$82,000 per year for Nursing Home??

From Wednesday's Wall St Journal.  Headline "Nursing Homes Balk at Senate Bill".  The nursing home industry is largely paid for from Medicaid and the industry fears the reductions in Medicaid funding will cut into their revenue.  Tough.
   I can send a child to college for only $40,000 a year.  You'd think all those PHD college profs, and all those overpaid and useless administrators would be more expensive than staffing a nursing home.  Put another way, that $82,000 a year comes out to $224.65 a day.  I can rent a first class Washington DC hotel room for half of that.  I means these are nursing homes, not hospital ICU's.  They provide a room with a bed, maid service, three squares a day, and somebody on the front desk 24/7 in case of emergency.  Somehow I think you could do that for  DC hotel room rates. 
   Note to self.  Hope my health holds up so I can die peacefully in my bed at my home.  Plead with my children to take me in should I no longer be able to shop and cook for myself. 

McConnell lacks the votes to pass Healthcare reform

Might have guessed it.  As of this morning's TV some ten "Republican" senators won't vote for McConnell's health care bill.  These "Republicans" are throwing away Republican chances in the 2018 election.  Us voters voted Republicans in to get Obamacare out.  We know that Obamacare has doubled the price of insurance and thrown a lot of people out of work.  Once we figure out that Republicans cannot do anything, they are gone and the Democrats will be back in charge.  
   And, to add insult to injury, these ten "Republicans" haven't told anyone (voters, newsies, McConnell) what is wrong with McConnell's bill.  Does it cut too much from some pet program?  Is it really just a patch on Obamacare to keep it running a while longer?  Does it lack something they care  about?  They ought to have some reasons they can express on TV for scuttling their own party and turning the country back over to the Democrats in 2018.  To say nothing of ruining their personal chances of re-election. 

US spends 19% of GNP on healthcare

That's twice as much as any other country in the world spends.  And American health, as measured by life expectancy and infant mortality, is not a good as about 10 other countries.  In short, for spending twice as much, we don't get any healthier.
  So  Congressional attempts to cut the expense of Obamacare are the right thing to do.  We ought to cut healthcare spending down to 10% of GNP, from 19% today.  Every other country in the world offers health as good as in the US, and spends only 10% of GNP doing it.  It they can do it, so can we. 
  

Anti Russian voter hacking measures we ought to take

Go to paper ballots.  Keep them after the election in case of a recount.  Get rid of voting machines which are nothing more than desktop computers running a ballot program.  And could be hacked at the factory, at the polls, over the net, every which way, and you could never figure out what happened. 
   Let's have some security on voter registration lists.  If hostile hackers managed to erase say 10% of all Republicans registered, that would throw the election to the Democrats.  A voter shows up at the polls, and he isn't on the registration list, he doesn't get to vote.  Ten percent of either side is enough to decide most elections. 
   Since we cannot do any paperwork without putting it on computer these days, we need some security on the machines that hold  the voter registration lists at cities and towns.  The machine[s] that store and modify the voter registration lists must NOT be connected to the public internet in any way shape or fashion.  Keep the machines in a locked room and only allow a minimum of people access to them.  Backup the voter registration list[s] every week or so, and store the backups off line and off site.  When  new voters are registered give them a printed certificate of registration that they can use to prove they registered should the computers mess up some how. 

What is in those two healthcare bills?

We have one bill passed in the House, and second one about to be voted on in the Senate.  But I have no real idea what each bill does.  For that matter I don't know all the things tucked away in 10000 pages of Obamacare.  Nobody does really.  Nobody can read and understand 10000 pages of legal gobble-de-gook.
   The health care bill I  like would repeal the Obamacare requirements that have forced a lot of workers into part time work.  It would spell out who gets government subsidies and how much.  It would allow the sale of  "hospitalization only" insurance which is a quarter the cost of  "Obamacare covers everything" insurance.  It would  require insurance companies to maintain coverage on insured patients who get sick, and allow such "pre existing conditions" patients to even change insurance companies should they need to (say like they took a new job) .   Uninsured patients who get sick would have to pay something more to get insurance  than ordinary patients.  Medicaid should be reserved for mothers, children and the truly disabled.  Able bodied grownups should get a job with health insurance or pay for their own.  Health insurance premiums should be deductible on federal income tax to even things up between the self employed and the company employee who gets tax free health care thru hisher job. 
   I have no idea if either of the Congressional health care bills have any of these things.  Neither do the newsies. 

"Slants" is derogatory?

An Asian American rock band wanted to call themselves "The Slants".  Some well fed bureaucrat refused to let them trademark the name.  He claimed "Slants" was derogatory. 
  Strange.  I was in the Air Force, I did a turn in South East Asia during the Viet Nam war.  We had a lot of bad names for things we didn't like, the enemy, the locals, the food, the weather, the service, and others.  I don't remember "slant" as one of them.  "Slope" you heard, and slant-eye ( as opposed to round-eye) you heard, but  I don't remember "slant" by itself as a put down. 
   Any how they took this one to the Supreme Court, and won,  The band may trademark "Slants".  Owners of the Washington Redskins, and the Cleveland Indians, both facing similar harassment from bureaucrats are relieved.  They figure they will win their Supreme Court cases.  
   Welfare for lawyers.

Suppose we assassinate Kim Jong whats-his-face, NORK dictator

That ought to slow 'em down a bit.  The NORKs already have nuclear weapons and rockets.  It's only a matter of time (a year? two? three?) before they have a nuke mounted on a rocket with the range to reach US soil.  We need to prevent that.  Nobody wants to start up the Korean War again, that is too awful to bring back. Diplomacy has been tried for twenty years or more to no avail.  Getting a nuclear deterrent (strike force) is so important to Kim that no amount of diplomacy will get him to stop. 
   If we bumped off Kim, it would leave a leadership vacuum.  There would be a struggle between the various number 2 men to take his place.  Kim has been executing anyone who looks dangerous to him and so the bench of number 2 men is pretty thin.  To take over as NORK dictator you have to have some name recognition and some friends to back you up.  We don't know if anyone up north has both the name recognition and the friends required. 
  The NORK regime might just come apart.  It's already under strain, what with peasants starving the the villages and shortages of nearly everything.  The only thing holding it together is the army and the secret police.  With Kim gone, nobody knows if they would stay loyal to the regime.  They might not.  At which point, there are very strong forces to pull North and South Korea back together.  Much stronger forces than any number 2 man struggling to take over could muster.  That result would be wonderful for us and for South Korea. 
   How to off Kim?  Simplest is a smart bomb thru his bedroom window.  Or a Hellfire on his official limousine (with Kim inside it of course).  Or a very gutsy sniper team parachutes in somewhere, gets to within 500 yards of Kim, plugs him and then boogies to a pickup spot and waits for the Jolly Greens to pick them up.