Pentagon

I know there's a lot of competition in what is the worst reason to eliminate competition from the health care sector, but I think we have a winner.

Megan McArdle's piece on why she opposes national health care got deservedly wide coverage, and provoked some generally limp objections, such as this offering from Ezra Klein:

For all its waste, elevating the U.S. government to sole purchaser seems to ensure a much-higher rate of military technology innovation than if we left it to the private sector.

How does this remotely make any sense? The reason the government is the sole purchaser of laser-guided 500 lbs bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles is that we don't allow civilians to lob them around at each other. There is no private market for such military technology, unlike for Lipitor or Viagra. Utterly ridiculous

Is the argument the Left is now making is that we need to make civilian health care as cost-effective as Pentagon weapon procurement?  Hello, let's let the folks who gave us $700 hammers get into the bandage business.

 Indeed, one of the shills for socialized medicine once used the Pentagon as a poster child for waste.  And the Center for American Progress, one of Klein's soulmates,decried the program we've used to buy weapons.  So the same system that was utterly broken for the Pentagon prior to Obama is the way to reform health care under Obama? 

Hello? I'm a mick lawyer from deepest suburbia, not someone like Klein who is kingpin of Jornolist and part of the Beltway Brain Trust, but Talking Heads described this whole concept about the time Klein was born.    

Even if you thought these folks made sense before, they sure aren't now that they are in charge.

And Ezra, you know, most of the stuff in this movie happened about the time you were in utero or slurping down formula, and the Pentagon had nothing to do with it.   Innovation? No government bureaucracy to be found here.

Maybe in Klein's future the NEA will be distributing posters "Wouldn't be great if the schools got all the money they needed and they had a bake sale to buy an MRI machine"

Promoted and bumped. -Patrick

I've been involved with many facets of many different types of campaigns: local school board, city council, state legislature, statewide gubernatorial, congressional, ballot initiative, and in-state presidential organizations. When I occassionally speak at campaign management and organization seminars, I am often asked the question: what is the most important part of the campaign? That question is so hard to answer because (1) campaigns are short-term "fire-fighting" operations as much as they are long-term strategic organziations, and (2) each part of the campaign (or at least a good campaign) is interconnected.

Yes, most of the money that gets spent is on paid media, and some will say that because of this, fundraising is the most important facet. While I don't disagree, something that I focus a lot of my attention on is GOTV efforts, a low-cost and high-importance category that has to be planned from the very beginning of the campaign but is executed in the last 72 hours.

So here are a few items of interest that all deal with GOTV efforts: