The uninsured, it’s said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That’s expensive and ineffective. Once they’re insured, they’ll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it’s untrue.

A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was “more convenient” to go to the emergency room or they couldn’t “get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed.” If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency-room use may increase.

Genius.

State Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill, an independent candidate for governor, today offered a wide-ranging and scathing criticism of the state’s universal health care law, saying it is bankrupting Massachusetts and will do the same nationally, if a similar plan is passed in Congress.

“If President Obama and the Democrats repeat the mistake of the health insurance reform here in Massachusetts on a national level, they will threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years,” Cahill said in a press conference in his office.

Echoing criticism leveled by congressional Republicans in recent weeks, Cahill said, “It is time for the president, the Democratic leadership, to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new plan that does not threaten to bankrupt this country.”

Hah! Hah hah! Hah hah hah! Oh, that reminds me. From Charles Krauthammer on the All Stars:

If this were a single isolated procedural oddity, it could be washed away. But it’s coming on top of a whole lot of others.

• We have never in our history passed a piece of legislation this sweeping and important, first of all, without a single member in either house of the opposition party supporting it. Never done that.

• We will never have passed anything on this scale — if it does pass the House — by squeaking through by one or two single votes. It didn’t happen with Social Security. It didn’t happen with Medicare.

• We will never have passed anything on this scale through the loophole of reconciliation in the Senate.

• And now adding insult onto all of this, we will never have passed anything of this scale using the Slaughter rule, the deeming rule, which is in and of itself absurd.

Now, you add all of that together — again, it’s not illegal. It can be done. It will be done. It will be rammed. But it’s outside of our practice, outside of our tradition and the spirit of the law.

When you add on to it the fact that it’s all about a bill that largely has a huge majorities over time consistently against it, and after an election in Massachusetts in which it was the major issue and the opposition candidate ran on that as his number one issue, and he won on that — all of that together makes it extremely, extremely unusual and makes the process look as if . . . there is no other way that you could do something this unpopular and wrong without it.

Joy.

A New Hampshire neighbor of mine did this ["Find a strip of land, live off the grid, stockpile ammunition, raise emus for meat, and keep your eyes peeled"] for a while. Then he figured out the ATF guys don’t need to besiege his stockade. What with GPS and so forth, Obama can take him out with an unmanned drone launched from Diego Garcia and no-one would know a thing about it. So he came back down to town and ran for the Select Board as a budget-cutter – and won.

Heh.

In a number of places around the world, it is open season on Christians. We read of Christians burned out of their homes and slaughtered in Pakistan. Most recently, at least 500 Christians were murdered in Nigeria. The attackers in all cases are Muslims, inspired by the warlike message of their Prophet. …

Do you remember the “massacre” at Jenin? Of course: Palestinians initially claimed that 500 had been killed, but it turned out that there was no massacre after all. In Nigeria, on the other hand, no one disputes that more than 500 Christians were slaughtered by Muslims. So where is the outrage?

Etc. Curtsy (circuitously): RC2.

Sigh.

Churches have joined together to protest against plans for a mosque that would tower over the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, with one minister describing it as a “supremacist statement” for Islam.

A collective comprising every church in Camberley, Surrey, has lambasted plans for the giant mosque, warning that will create only “division and discord” in the town.

The proposal has already caused security concerns in military circles as the mosque includes 30m (100ft) minarets that would overlook Sandhurst.

The planned mosque lies just 360m from the academy, where hundreds of newly commissioned Army officers take to the parade ground each year for their passing out ceremony. The event attracts senior members of the Royal Family as well as important military figures.

Good grief.

The other day, while taking a break by the Al-Hamra Hotel pool, fringed with the usual cast of tattooed defence contractors, I was accosted by an American magazine journalist of serious accomplishment and impeccable liberal credentials.

She had been disturbed by my argument that Iraqis were better off than they had been under Saddam and I was now — there was no choice about this — going to have to justify my bizarre and dangerous views. I’ll spare you most of the details because you know the script — no WMD, no ‘imminent threat’ (though the point was to deal with Saddam before such a threat could emerge), a diversion from the hunt for bin Laden, enraging the Arab world. Etcetera.

But then she came to the point. Not only had she ‘known’ the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the ‘evil’ George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. ‘Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out.’ Startled by her candour, I asked whether thousands more dead Iraqis would be a good thing.

She nodded and mumbled something about Bush needing to go. By this logic, I ventured, another September 11 on, say, September 11 would be perfect for pushing up John Kerry’s poll numbers. ‘Well, that’s different — that would be Americans,’ she said, haltingly. ‘I guess I’m a bit of an isolationist.’ That’s one way of putting it.

The moral degeneracy of these sentiments didn’t really hit me until later when I dined at the home of Abu Salah, a father of six who took over as the Daily Telegraph’s chief driver in Baghdad when his predecessor was killed a year ago.

Fabulous. What a nice lady.

Let’s revisit that “I hope Obama fails” line of Rush’s and the OMG SCANDAL OMG that ensuuued…

Anyhoo, over ‘n out.

Forbes – Toyota Hybrid Horror Hoax, by Michael Fumento

Also, check out the Ken Doll byline headshot on this guy. Yeesh.

Barack Obama’s offhand approach to Gordon Brown’s Washington visit last week came about because the president was facing exhaustion over America’s economic crisis and is unable to focus on foreign affairs, the Sunday Telegraph has been told.

How does he explain the box set of DVDs?