Standard Mischief

I’ve been over this before, but every time this comes back up, it still manages to floor me.

It goes like this. The cornerstone of Roe v. Wade, a landmark Supreme Court case on the right for a woman to have an abortion, is privacy. Medical privacy. As in “the government may not stick their nose in a woman’s medical care because to do so would invade their privacy” type of privacy.

Furthermore, I also happen to note that the most “vocal”|”fringe”|”progressive”|”leading edge” of the feminist bunch almost universally support government run “universal”|”single payer”|”socialized”|”ObamaCare” type healthcare. One of the promises of the plan they are trying to promote is that there will be a “cost savings” by letting the nanny state safeguard your own medical records in some kind of digital format.

If you can’t see the elephant yet, I’ll spell it out for you. If you think of your medical records as private, how in Lilith’s name is it logical and prudent to hand over safekeeping to the state?

I mean this is the government that has been rightly condemned for misusing the Census data to round up the Japanese and put them into internment camps. The same government that has been doing all that warrantless wiretapping. The same government that has been torturing and detaining non-POWs while ignoring Habeas corpus.

I’ve always asked this question every single progressive pro-choice feminist I run across who speaks fondly and approving of state-run, taxpayer supported healthcare schemes. So far I’ve gotten zero responses. I’ve been left to guess the lack of response is some kind of self-defense mechanism; a cognitive shut-down to avoid a warp core breach.

If I listen to my own inner “healthy” sense of paranoia, I’d have to come to the conclusion that Congress-critter John Fleming must be playing the part of the “designated opposition” in the carefully crafted “medicine show” to sell us all on ObamaCare.

The Honourable Representative from Louisiana’s 4th District has the following to say in an article in the online version of the New York Post:

“So I’ve offered a bill, HR 615, to give them a chance to put their “health” where their mouth is:…”

However, if you go looking up on Govtrack.org for the “bill”, don’t search for “HR 615″ or you’ll get the “Antifreeze Bittering Act of 2009″. Instead search for “H Res 615″, at which time you likely conclude that this is a non-binding resolution, rather than a proposed law. Here’s the highlight:

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that Members who vote in favor of the establishment of a public, Federal Government run health insurance option are urged to forgo their right to participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) and agree to enroll under that public option.

(Emphasis mine.)

That’s some strong language there for a non-binding resolution!

So, will the real opponents to Obama-ized healthcare please stand up? I know the socialist faction is going to pull every single trick in the book. I’d like you to respond in kind with the usual standard mischief; including obfuscated language, last minute riders to “must-pass” legislation, keeping the actual text of the bill out of Thomas.gov until after it’s been voted on, having anonymous “staffers” secretly editing text without anyone noticing, killing things in committee, and the always effective “poison pill” amendment.

There’s just one group of clowns that I use these words on, and they are represented well in the search results you’ll get back if you try this phrase.

In the upcoming “medicine show” that will promote “ObamaCare”, it seems that our overlords have exempted themselves from the healthcare rationing for the masses. This will also seem to keep their private medical records from being mingled with our own “government safeguarded” digitized records, (digitized solely as a cost savings measure, or so they claim).

I’d cite some bills, but instead I’d like to call on our congress-critters to fix Thomas.gov first, before trying to “fix” healthcare.

So, Swine flu.

IANAD, but I’m pretty sure that one of the complications is pneumonia. Getting vaccinated against pneumonia. before coming down with any flu strain probably increases your chance of survival. The only doubt I have here is that the news reports on H1N1 don’t usually go into detail about the specific causes of pneumonia (which can be caused by both viruses and bacteria), and the pneumonia vaccine does not protect from every cause.

So why isn’t the fedgov pushing the vaccine? Well, it seems to be in perpetual short supply. The CDC recommend it for only the elderly, and sickly, even though in the very next line they say it’s very safe. Elsewhere, it’s also recommended for medical personnel too. One shot seems to last at least five years, (although they said ten when I got my shot, and others are saying that it’s good for forever).

Mine was about $10 at a walk-in clinic set up in a grocery store for the day. Probably well worth the trouble even if it’s not effective for the current pandemic.

My 8-year old nephew, the really clever one that’s unusually quick for his age on the computer, has managed to guess his mother’s password. Of course, having discovered something neat, he had to go tell everyone to inflate his “street cred”. Thankfully, it looks as though he is not getting in trouble for this. His Dad, my brother, was bragging about it this weekend. Mom has learned to pick a password that is stronger than just a number plus a word found in the dictionary.

This nephew reminds me a lot of another one of my nephews from another brother. Besides the quick study of all things binary, I’ve watched him get into a hyper-focused bubble-like trance when learning marksmanship with my bolt-action .22. (When teaching kids like this, make sure to give them one round at a time.)

Seeing these kids excel at tasks that they self-motivate themselves on, reminds me again that the label “attention deficit disorder” (or any of the other names on the euphemism treadmill) really don’t fit. Nor do I approve the popular remedy of indiscriminately giving these kiddies the functional equivalent of crystal meth in pill form so that they will settle down and focus. (I won’t reject the therapy out of hand, or say it’s never appropriate, but there’s got to be a reason why it’s a very popular prescribed pill, and I think you’ll get a lead on the answer if you just google “homework drug”).

Fortunately, my nephew’s million-thoughts-per-second-yet-still-can’t-remember-to-brush-his-teeth-when-sent-upstairs scatter-brain is tempered by my sister-in-law’s amazing patience-fu.