Here are some thoughts from 30,000 feet – as I am flying up to Sacramento for a quick trip to the State Capitol…

The real “hidden tax” in the health care arena is not this number that accounts for the costs of uninsured people who nevertheless receive health care services. Oh, that is a troubling situation to be sure, and we need to figure out a way curb the ability of those who choose not to have coverage to get services for free (“free” is code for “from other taxpayers”).

The real “hidden tax” comes from what John Graham, the Director of Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, refers to as “overinsurance.”

It is estimated that one-quarter to one-third of health care is wasted because almost nobody has the right incentives to use it wisely. Our third-party payer system takes away any incentive for patients with health care plans to be concerned with whether they “over use” their coverage. In fact, many do because there is an incentive to “get more” from their coverage.

According to Graham, this “hidden tax of… Read More

As liberal a city as San Francisco is, one would think the left-wing bleeding-heart political leaders there who so loudly advocate for the homeless would by now have solved the problem of homelessness and also dealt with the City’s asocials and aggressive panhandlers in a consistent and caring way, getting these folks the help they need and off the streets. Indeed, it seemed like some progress had been made in recent years — at the insistence from the hotel association. But judging from our recent vacation interlude in downtown S.F. this weekend, the unfortunate, and the freaks, are stillmasters ofthe streets, day and night on weekends, in stronger numbers than ever. This sad situation can’t be good for business in San Francisco, and it demonstrates how heartless liberals can be in insisting on peoples intangible rights above all rather than delivering tangible, substantive programs to actually improve people’s situations.

We decided to take a long weekend in San Francisco to "recharge the batteries." My grandmother and father were born in The City, and I grew up in the Bay Area, so we have some history there. We thought it… Read More

With only two weeks to go, there is one issue the candidates for CRP officehardly seem to talk about and yet it affects every other aspect of whattheir ability to finish their campaign promises. The CRP is in debt! Not just a little debt, but I’m told and have seen figures that amount to $4.6 million. This is unprecedented for the CRP. Yet, no one is really talking about it. The CRP has clearly earned the "Biggest Party Debt Award". To give some perspective the RNC with all their spending ended $3 million debt. See here. It has now been paid off. When will the CRP’s? … Read More

The LA Times has a story today about the Trung Nguyen Photoshop incident.

The story broke on Red County/OC Blog and was developed and moved forward by the larger OC blogosphere.

Not that you’d know it from the LA Times article, which completely ignores that fact and give no credit to the blogs. Most LA Times readers will think the LAT got the scoop.

Read more about it here and here on Red County/OC Blog.

UPDATE (5:00 p.m.): I got off the phone a little while ago with Jeff Gottlieb, City Editor of the OC edition of the LA Times. Jeff was very gracious. He said it was the policy of the Times to give credit where it is due and that it was an omission in this case, for which he apologized.

That was a classy thing to do.… Read More

The special election to fill the 1st Supervisor District seat here in OC — a consequence of Lou Correa’s election to the state Senate — has been an interesting one.

This weekend, however, it really took a turn for the weird.

One of the candidates is Garden Grove school board trustee Trung Nguyen, who’s being backed by the formidable political operation of Assemblyman Van Tran and more than a $100,000 of his own money.

This weekend a Trung Nguyen for Supervisor campaign ad appeared in the Vietnamese-langauge newspaper Vien Dong, inwhich Trung has obviously been Photoshopped into a photo with Gov. Schwarzenegger at a Lynn Daucher for Senate rally last year.

There’s been no comment yet from the Trung Nguyen campaign.

Here’s the Photoshopped picture:

Compare it with other photos of the rally — including what Trung was really wearing — here on Red County/OC Blog.… Read More

For those wondering what happened to the staple of Sunday San Diego…hey, I didn’t post yesterday, ok? Fleischman said he was going to half my pay as a result. I went to public schools, and (not but) I can figure 50 percent of zilch. So, what do you want for free?

Speaking of real media sources, however, which have real deadlines that can’t be missed, let’s take a look at the San Diego Union-Trib’s increase in blogging.

As noted previously, Chris Reed’s America’s Finest Blog has been a welcome addition to the U-T, utilizing a sometimes acerbic opinion style that the more stoic newsprint editorial pages can’t – or won’t – even begin to touch. Bottom line: Chris’ no-holds-barred writing is an entertaining must read.

Without getting into the unknown legal nuances between the U-T’s broadsheet and the on-line SignOnSanDiego.com, the editors do want to… Read More

If you take an Internet stroll to the Democratic Party of Orange County’s web site you find the typical party RA-RA and fund raising appeals and smartly a big pitch for Dem endorsed supervisorial candidate Tom Umberg.

Down at the bottom of the page is one of those rolling straw polls for the Democratic Nominee for President. It’s been operational since Nov. 28, 2006 and over 1200 people have responded to the on-line poll.

I thought it would be fun to put in a vote for Kucinich in the straw poll. I assumed it would be one of only a handful for the guy. Surely Hillary or Obama would lead the pack. I thought maybe Bill Richardson would be high on the list, after all Orange County is a conservative place, maybe our Democrats would prefer a more moderate Dem.

I was embarrassed for my local rival party when I saw that my shill vote for Kucinich was joined with hundreds of others.

No political professional considers Kucinich to be a real candidate for anything other than perhaps re-election and certainly a good shampoo and hair cut. Yet it seems that the Dems in OC are excited about his… Read More

Term Limits, on balance, have been good for California. Term limits have been around long enough now that there are actually a lot of people involved in politics who really don’t remember what it was like before they were voted into place by the California electorate back in 1990. What we had before term limits was the era of the career politician. You know how your local Congressman has been in office for what seems like a lifetime? Well, that is how it used to be for members of the Senate and the Assembly. In many cases, members of the legislature never had any other career before leaping into state house. Once they got there, legislators would serve in office for decades (or even longer). This created a system where the personal relationships became the dominant factor in the Capitol — which ended up primarily serving the ends of crafty politicians like uber-Speaker Willie Brown. Now there is a healthy turn-over of legislators that insures that those who are elected do not lose touch with those that put them in office. Unfortunately, because of the grossly unbalanced legislative districts crafted by a politician-drafting redistricting… Read More