† Obama - Not McCain - Will Be Bush III: As InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds notes (emphasis, in the original):

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE’D BE BOMBING STILL MORE ARAB COUNTRIES AND TALKING ABOUT REINSTATING THE DRAFT: And they were right!

And this blast from the past, courtesy of Matt Drudge:

MARCH 19, 2011
OBAMA: 'Today we are part of a broad coalition. We are answering the calls of a threatened people. And we are acting in the interests of the United States and the world'...

MARCH 19, 2003
BUSH: 'American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger'...

† AZ Becomes The Epicenter Of Civility: The worthies running the University of Arizona's National Institute for Civil Discourse sure have their work cut out for them, given the staggering number of "death threats, vandalism, and intimidation practiced by pro-union thugs" in WI compiled by BigGovernment. And in the latest such incident, the La Crosse (WI) Tribune reports that Sen. Dan Kapanke (R), whose car window was smashed, has cancelled public meetings with constituents after receiving death threats.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: In which gifted statistician Nate Silver turns his talents to telling you how to get the most food for your buck at the salad bar (hint: avoid “heavy” toppings and dressings, since you're paying by the pound). 

† SOTU = Stuff Our Taxes Underwrite: In another context, The Stiletto observed:

As the Obama administration has a poor track record in making realistic cost estimates on major policy initiatives and has consequently engaged in voodoo economics to conceal egregious economic miscalculations, Biden is in no position to criticize how others do budget math

The budget proposed by the math-challenged (third item) President Barack Hussein Obama will never achieve primary balance, and will drive deficits $2.3 trillion higher over the next 10 years than administration projections.  

The Washington Times reports that a preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget Office Finds that “deficits will total $9.5 trillion over the next decade and never once will it be in balance - even when subtracting interest costs”:

The closest the government will come to balance is in 2018, when the deficit will be $902 billion and net interest costs are projected to be $725 billion — still leaving a substantial deficit of $177 billion.

That contradicts a talking point for Mr. Obama and his administration, where officials have said their budget would have the government live "within our means," meaning it was taking in enough revenue each year to pay for its operations, minus the interest costs on the debt.

Congress is required to use CBO's estimates when writing bills and producing a budget, so the new estimates could prove devastating to the president's hopes of enacting his plans.

Los Angeles Times reports that analysts are concerned that if spending isn’t reined in, “the situation could balloon into a European-style fiscal crisis”:

Republican leaders in Congress seized on the report to portray the president as unresponsive to the rising concerns about the nation's debt load.

"[The] report exposes the widening gulf between the president's rhetoric and his budget's reality," said Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget committee.

Concern over the rising discrepancy between revenues and expenditures led 64 senators - half Democrats and Republicans - to sign a letter to Obama on Friday pressing the president to take a more active role on the deficit.

"This letter sends a very powerful bipartisan message that there is a long list of senators ready to make tough decisions," said Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), one of the primary authors of the letter.

Separately, another bipartisan group of six senators has been meeting behind closed doors for months to devise a budget blueprint. Their plan would be based on sweeping conclusions last year by Obama's bipartisan fiscal commission. Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) lead that group.

Meanwhile, House Republicans also are developing a comprehensive budget proposal.

Just as Obama followed French president Nicolas Sarkozy's on supporting the Libyan revolt, he will take the Repub lead on supporting the taxpayer revolt. It’s how he rolls.

† How To Tell When A “Hate Crime” Has Been Committed: It appears that President and Mrs. Obama’s focus on schoolyard bullying has a blind spot, reports The Washington Times:

The Department of Justice announced in December 2010 its intention to hold liable school districts that fail to protect students that are bullied. …

Here is the catch. DOJ will only investigate bullying cases if the victim is considered protected under the 1964 Civil Rights legislation. In essence, only discrimination of the victim’s race, sex, national origin, disability, or religion will be considered by DOJ. The overweight straight white male who is verbally and/or physically harassed because of his size can consider himself invisible to the Justice Department.

Apparently, the Justice Department is going by George Orwell’s famous Animal Farm ending: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” …

If a schoolyard bully is a straight black male and his target is another straight black male where does that leave the victim in the eyes of Attorney General Eric Holder? What about two female students of the same sexual orientation and race?  Is the victim in the latter situation considered to be less equal in the eyes of Obama’s Justice Department than a minority student who is picked on by a heterosexual white male student with no disabilities?

Unfortunately, the Justice Department is politicizing its priorities yet again. One must wonder why the administration believes it should be micro managing local school districts bullying problems. When the Justice Department is more interested in making ideological statements through seemingly sugar coated campaigns, no one should feel protected. 

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, There’s Many A Slip ‘Twixt The Cup And Lip): The GA state legislature is the latest to join the Health Care Compact, an interstate agreement that “restores authority and responsibility for health care regulation.” The Health Care Compact is an initiative of the Health Care Compact Alliance, a non-partisan non-profit organization “providing tools that enable citizens to exert greater control over their government.”     

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Why Shouldn’t Illegals Get Government Healthcare?): CA lawmakers want to transfer half of the money in the state’s Maddy Emergency Medical Services Fund - named for late state senator Kenneth Maddy, a moderate Republican who proposed a scheme to use fines from certain traffic violations to support emergency medical treatment and training – to Medi-Cal. Proponents of the plan say that the $55 million transfer of funds into the state public healthcare plan for the indigent would make these monies eligible for matching funds from the federal government, which would help put a dent in the state’s massive budget gap. ER docs say that raiding the Maddy Fund, which compensates them for treating poor, uninsured patients at private hospitals, “would still leave millions uninsured for the next several years, raising questions about who will pick up the tab at already strained emergency rooms” and would force emergency rooms at public hospitals that serve poor, uninsured patients to close, reports The Los Angeles Times:

Many of the patients formerly covered by the fund would be covered by a federal waiver that takes effect July 1 and by Medi-Cal as it expands under national health reform, according to Mark Hedlund, a spokesman for state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), who proposed the transfer along with other legislative leaders.

"That helps maintain the essential services and leverage federal money," Hedlund said. …

Dr. Andrea Brault, president of the California Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, said the transfer would effectively eliminate the fund. Brault said moving the money into Medi-Cal would limit hospitals' ability to maintain panels of on-call surgeons and specialists, increase emergency room wait times and force some emergency rooms to close. …

Brault said the federal waiver would cover 500,000 patients only and national health care legislation will not expand Medi-Cal until 2014, leaving about 7 million of the state's uninsured patients with reduced or no access to emergency medical services in the near future.

Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Hospital Assn. of Southern California tells The Times that of the 17 CA hospitals that closed during the past 11 years, all were in low-income areas.

Shifting the costs of emergency care from the state to the feds is an economic sleight of hand that does nothing to reduce healthcare expenditures or relieve the tax burden of beleaguered Californians – those who pay federal taxes likely pay state and local taxes as well. What will reduce costs: reducing the population of illegals who reside in the state. Though the 2010 census found that the number of illegals declined by 250,000 to 2.6 million, CA still has the largest population of illegals in the nation. As House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) noted in a recent op-ed in The Washington Times, “[i]f immigration laws were fully enforced, California's budget deficit [expected to reach $25 billion by June 2012] would nearly be eliminated.”

The Center for Immigration Studies explains:

An estimate by a Los Angeles County supervisor finds that his county spent more than $600 million in 2010 on welfare for the children of illegal aliens. That's up more than $30 million over the previous year.

The cost estimate accounts only for food stamps and welfare benefits through the CalWORKS program. The figure does not reflect any direct costs from illegal alien parents themselves, nor from their children's education, health care, or public safety. However, the supervisor notes that illegal immigrant parents typically collect the kids' welfare. Such costs fall primarily upon localities and states. L.A. County saw 22 percent of its welfare spending go to illegal aliens' U.S.-born children.

CA’s Maddy Fund and Medi-Cal programs – and the public hospitals that rely on them - are also being bankrupted by illegals because immigration is driving much of the growth in the uninsured population, notes CIS:

California, the number-one destination of the foreign-born both legal and illegal, has seen many hospital closures. Many couldn't sustain the oppressive amounts of care demanded by uninsured patients, in many cases aliens.

It strikes some as hard-hearted to say so, but immigration is a major reason hospitals face much of the crushing levels of bad debt and uncompensated care. The reason is simple. As CIS's Steve Camarota has reported: "34 percent of immigrants lack health insurance, compared to 13 percent of natives. Immigrants and their U.S.-born children account for 71 percent of the increase in the uninsured since 1989."

CIS poses questions that CA lawmakers should ponder before using budget tricks to pull off a shell game that cheats taxpayers and harms impoverished American citizens who will suffer when community hospitals close:

Some … regard it as hard-hearted to say that immigrants bear individual responsibility for the financial burdens they place on this society, including our health system. But they are here because of a choice they made to come to this country – many outside the law. The expectation should be that they assume the risks associated with life in the first world's most developed nation with the highest standard of living. That means spending their scarce dollars on health premiums, not remittances sent back to their home country.

How is it our moral responsibility to provide thousands or millions of dollars' worth of medical treatment to someone who, except for an overly generous immigration system or insufficient law enforcement, wouldn't even be in this country, who provides false information on hospital forms, who has either no means or no intention of paying his medical bills, who apparently regards it as a right that he's due medical care while some poor American, perhaps also uninsured, is forced to wait longer for care behind a foreign resident or even forego needed treatment?

Health care is basically a commodity. Medical goods and services are relatively scarce. That makes health care a zero-sum game. There will be winners and losers. If the public is forced to pay for part of it for other people, in addition to one's own health care, then hard choices must be made. The easiest options are to stop bringing in more people who can't pull their own weight, send back those who show themselves incapable or unwilling to assume individual responsibility where health care is concerned, and to allow health care providers to turn away people who have no prospect of paying for the scarce care they demand. Many providers will treat them anyway, but then it's a conscious decision, not something forced upon them by the heavy hand of the law.

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ): The AZ Senate blinked and “[i]n an abrupt change of course … capitulat[ed] to pressure from business executives,” rejecting five new anti-immigration bills, including one that denied automatic citizenship to American-born children of illegals, The New York Times reports: 

Gov. Susana Martinez (R-NM), a Mexican-American and campaigned on the promise of cracking down on illegal immigration, tells  Reuters that her office is “looking into administrative measures targeting the issuance of driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants.”