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Wow, props to the Washington Post! Maybe one of the networks will pick up on this story.
“Its the post office that is always having problems”
Great, tout one failing government program to promote another. Obama is out of touch with reality.
I was going to post this on the (now deleted) post on the Whole Foods’ CEO’s plan for reforming health care, but that post is down…
Anyone with a Digg account should digg up that post so that there is a competing view on Digg.
It amazes me now, but the same people who were so skeptical of Bush/Cheney keep sending me the White House’s “Clearing up some Health Care” myths web page as if it’s unimpeachable. Where did their skepticism go?
I can identify with the redheads. Though a blond, it took 5 doses of septocaine last week to do a filling. A visit for a filling when I was 12 took 11 doses of novocaine.
As a redhead who just went recently went through several bad sessions at the dentist I can concur. As a child I dreaded going and avoided them for years.
Post office has been one of the few government institutions worth keeping around. They are starting to hurt now, and were hurting around a decade ago, and the advent of internet purchases helped them greatly. And people please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think have ever had to been subsidized by tax payer dollars. I will concede though that the have the USPS around isn’t nearly as critical as it was 100, 50, 25, or even 10 years ago, and it might be time to start rethinking the monopoly it has on the industry.
Radley, in reference to your first post I take it that you haven’t seen the 2001 movie “Series 7: The Contenders”? My friends were appalled; I figured it was brilliant satire.
thomsblair,
Whoa. Terrible.
Obama has really just gone insane at this point. I think that could be viewed as the moment where you could no longer pretend that he was some intellectual heavy-weight, he’s clearly saying anything, true or not, logical or not, just to make a stupid point.
When I challeneg people to name something the fed does well, I usually concede that the Post Office runs ok in that 44 cents gets an envelope clear across the country in about 4 days, but this is easy to explain in that the government has a Constitutionally ordained monopoly over a consumer good/service (something that people are actually willing to pay for), and it is entirely apolitical.
If Obama is conceding that the Post Office is always having problems in his effort to epitomize the way government tends to always have problems then what in the fuck is he even talking about at all and/or how can you then (immediately thereafter no less) argue in favor of some giant government program!??!
It’s little moments like this where politicians reveal how dumb and dishonest they truly are.
And don’t even get me started on a “self-sustaining” public option…..
#8: I thought the reality TV story reminded me more of Man Bites Dog.
Also – in regards to the USPS monopoly, more people should be aware of the history of Lysander Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company before arguing for either side -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company
I myself favor an end to the current legal monopoly.
Glad to see that you picked up on the WaPo editorial. Elisha Strom has been in jail almost a month now as far as I can tell. I can’t believe that the press is not interviewing her or at least trying to. I don’t think anybody has really put their finger on the legal probles, but I see the two legal problems thusly:
1. It is probably okay to have a law against “harrassing” speech, so long as harrassing is understood as person A following person B around and telling her things she does not want to hear. More specifically, this would be a “time, place or manner” restriction on speech, and not a content based restriction. However, publishing a person’s home address on the Internet (what she is in jail for, that is) is not the same, or even analogous, to following a person around and haranguing them. This is because of the nature of the Internet. If they don’t want to hear her speech, then they just have to NOT go to her site. They may be vexed or annoyed by what she puts on her site, but they are not harrassed because harrassment does not apply when the victim of the vexing and annoying speech actively seeks out the annoying speech. What this does (or at least should) mean for Elisha Strom’s case is this:
a. the law she is charged under clearly does not apply to her
or
b. the law applies to what she diid, but is unConstitutional (as being against the First Amendment) for that reason.
2. the fact that the law punishes what she did as a felony for policemen and a misdemeanor for regular citizens makes it a clear violation of the Equal Protection clause.
Basically the USPS sets the minimum price a private mail service can charge for delivery, which is higher than the USPS cost. Whether or not a company like fedex or ups would want to offer the same kind of letter delivery services if such a restriction were to be lifted is another story. The thing with fedex or ups with their current setup is you can send a package to a local address and often end up with the package hundreds of miles away in a processing center. The usps does what it does incredibly efficiently, and the existing major courier services would have to invest a lot to make that kind of service cost effective.
Hamburglar what is your definition of effciently? I’m no expert, but I am pretty sure that a “company” that continues to lose billions per quarter cannot be considered effcient.
obama makes less and less sense the more he talks about health care…
Hamburglar007,
The post office is very subsidized. In the 70′s it was legislated that they were spun off from the old post office department, at that time the gov capitalized them to the tune of about $1.3B. By the beginning of the 80′s they had gotten another $1.8B in USG cash and property infusions from the general government funds, so that’s pretty significant tax payer money for the time. But look at the USPS annual report for 2005(http://www.usps.com/history/anrpt05/), there is a line item for government appropriations received, $503 million, that sounds pretty subsidized to me. The 2003 report has the same line for $762 million. http://www.usps.com/history/anrpt03/
I think what is happening is that their capital expenses/fixed asset purchases are provided by the government in general. So they are getting subsidized. Its like if FedEx got their new and replacement planes delivered free of charge.
The Post Office is subsidized by the taxpayer by the simple concept of their operating costs come from tax dollars. Not being subsidized by the taxpayer would mean the Post Office is a private company and thus raises capital from profit and investors. Since we know the Post Office isn’t a private company, and we know it is run by the government, we know the operating costs come from taxes.
Does anyone really need this spelled out? I can’t understand how any other thought process is employed.
#12 | Tom G
+1,000,000 for Lysander Spooner.
Besides challenging the USPS in 1st-class mail delivery, he advocated no voting as the solution to government. He is an anarchist for the ages.
Ohio Cops Defend Slamming 84-Year-Old With Knife to Ground
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,539075,00.html
“Police Chief Richard Zitzke in the Columbus suburb of Whitehall says the officer did what she had to do when the woman was seen holding a steak knife in a Walmart parking lot on Aug. 1. Police say the woman has Alzheimer’s.”
The good ‘ol “do what you have to do” generic phrase saves the day!
Obama cited one criteria for private insurers to be able to compete with the government would be “if they have a good network of doctors.” WTF? Won’t the government’s network of doctors be “all doctors?”
I could almost support the whole Obamacare plan if it were limited to citizens and legal residents but evidently it isn’t.
The US military has great, or at least decent health care. It works as well as it does because services are limited to members and their immediate families.
Not to get on an immigration rant but I just can’t understand why this is so difficult for people to grasp: If you want to end, or at least severely curtail illegal immigration, stop making it so damn attractive for them to come over here! How tough is this?
One way to make it less attractive for people, who look different from us, to come here is to absolutely ruin our nation’s economy…MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
#22 | Steamed McQueen
Obamacare is a ponzi scheme that’s doomed to go broke no matter who’s a part of it.
I am glad you brought up the military health care, though. I’d like to know how the funding works for VA hospitals and how much of the military budget is allocated to them. I’ve been in and dealt with VA hospitals numerous times- it is a machine- pure bureaucracy and cya medicine. If you look at the healthcare offered to prisoners, I think you’ll see a more accurate portrayal of govt medicine. This is a ‘state of the art’ hmo system implemented by states to service our enormous prison population. Type in ‘CMS prison death’ to see a few examples. Imagine the cover-ups associated with these companies. Imagine trying to sue a company (affiliated with the govt) that killed your child who was locked up for marijuana. Call a malpractice attorney and propose this scenario- they’ll hang up on you. Ask a prisoner how the ‘comprehensive health care’ is… These companies are already established and doing business with the govt- I guarantee they’re drooling over obamacare!
All the other topics piss me off today so I am going to talk about the living bridges.
I think that is way cool.
When I lived in Peru as a kid, we cut these fenceposts out of a type of local tree. They sprouted roots and grew into huge trees. It was easy to graft a limb from one tree to another. You could tie limbs together and they would just fuse into a single limb.
I have since thought about building a living house out of that stuff.
Stephen that would be an awesome treehouse!
“#20 | BamBam | August 12th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Ohio Cops Defend Slamming 84-Year-Old With Knife to Ground
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,539075,00.html
“Police Chief Richard Zitzke in the Columbus suburb of Whitehall says the officer did what she had to do when the woman was seen holding a steak knife in a Walmart parking lot on Aug. 1. Police say the woman has Alzheimer’s.”
The good ‘ol “do what you have to do” generic phrase saves the day!”
Even as a person who has come to distrust a lot of police action due to this site, I think the officer did the right thing here. Would you prefer they tased her? You can’t have a demented woman wandering a parking lot brandishing a knife. The officer appears to have executed an excellent knife disarm (looks like a kote gaeshi to me) and the only reason this woman was injured was because she hit her head on the pavement. That can be treated pretty easily and probably isn’t life-threatening. A stab wound with a serrated 4-6″ knife? Not so much. The fact that the 84 year olds wrist, elbow, and/or shoulder weren’t seriously injured seems like a testament to some level of care in getting her on the ground. If you’d ever taken self-defense courses, you’d know that knives are no joke and can be every bit as fatal as firearm.
Now stop spamming this story in every comments section. :P
#18,
For a long time the post office paid their own way from the sale of postage. I suspect that this policy has changed, but there was a law that basically stated the usps doesn’t get money from congress.
“The usps does what it does incredibly efficiently, and the existing major courier services would have to invest a lot to make that kind of service cost effective.”
Well this seems true for some aspects of its buisness however those aspects seem to be delivering junk mail to my doorstep. A service I would gladly have them stop. With regards to certified mail/registered/overnight mail It seems pretty awful compared to UPS/FedEx. USPS is absolutely my last choice with these. It may be slightly cheaper dollarwise but is definately more expensive timewise.
As for subsidies I don’t think you can exclude mailboxes. The exclusive access to mailboxes is certainly a subsidy. Certainly a system where a Postal Driver can drop my junk mail off without getting out of the car is quite the boon to the USPS.
I had no idea that it’s because I’m a redhead, but I definitely require more anesthesia than the average person. I just self-administer mine in the form of single malt scotch whiskey.
Why doesn’t the U.S. government simply buy the opium poppies from the growers, and have the opium refined into morphine? I’m certain we can offer a better price for the raw product than the Taliban…
This would serve a number of purposes; it would reduce the world supply of heroin, reduce the amount of drug money available to the Taliban, and increase the world supply of morphine, which, currently, is in short supply and critical demand…
redheaded kid + sadistic dentist = I hate dentists still today, don’t trust ‘em. Something not quite right about dentists.
So, they’re going to start sending military units after drug traffickers in Afghanistan, as if they were U.S. citizens? I thought we were supposed to be spreading “Freedom”, or something.