Iran Crackdown

I wish I could say I was surprised at the violent turn of events in Iran, but I am not. Sadly, it is like now that no one will ever know for certain who won the elections. Personally, given the government hardliners attempted crack down, I now believe that the election was rigged to ensure the Ayatollah’s beloved puppet Ahmadinejad won whereas before I was merely suspicious.

I guess now it’s just time to sit back and watch what happens, as there is little anyone can do outside of Iran. After all, I’m not Iranian, but I can sit back and cheer on one side. I take heart that so far the Iranian people don’t seem to be buying into government line and are continuing to, at the very least, demand some transparency and, at most, refusing to accept the alleged results. My best wishes to the protesters and hopefully not too many people with be hurt or killed.

So far, Obama seems to have taken the right approach to the situation. If he speaks too strongly for or against either AJ or MHM it’ll be twisted and used as a means to quell the masses to “stop the Great Satan” from interfering in Iranian affairs.

I’d suggest visiting Sandmonkey’s Blog and the assorted twitters for what’s happening in Iran. Fascinating stuff like civilians attacking the Basji base, an apparently rather pathetic pro-AJ rally (if you call 20 people a rally), and other stuff like that. It’s also where I discovered that apparently a number of middle eastern news agencies aren’t even bothring to mention what is going on. I guess it’s that Persian-Arab rivalry.

Obama pushing the health care follies

So I see President Obama was pushing his health care system “overhaul” today at the AMA. Not surprisingly he attacked anyone who disagreed with his agenda with the usual smears of “fear mongers” and “naysayers”. It’s sad really that he has chosen the same destructive course and lies used to cripple the auto industry and banks from rebounding from their woes, even comparing the health care system to Chrysler. Funny, didn’t the government bail out a good chunk of both industries and they’re still floundering? How about the government’s complete and utter failures with regards to the VA, Medicare, and Medicaid? Hardly a resounding endorsement for government run anything, Mr. President.

Sadly, the President tout’s these plans as reforms: making health insurance available and affordable, cutting costs, etc. The problem is there is nothing in these plans that hasn’t been done before and completely and utterly failed. They are called HMOs. I highly doubt that a government run HMO would somehow magically be more effective than the private sector given our government’s notorious behavior when it comes to budgets, debt, and bureaucratic abuse of it’s citizens.

No thanks, I’ll take the free market health care system as it is, warts and all. At least there is a choice and I can shop around to get whatever insurance I want from any company in the nation. The problems can be fixed with some adjsutments here and there. Scrapping it doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do, in my opinion. Somehow throwing out the baby with the bathwater just doesn’t sound appealing to me and certainly doesn’t solve the underlying problem. It just creates and even worse one.