Selective Thoughts

Selective Thoughts
Bruce Bialosky
8-1-10

Let’s see – Goldman Sachs supposedly manipulates the mortgage bond market, helping to cause the market downfall, and the SEC fines them $550 million. $250 million goes for restitution and $300 million goes to the SEC. You may have thought attorneys were running scams soaking corporations in class action lawsuits, but they are pikers compared to the federal government. A shakedown like that even makes contingency fees look reasonable! This episode should motivate our citizens to stop governments from penalizing companies for their misdeeds against consumers – only to pocket the fines for their own purposes.

The definition of Chutzpah – President Obama asking industry leaders to tell him what regulations are causing them concern when he has signed two bills into law (health care and financial industry “reform”) that total about 5,000 pages, that no one yet understands, and that will spur thousands of more pages of regulations to comply with those two bills.

Helen Thomas used to sit in the front row of every presidential press conference and ask the first question. She worked for UPI (MSM) and we were to believe she was a reporter – one just reporting the facts. Then she became a columnist and all of a sudden she was a wild-eyed leftist and anti-Semite (but then I repeat myself).

Case after case, time after time, the trusted people from the MSM tell us they are even-handed and just reporting the facts. But when they retire (or get fired), somehow they suddenly turn into committed leftists – Rather, Cronkite and Thomas are just a few well-known examples. It is any wonder the MSM has lost almost all of its standing with the American people?

When you go to the Los Angeles Airport, the first airline you see is Southwest Airlines. The lines to enter the building often run all the way down to the next building, passing (and often blocking) the entrance to U.S. Airways. I have often wondered what U.S. Airways personnel are thinking when virtually no one enters their building while waves of people line up for Southwest. I now understand.

I purchased a ticket from U.S. Airways to go to the Final Four, but unfortunately our team lost and we cancelled our plans. When trying to use the value of my ticket for another trip, I ran into a slew of restrictions, including the unfortunate drawback that I could only use the replacement ticket for myself – no family members – for a $150 change fee. At Southwest, I would have been able to use the value of the ticket for up to a year at no additional cost, and I could have transferred the ticket to any of my family or friends.

I rather doubt I will ever fly U.S. Airways after I use the value of this purchase. The most important lesson of this story is the value of competition in a free market. What a perfect example of why we need less government and more competition in every industry.

At a recent oncology conference, Bristol-Myers and Novartis announced significant breakthroughs on a drug for leukemia. Pfizer announced positive results from an experimental drug that shrank tumors in lung cancer patients. Bristol-Myers also announced improved survival rates from a drug to cure a deadly form of skin cancer.

You can be assured that all of these developments cost hundreds of millions of dollars. They are all being done in America, where the drug companies still have a profit motive. If these all come to fruition, they will be considered miracles. Yet, there are still politicians who attack drug companies for profiteering. Instead of abusing the drug companies, our elected officials should get

Europeans to pay their fair share of the development and approval costs for these drugs instead of suppressing their prices with unreasonable cost controls. Europeans are living off us for all of their medical advancements, just like they have been living off us for their defense for 65 years.

And yet despite this, most European countries are still economic basket cases. The stupefying thing is that some politicians find them a positive role model.

Americans are all for second chances and redemption, but did CNN really have to put Eliot Spitzer on prime time. There is giving someone a second chance and then there is overkill. Is there no limit to the benefit of notoriety? Or maybe the CEO of CNN thought that “Client Number 9” was a lyric from the Beatles’ white album.

Anyone who believes anything that Elena Kagan said about how she is going to act while on the Supreme Court should go back home to Never-Never-Land. She has no intention of leaving her politics at the door, and her written opinions will be filled with her radical-left philosophy. She will for many years be a reliable vote for revisionist constitutional rulings and internationalization of court decisions.

These hearings should be dispensed with in their current form. When the people who are going to determine the legality of the rules that run our society are forced to lie in a public forum, it deteriorates American politics and creates an even higher level of cynicism among our citizens.