tax cuts and a strong defense “Bush lite.” In return, they say Dean’s latest attacks on the DNC show he is nothing more than a whiner.

And the funniest thing is that Dean’s spokesman Jay Carson claims Howard Dean is running a “positive campaign!” He also accuses Dean’s rivals are the ones who are attacking “out of desperation.” Carson said, “The politics of attack … is exactly the kind of politics that turns off voters and suppresses turnout… It’s bad for the party.”

I guess Howard Dean has forgotten his own television ads that criticized his Democratic rivals as “Washington politicians” who voted to support using force against Iraq and for failing the country on such issues as prescription drug benefits.

Lloyd Grove, of the New York Daily News also reported back in October that Howard Dean hired Ace Smith, Gray Davis’s former muckraker to “to gather dirt on political rivals.”

So that’s good for the party?

Truth be told, Howard Dean is a whiner. He’s fumbled on his attempts to gain yardage on foreign policy. After his comments on Hussein and bin Laden backfired, Dean is really feeling the heat and is now working on damage control. Making the smallest of concessions he can without completely disavowing his previous words, he’s now trying to divert criticism away from himself by going back to doing what he does best - reading the news and locating something to blame on Bush.

Howard Dean has recently accused George W. Bush of placing “ideology over facts” which has resulted in “the most dangerous administration” of his lifetime.

It’s “Classic Howard Dean” again. The same one we’ve been laughing at for months.

How can Howard Dean accuse George W. Bush of placing “ideology over facts” when Dean is the one who
…wants to repeal all of Bush’s tax cuts - the same tax cuts that turned around a failing economy?
…opposes the bipartisan “No Child Left Behind Act”?
…opposes the war in Iraq, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was in violation of multiple U.N. Resolutions?
…thinks as governor he could have secret meeting with his energy task force, but Dick Cheney, as Vice-President couldn’t?
…who supports minors receiving abortions without parental consent despite the fact that an abortion is a serious procedure that can cause death? (He even lied to justify his position)
…thinks that it’s okay for the 9 Democrats running for President to attack Bush, but it’s not okay for them to attack him?

While Dean cries about being attacked by his Democrat opponents he comes out swinging with his eyes closed, attacking his Republican opponent going after anything that smells like a potential target:

“National security and economic security are the touchstones of the election,” he said in the interview after a rally Monday in Green Bay, Wis. “I think the president has been fairly reckless in just about every area I can think of.”

Okay, let’s look at the facts on our National security and economic security:

• Bush’s tax cuts are repairing the economy.
• Bush saw the creation of the Homeland Security Department.
• Bush’s war on terrorism saw the toppling of two terrorist regimes.
• Libya, in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s capture, has now agreed to cease its own WMD programs, and other countries are warming up to negotiating with the U.S.

Yet, Howard Dean keeps on swinging:

Dean also accused the administration of stubbornly ignoring warnings about mad cow disease and blindly promoting an abstinence-only sex education program that “is not a good solution at all for teens who have decided to have sex.”

Dean seems ever so desperate to blame anything on George W. Bush. He says Bush didn’t heed warnings on mad cow disease – however, Howard Dean, who calls himself a doctor, has not mentioned mad cow disease ever during his campaign before the outbreak. A simple Google search will show that the only news stories containg the terms “Howard Dean” and “mad cow” will show. A search of Howard Dean’s website using Google using the same terms yields similar results. Clearly mad cow only became an issue for Dean when it became a news story. Dean says Bush is to blame for “failing to enact broader cattle testing requirements.” Funny, I can’t find anything that shows Dean caring about that either until last week.

Of course, what Howard Dean doesn’t seem to realize is that the restrictions on the bad cattle feed which causes mad cow were enacted in April of 1997 – fairly early in Bill Clinton’s second term. “broader cattle testing requirements” would have been an issue for the Clinton administration.

Sorry Dean, you lose again.

Howard Dean’s criticism of abstinence-only education also has no merit. Back in a December a survey of U.S. teenagers was conducted and showed that two-thirds of teens who have had sex wish they waited longer – an upward trend from the same survery conducted in 2000. Howard Dean, who likes to consider himself a doctor, ought to be ashamed of his morally bankrupt idealogy.

Howard Dean’s self-exposed weaknesses are making his Democrat rivals more outspoken about their party’s frontrunner and his hypocrisy:

“I’ve got some news for Howard Dean,” presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, who ran as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2000, said Monday. “The primary campaign is a warm-up to what George Bush and Karl Rove have waiting for the Democratic nominee. If Howard Dean can’t stand the heat in the Democratic kitchen, he’s going to melt in a minute once the Republicans start going after him.”

“Howard Dean has spent the last year criticizing me and other candidates at every opportunity. Now, as he makes a series of embarrassing gaffes that underscore the fact he is not well-equipped to challenge George Bush, he suddenly wants to change the rules of the game,” Gephardt said.

It’s pretty sad that Howard Dean’s worst enemy is himself. Howard Dean needs to learn that in order to play with the big boys, you have to be a big boy yourself.

Jerry Bowyer has a great article on the benefits of George W. Bush’s tax cuts.
“The tax cut, ” Bowyer said, “did not just benefit the economy; it benefited economics, too. That is, it created the conditions for an experiment which would test rival theories of how the economy works.” Bowyer calls this “The Great Supply-Side Experiment of 2003″

Liberals on the blogosphere go crazy whenever supply-side economics is brought up. These hypnotized Krugman-ites, always have some “facts” as to why supply-side economics doesn’t work, however, too their dismay and to my pleasure, Jerry Bowyer explains just how supply-side economics worked with the Bush tax cuts.

The concept is very simple, when rates go down, receipts go up. The more of their own money the people have to spend, the more they spend. As the Laffer Curve attempts to explain this - and Bush’s tax cuts have justified it. While the idea a controversial one, Bowyer tells us that it “should not be controversial; in fact it is nearly geometric in its certainty.”

This year’s [2003] economic experiment indicates that in fact rates were indeed too high. The evidence for this is that the beginning of FY 2004 is showing higher tax revenues than the comparable period for FY 2003. It appears that the tax cut of 2003 has created higher tax receipts for 2004. For October and November of this year (which are the first two months of FY 2004 and the only two months available so far) Federal tax receipts were $254.03 billion which is $9.5 billion higher than last year’s revenues of the same two months. In fact the Bush tax cut last spring seems to have even had a positive impact on FY 2003 despite the fact that it happened late in the fiscal year: The Congressional Budget Office had forecasted a deficit of $401 billion and The Office of Management and Budget had forecasted a deficit of $455 billion. When the actual numbers came out recently it turned out that OMB had been $81 billion too pessimistic; the deficit turned out to be a much lower than expected $374 billion.

The Krugman-ites have been fighting a losing battle. However, George W. Bush’s battle to get his tax cuts passed were not only a victory for him, but now they are also a victory for our economy.

The typical Krugman-ite clich�s include “irresponsible tax cuts,” “deficit causing tax cuts” and my personal favorite: “tax cuts for the rich.” The silly idea that the wealthier you are the less deserving you are of your own money is a popular belief among these people - even though they don’t come right out and say it most of the time. The bottom line is this: if not for tax cuts for “the rich” the tax cuts wouldn’t work at all:

Some opponents of tax cuts have questioned whether there ought to be large tax cuts for “the rich.” Some Democrats say that they’re all in favor of tax cuts but that they should be for the poor and middle class only since the rich don’t need them. Well if you believe that, you must have been very happy with the year 2001. It was the perfect demand-side tax cut: the rich were excluded and the poor and middle class received their cuts in the form of a consumer-demand-stimulating rebate check. Bush critics derided the results as “the worst economy since Herbert Hoover.” That was of course a grotesque overstatement. What 2001 gave us was a rather sluggish recovery which is exactly what you get when you leave rich people out of the tax cut equation.

It wasn’t until May 2003, when the tax cuts included the wealthy taxpayers that our economic recovery turned into a boom. The wealthy consist largely of small business owners, and once they got their tax cut, the unemployment rate started to drop. The unemeployment was at a slightly high rate of 6.4% when Bush signed the tax cut into law earlier this year. Now it stands 5.9% and continues to drop.

It’s time for the Krugman-ites to look on the bright supply-side of life… Because things are looking brighter for 2004 and that is a good thing for our country – even though it disproves their line of thinking.

I’d like to wish you all a Happy New Year. 2004 will be a great year. This year we will see a tremendous victory for President George W. Bush, as well as our country. As Americans, as bloggers, and as individuals who care about the prosperity and security of our country, we have to do our part to help keep Bush in the White House. I urge my fellow patriots to donate to the Bush/Cheney ‘04 campaign and volunteer.

Perhaps most of you don’t know this, but I am going on vacation tomorrow for about a week. During that time, I’ve asked my friend, George Turner, to blog here during my absence.

So, starting tomorrow, he’ll be taking over, while I am enjoying a well deserved vacation at an “undisclosed location.”

Enjoy the New Year!