Good, Bad, Ugly?

No pictures today, doing some airport blogging.

Good

New Jersey voters are listening to Governor Chris Christie's efforts to beat back teacher union thuggery and demand for ever higher salaries in these tough economic times appears to be paying off. To see why California is a basket case, and why the New Jersey revolt is the roadmap for what we must do read "The Beholden State" by Steve Malanga at City Journal. WARNING: Take your meds before reading, the horrific abuses visited on our fair state by the unions and the polticians they have purchased will make your blood boil.

Bad

Frequently in software, we use the phrase, it's not a bug, it's a feature to describe some annoying product detail that will guarantee the software coders job security for their lifetimes, as they continue to fix bad code. Dean has been detialing many of the features of Obamacare already. I tripped over this one today, which was wholly predictable. From the New York Times (H/T) media.nationalreview.com:

Fearing that health insurance premiums may shoot up in the next few years, Senate Democrats laid a foundation on Tuesday for federal regulation of rates, four weeks after President Obama signed a law intended to rein in soaring health costs.
After a hearing on the issue, the chairman of the Senate health committee, Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said he intended to move this year on legislation that would “provide an important check on unjustified premiums.”

Well, if you were looking for a path to single payer, this is it, regulate the health insurance industry out of existence, but hey you can keep your existing coverage, you just can't keep your existing insurance provider. How Orwellian.

Ugly?

The Tea Party endorsed the Democrat, Minnick, in the Idaho Congressional race. At first, I was appalled, but read hotair's take, excerpted here:

They have also made the point Russo notes here, that both parties need to have fiscal discipline in order for the US to end the spending spree that is sending us careening towards bankruptcy. In that sense, Minnick might be the one Democrat to support. While his party pushed a Porkulus bill that cost $830 billion and didn’t stimulate anything, Minnick proposed a $170 billion version that eliminated all of the pork and had self-termination clauses that returned unspent money after recovery began. He voted against Porkulus, cap-and-trade, and ObamaCare.