Bernie Sanders Extorts Blood Money

The Weekly Standard is reporting that Bernie Sanders (S-VT) is profiteering off of the Arizona shooting:

This afternoon Sanders sent out a fundraising appeal, seeking to raise money to fight Republicans and other “right-wing reactionaries” responsible for the climate that led to the shooting.

Don't confuse that ch-ching you hear with the sound of spent casings hitting the pavement outside a Safeway in Arizona. The two are only related in Bernie Sanders fundraising letter.

Related articles

• Mixing fundraising and tragedy (politico.com)
• Sanders puts Tucson attack in fundraising crosshairs. (redstate.com)

Obama's Tax Hike Extravaganza

Each tick of the clock brings us closer to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Rush Limbaugh has come out against the compromise bill as has far-left Senator Bernie Sanders. President Obama has unwittingly united the left and the right, but what's gnawing at him is the ghost of George W. Bush.

Having won the presidency in 2008 largely by vilifying Bush, Barack Obama is now facing the reality that Bush's tax cuts will become Obama's Tax Hike Extravaganza at the stroke of midnight that begins the new year. And Obama will receive the blame because of his failure to lead on Tuesday, his abdication on Friday, and the fact that Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency for the past two years. Thus the nation plods, zombie-like, toward the economic catastrophe of higher taxes for all.

Inducing a Market Crash

Heather MacDonald's Post-Christmas economic vent:

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders recently encapsulated one fallacy regarding for-profit activity prevalent among intellectual elites: “The point of insurance companies is not to provide health care but to make a profit,” he said, as if these were mutually exclusive goals. Sanders complained that for-profit insurance companies are too bureaucratic and, in a flight of fancy that would have seemed like a fringe conceit just a year ago, asserted that they require government to provide efficiency-inducing competition. The hilarious idea that government is less bureaucratic and more efficient than private sector companies will endure even if the seemingly nine-lived public option finally stays dead.

Insurance companies are profit seeking because they have a fiduciary responsibility to be profitable. Our legal tradition, of which Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT) is a part in his capacity as a Senator, requires insurance companies to seek profits. Bernie can vote to change that if he likes. If he 59 other senators do vote that way, I expect we'll see a lot more short interest in insurance companies.

As for the absurd idea that government is less bureaucratic and more efficient than private companies: Medicare denies more claims than any private insurer.