Over the past two months I’ve been struggling with a couple of medical issues. Neither issue is serious. These are issues that in the past were resolved quickly. Not anymore. It took weeks to figure what the cause was of one of my issues, and I had to do that myself.
I remember in the good old days, if you had issues that were at the level of issues I was experiencing they would check you into the hospital for a couple of days. There they would run a lot of tests and consult specialists. A diagnosis usually came quick along with the treatments.
Today it is much harder to get admitted to the hospital. At the Emergency Room they run you through a standard battery of tests. If the results are not life threatening they send you home, even if you are in bad shape.
Instead of a quick diagnosis and treatment you are given referrals to specialists on an outpatient basis. The waiting time to get to see a specialist for the first time is usually several weeks. It usually takes a couple of visits with a specialist to get a diagnosis and treatment pinned down. If you are suffering like I was, that delay can seem like an eternity.
One condition I am suffering from is painful. In the good old days, they prescribed a pain medication that actually worked. Thanks to war on opiates, the vast majority of pain medications they prescribe now don’t really work and have a long list of side effects. I have been informed by more than one doctor that the reason they no longer prescribe opiate pain medications to patients that need them is because if they did, they would be arrested.
The opiate crisis was not caused by patients that really needed opiate pain medication. It was caused by open borders and an abundant supply of illegal narcotics. Politicians panicked. They stepped in between doctors and patients. Now patients are suffering,
Thankfully I am on the mend. The pain I’m suffering with now can be treated with over-the-counter pain medications. I feal sorry for all of the countless individuals that are suffering and cannot get the pain medication they need.
Yesterday I had expected to be home in time to watch the GOP debate live because thanks to BidenomicsTM there has not been enough work at work for full 8 hour days but as two people were on vacation and two more had left finding other jobs I ended up working a full shift and getting home at 1:00 am after dropping off my car at the garage for a pre-inspection checkup didn’t get to see the GOP debate till 1:05 which meant a long night and given the repairs and inspection this morning for my 1999 LeSabre (it passed) I’ve not had time to comment till now.
The first thing that jumped out at me was Nikki Haley who much to my surprise sounded like the credible presidential candidate and make several excellent points, particularly on the fact that there was absolutely no chance of passing a national abortion ban. She seemed ready to showcase herself as a credible alternative to Donald Trump and without a question accomplished that mission. The proof will be if Trump comes after her.
There was a lot of speculation that everyone would be targeting Ron DeSantis but that wasn’t the case. DeSantis made his points very well and seemed to spend his time focusing on the failures of the Biden administration (something that it seemed to me the moderators were doing all they could to avoid dealing with that subject). While Haley was the star there is no question DeSantis did what he wanted to do which was make the case that he had produced and would continue to do so. Ed Morrissey put it best:
We're at the end of the debate; just final summations now. I'm very stunned that no one really went after DeSantis; he did a good job tonight being above the fray of the other fights as a result.
This reality is likely why the Trump campaign has apparently invested plenty of time claiming this was all bad news for the Florida governor. The facts alas don’t match with that rethoric.
In terms of entertainment Chris Christie was the primary source of it spending all his time throwing punches at Ramaswamy as there was no Trump to attack while occasionally touting his record as a conservative governing a deep blue state (a record that wasn’t as bad as people remember it to be) Ramaswamy handled it well and make me smile by forthrightly calling climate change BS and speaking truths concerning Ukraine and other subjects that were being dodged. I thought he acquitted himself well.
Most of the rest of the field was invisible, Tim Scott particularly, although he did better than Hutchinson & Bergum who showed they didn’t belong on that stage. As for Mike Pence he kept talking about the achievements of the Trump/Pence admin which is a legit move and was rather adamant that despite the Biden admin making a point to pass a law preventing a VP to reject electors after the fact (a point he never mentioned btw) he in his opinion had no authority to reject the electors in 2020. I think he’s dead wrong but I also think he actually believes he believes that
Finally several quick thoughts:
I think the debate moderation demonstrated little difference between Fox & the rest of the MSM
It’s apparently still possible to have an actual debate about substance, at least without Trump
The whole Trump “counter programing” plan really doesn’t work when in a streaming era
It seemed to me Youtube did all it could to steer people to the spin rather than the debate
When the first round of debate cuts come half of those candidates should be gone
I’ve yet to watch the Trump interview I’ll do so tonight when I get home from work
I suspect Trump will reverse his no debate position once the field is down to 3 or 4 but we’ll see
"I saved you," cried that woman
"And you've bit me even, why?
You know your bite is poisonous and now I'm going to die"
"Oh shut up, silly woman," said the reptile with a grin
"You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in
This ad from the DeSantis camp is the first open hit on President Trump and it’s a valid one:
You see there is one basic thing that President Trump missed that has now become very apparent during the Joe Biden years.
If there are no consequences for bad behavior (such as mass shoplifting looting, setting fires and assaulting people on the streets) you get more of it.
Likewise if there is no punishment for corruption in government you get more of it. DeSantis understands this and has made the left pay the price in Florida.
Donald Trump let the left in general and the Clintons in particular off the hook on their corruption because while he was a bit off the reservation in the sense of getting things that needed to be done for the people done, in the end this was the circle he has previous traveled in and hoped once his term(s) were over to travel in again so he let them know that his rhetoric about corruption and draining the swamp was just business.
Alas he didn’t recognize that the swamp didn’t feel the same and even has his campaign in general and he himself in particularly rightly cry foul over the corrupt use of government against him to criminalize political speech they can paraphrase his own words against him
Oh shut up, silly Donald,” leftists cry and laugh and scoff “You knew well what we were back on the day you let us off
Imagine if instead of serving as the governor of Illinois, Democrat J.B. Pritzker is an Uber driver. And Pritzker’s car is loaded with problems. The check engine, oil pressure, ABS, and TPMS warning lights are on.
What would be Pritzker’s fix?
Uber J.B. would simply ignore the problems by having his car professionally detailed, so his vehicle looks good, then he’d place electrical tape over the locations on the dashboard where each warning light is flashing.
Pritzker governs America’s sixth most populous state the same way–by ignoring the metaphorical warning lights facing the Land of Lincoln. Here at Da Tech Guy for years I’ve been railing Illinois’ big three problems–which are intertwined–and they are a massively underfunded public pension system, widespread government corruption, and declining population.
Now there is a fourth one, rampant theft and violent crime. Illinois’ largest city, Chicago, is still suffering from the highest murder rates since the 1990s. Carjackings are skyrocketing–in 2013 there were 344 reporting carjackings, last year the total was 1,674. Because so many shoplifting incidents aren’t reported, I don’t trust any theft figures. But the anecdotal evidence is alarming–shoplifting is soaring.
For years, liberals have, often blaming “corporate greed,” decried the many food deserts in big cities–and rural areas too. A food desert, if you are unfamiliar with the term, is an area without a nearby supermarket selling inexpensive groceries. Chicago, after some pushback from left-wing alderman because it is non-union, didn’t see its first Walmart open until 2006. Eventually there were eight Walmarts in Chicago, but shortly after the election of a far-left Democrat, Brandon Johnson, as mayor, Walmart announced it was closing four of those big box stores. In the press release explaining the reason for the shuttering of those Chicago stores, Walmart revealed “that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago – these stores lose tens of millions of dollars a year, and their annual losses nearly doubled in just the last five years.”
Also last week, multiple media outlets reported that Home Depot, Target, and yes, Walmart, have decried the drastic rise of “shrink,” that is, shoplifting, at its stores. Walmart’s CEO, John Furner, pointed his finger in the right direction about “shrink.”
“It’ll take communities stepping up and enforcing the law to be able to – to bring this issue under control,” Furner said.
While local law enforcement is not the responsibility of Illinois’ governor, Pritzker has never condemned Kim Foxx, the Soros-funded so-called prosecutor in Cook County. Her social worker approach to law enforcement–which Brandon Johnson also favors–is partly responsible for Chicago’s crime wave.
As for Pritzker, thru his ridiculously misnamed SAFE-T Act, the abolishment of cash bail–little or no bail is the current de facto practice of Foxx–will take effect statewide in less than a month.
Here’s my fix for the food desert problem: Hire more cops, have them arrest shoplifters and the criminals who fence their swag, prosecute them in a fair trial, and imprison them if found guilty for a few years. Such a surefire strategy will not only to protect the public and retailers, but it will serve as a deterrent to people considering a life of crime.
Simple and easy.
Illinois’ mainstream media needs to get on board and accurately report on food deserts. In a New York Times-length study by the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago’s NPR affiliate from earlier this month, only one sentence mentioned the real problem, albeit gently. “Grocery operators have pointed to crime and homelessness as reasons they’ve needed to invest more in security, driving up costs,” they reported, “according to Amanda Lai, a Chicago director of food industry practice for the consulting firm McMillan Doolittle.”
Yep, one sentence.
Meanwhile, with the warning lights flashing, J.B. Pritzker continues to drive Illinois into the ground, while pissing away $20 million to fight food deserts. In the short term there is no hope for a repeal of the SAFE-T Act, but that’s part of the cure that Illinois needs.
As Ronald Reagan said, “Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.”
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