Is it my "negative energy" ??

    It seems to me that possibly President Obama has spent too much time listening to Oprah.  For when he is asked about the cause of the ObamaCare (now known as ACA or Affordable Care Act) meltdown, he puts much of the blame at the feet of the Republican House members and their opposition to the law.   He blames them by saying that they are not willing to see this law work and are doing everything in their power to destroy it.   This  is the reason, he wants us to believe, they have had such a hard time getting the website ready for their October 1st deadline. 

    But pardon me Mr. President! Every bill the House has sent to reform the law has sat nicely on Harry Reid's desk in the Senate and unable to be brought up for a vote or even a discussion.  Are you saying the the Republicans are emanating some form a "negative energy" that is causing the website to crash, lose data, or simply hang?   Is my negative energy as a voter causing some in ability for people to get on healthcare.gov and search for insurance?  Is that what you are implying?  It seems like it.

   By that same thought, the president seems to be channeling another Oprah ideology by using his power of "positive energy" or "positive thinking" to WILL the healthcare website into being fully functioning and loved by all who visit it.  You hear this in the tenor of his voice when he emphasizes certain words in his speeches on ObamaCare as he says "the law IS working and WILL work in the future". 

    Funny, this is the same man who said in his 2008 speech that "This is the day we will remember that the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal...." who now must either recognize he is not God and work with other politicians to re-write the law (or scrap it) or do everything in his power to "will" it into existence.   Something tells me he will do the later and not the former

What does God want?

   On Sunday I had a long phone conversation with my daughter who is at college.   She is looking for a church to attend down in the Anaheim area and so we spent a while talking about faith and our world.   One thing I was pondering was our faith in Jesus Christ and our desire for our country to be strong.   But is our desire for our country to be strong economically and God's desire for all to come to faith in him and enter his kingdom diametrically opposed to each other.  I say this because often I feel many Christians desire our country to return to God not so much for them to be saved but instead because they fear God will be angry with us and will punish our country with economic and military turmoil which we do not want.  No one wants "fire and brimstone" to rain down on their city or country.

    But I believe we live in a period grace and not fear.   After all, Jesus has paid for ALL of those sins ("He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only ours but also the sins of the whole world"  1 John 3:2) and there is nothing to fear.   God's plan is save as many as possible.   (John 3:16: "For God so loved THE WORLD ...").   If we allow ourselves to live in fear then we have not put our trust in God and what he has done.

   But what if God's plan to bring more people in means that our country must fall?   Are we willing to still pray as he tells us to:  "Thy will be done".  We must look at our hearts and ask ourselves WHY we want God to turn our country politically back in the right direction.   Is it because we want to have a cushy life and a certain economic future?   I have to say I do!   I am no different than many others who see what's happening around us. 

    I told my daughter "I know I spend too much time worrying about politics and I need to spend more time growing spiritually in grace and humility".  I need to ask God to do whatever it takes to save as many as possible and to let myself be used in whatever way he needs.

    I've told my son this before. "America and all the countries of this world are not going to last.  The Constitution is not going to last.   But what will last is God's word and his promise of salvation".  Does this mean we should not care?   No.  But I believe it changes your attitude.   Like a football team what knows "It's only a game", and that after the last second has ticked off the clock their lives go on.  This attitude allows them to keep their cool and play the best game possible.  So also we need to have that same attitude.  We need to know that our eternal salvation is not dependent on who is in the White House.   Those who scrape and claw to get all their political desires met by the next election will in the end be the losers.  

     We will know that God has a bigger plan for us

Lessons from the Roadrunner

    Like many adults my age, I grew up watching on Saturday mornings "The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Hour" and it was the highlight of my week as a kid.   We laughed so hard as kids watching Wile E. Coyote go after the Road Runner with his plans involving rockets, anvils, springs, catapults and explosives purchased from ACME corporation (he must have had an enormous credit card bill).     Often his escapade ended with him going over a cliff and true to fashion he would go straight off the cliff until he lost speed.  Finally after he came to a complete stop, the truth of the situation would dawn on him as he looked down and see the canyon floor.  Then suddenly gravity would take control and down he would go after only moments of time for him to deploy a sign saying "Help" or some other message for us viewers to read to let us know what he was really thinking while the Road-Runner was standing nearby to watch the fate of his adversary.

     And down he would go , getting smaller and smaller until all we would see was a puff of dirt and the sound of a bang as he hit the dessert floor. (Note: I learned more about one-point perspective drawing at the age of 8 watching these cartoons than any where else although I had no idea that it was called that at the time).

     I don't know if our President ever watched these cartoons when he was young, but now I do believe he feels like Wile E. Coyote right now as he watches his poll numbers fall off the proverbial "cliff" and see what it feels like to be "George W Bush".

     The media for so long had helped him "defy gravity".  They gave him softball interview questions, allowed shows like "The View" and "Jon Stewart" to fill in as pressers.   They put pictures of him on their magazine covers with the Presidential Seal in the background as a Messianic "halo" and labelled anyone who was against him a racist or a bigot.  But now he has lost speed and he must look down at the chasm below from which no one can help him.   His promises are now the seed for late night comedians and his namesake legislation, embossed with his name ObamaCare (although many in the media are now starting to refer to it by its legislative name Affordable Care Act), is the laughing stock of the internet world.   While I don't find it as funny as the Road-Runner cartoons I do find it a sorry situation that our country has found itself in.  After all, we elected him to this office despite his lack of leadership skills, his lack of business skills and lack of political skills (no bills he ever had to write or sell, voting present instead of yes/no and only two years as a Senator).  We, in a sense, put the rocket pack on his back and he lit the fuse to send himself over the cliff and now we must watch his presidency disappear into the vast canyon of history.

    But even sadder is that his downward flight still has 3 more years to go.

Never go into business with a competitor

    This blog falls into the category of "Are you stupid??"

    There is an old rule of business that says to never go into a business venture with a competitor (especially a much LARGER competitor).  It never ends well for you.   The reason is simple.  Your competitor doesn't have your best interest at heart and will always leave you hanging.

   With a collective "What were you thinking?" we wonder who thought this would be a good idea to go into business with a competitor (i.e. the government) to sell insurance?   To me it's been a bad deal all around for the healthcare companies.  First, they have to modify all their plans to be ObamaCare compliant thus forcing many of their plans to be cancelled and thereby losing customers.   Then they have to rely on the government to set up the "exchanges" on websites to funnel new customers (hopefully young and healthy ones) to the healthcare providers.  But now we find out that the HealthCare.gov website was only designed to handler roughly 1000 customers at a time (that's 20 people per state... ugh!).   So not only is their competitor making them lose customers, they are not aiding them in getting new ones. 

It's almost as if the system was designed to fail and put the healthcare companies out of business.

Can I be good without God?

      Recently when I was driving down I-80 in California I saw a billboard that asked:
     
               "Are you good without God?"

     Immediately I began to ask myself, "Can you?".   On the surface it seems plausible as we do see plenty of charitable people who are openly non-religious.  Ted Turner once gave the UN one billion dollars to help remove landmines from countries recovering from war.  Certainly that is a noble cause and no one compelled him to do it (as least that we know of) and he has often declared himself to be atheist.  but let's dig a little deeper into that claim, "I can be GOOD without God".   Just what is GOOD?   Jesus was once approach by a rich man who said "Good Teacher what must I do to inherit the kingdom?" and Jesus replied "Why do you call be GOOD, when there is only ONE who is GOOD and that is God".   To define good, you need a reference to compare to is what Jesus is saying.    You can't know what is black unless you compare it to what is white.  You can't tell what is a lie unless you have the truth to compare it to.

      Some would say it would determined by society and those around me rather than an ancient religious teaching.  To some degree that can be true.  Japanese culture for example puts extreme social pressure on its people to as to how to take care of their families and behave in society.  But can this be a false or misleading measuring device?   Take for example Nazi Germany.  Here a whole country was lead down a path of eugenics and committed nationwide genocide on other citizens illustrating how "good" can be so horribly modified over time to be so destructive.  First they determined that they could not afford to take care of the mentally or physically handicapped and buses would pull up to hospitals with "special medical staff" to help end these patients lives.  Posters were made asking Germans if its right to spend so much money on people who will never be able to take care of themselves.   After a while they decided that the terminally sick and those with genetic diseases were to be euthanized to save society the pain of providing for them.  From there it was not hard to convince that certain ethnic groups were weaker and damaging to their race and complete eradication was in order. 

Ask yourself:

              "What if Darwinism was the first religion"?
               "How would our world look today under Darwinism?"
 
        Would we have anything remotely resembling the 10 commandments?   Probably not.  Of course the first 3 would be out because they deal directly with "God" (although I might suppose they would have some rules regarding discussion of other ideas as being unsavory or wrong-minded).  What about the 5th commandment?  Thou shalt not kill?   Under Darwinism, survival of the fittest, this concept is counter productive.  After all, if another person is too "weak" to defend themselves then they should be eliminated and improve the gene pool.  Protecting the weak from elimination is foolish in their sight.   Then there's the 6th commandment: "Thou shall not commit adultery".  Doesn't this create a conflict with the main tenant of Darwinism to create as many of your offspring to dominate a region?  Isn't it in my best interest to have as many wives as possible?  Heck, why even have wives at all?  That just slows down the whole procreating process altogether and the concept of rape would be non-existent.  Then there is the 7th commandment: "Thou shall not steal".   This too would be counterproductive in Darwinism for the same reason as the 5th.  The stronger should be able to maintain their possessions and their food.  Too illustrate, I recently watched a program on how wolves reintroduced to Wyoming are stealing food from mountain-lions and so they have to hunt more often.  This is having a negative impact on their ability to reproduce (side note:  it was so called well meaning environmentalists from the group 1491 that came up with this ingenious plan to bring wolves in from Canada).  Here we see nature using "stealing" as a way to help "their kind" to advance.  And what about the 8th commandment?  Thou shall not lie.  Hmmm.   This too is in the same category as stealing.   After all, lying is actually used by the animal kingdom in many ways.  For example, the use of camouflage is a method of "lying" because it says "there's no one here waiting to pounce on you".  Some animals even pretend to be other kinds of animals.  For example the gopher-snake has the same colorings as a rattlesnake.  Why?   So they can kill other rattlesnakes. Some birds will take over a nest, lay their eggs in the nest along side the other eggs and then take off to let the other bird incubate them and feed them. When the birds get bigger, the bird that was added, kills the other birds and takes their food (isn't nature lovely!).   Lying can be used advantageously by one person over another and if under Darwinism they other is to stupid or dull-minded to know the difference then too bad.   And finally the 9th and 10th would be gone as well as they are about wanting what others have for yourself which goes against our human nature to provide as much food and protection for ourselves as we can gather to live as long as we can.

      So there you have a world in which Darwinism is the first religion of the world.  Kill who you want.  Steal from whom you want.   Have sex with whoever you desire.  Lie and cheat as much as you want and by all means take all you desire. 

     What a wonderful world it would be (sarcasm added)

      I hope this shows that atheism piggy-backs on other religions and claims it can do it all by itself when clearly it cannot.  For if atheism was the first on the scene, we would have none of the laws that have benefited society and our world for thousands of years. (Technically atheism can never be the first on the scene, for in order to have a belief in "no god" you must first have a belief in a "god" to not believe in. In other words, atheism must always derive itself from theism and therefore come later)

     Jesus once said, "The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.  Though it is small, it grows into the largest of garden plants and the birds of the air nest in its branches".  For the Jew, birds are meant to symbolize evil people or non-believers and so Jesus is showing that even non-believers benefit from the Kingdom of God.

   Q:  So can you be good without God? 
   A:  Not unless there is a God in the first place to tell you what GOOD IS FIRST!

Dr Quincy we need you!

    In the 1970's and 80's there was a famous TV crime show called "Quincy M.E." (Medical Examiner).   This show was an early version of CSI:Miami, only without the dim-lights, hush-hush dialog, sexy lab-workers and gun-toting-coroners .  It was the first show to use science to find murderers and solve crimes.  In one show, for example, Quincy solves a murder where a man poisons his wife slowly over time with "lead" in her coffee.  Her doctor doesn't suspect anything wrong and treats her for anemia.    She of course dies from lead poisoning, but Quincy is able to find the lead in her "ashes" and convict the husband.

     Where is Quincy when you need him because the "perfect crime" has been committed against the American people in the name of healthcare.  To explain, let's go back to 2009 when this all started.   The democrats owned both houses and the presidency.   They made it their mission to "fix healthcare" and began proceedings to look at "solutions" (most of which had already been written).  The healthcare industry had seen this before under Clinton and the democrats knew that.  They knew they needed to keep the healthcare providers appeased or else they would dump millions of dollars into elections to push them out.   To do this, the democrats promised that their solution would provide  between 6 and 30 million new customers to the healthcare companies in return for them having the power to regulate them.   The healthcare companies pulled back their opposition funding and said "ok"  (Karl Marx once said "The capitalist will sell you the very rope to hang him with").  

      But what has happened is:

1. Most young people are opting for the "penalty" under ObamaCare since it's less costly than buying health insurance.
2. Healthcare companies now have to take people with pre-existing conditions like cancer and diabetes.  Without bringing in more healthy people (see #1) insurers are incurring more costs.
3. People trying to get healthcare from healthcare.gov are finding it impossible to log in and submit their enrollment.  Obama "says" they will fix the issue, but what's the hurry?  They will get to it sooner or later...(just look at how long we have been investigating Benghazi!)
4. ObamaCare limits what providers can charge and how much they can raise their rates.  They will be stuck between a proverbial "rock and a hard place" with the only choice eventually being to go out of business.

    The progressives (note I don't say democrats here) plan is not that Obamacare will "morph" into Universal Healthcare, but instead that it will drive out all the competition and create a healthcare "crisis" of such a magnitude that the only solution is to have the federal government take it over and give us ... Universal Healthcare.  It's the perfect crime of the century as all the consequences look like they were accidental/coincidental and not intentional.   It will be a slow painful death (like lead poisoning) for the health insurers over many years.  They intend it to be that way because you can't kill off 1/6th of the economy over night or else people will become suspicious.  Instead it must be slowly so that no one notices.  

    This is why ObamaCare must be repealed as soon as possible (and NOT replaced).  

You think ObamaCare is bad now?

   There's an old polygamy joke that goes like this:  

Question: What's the punishment for having more than one wife ?  

Answer :  Having more than one wife. 

     So also one might say the punishment for having big government is having... a big government to deal with. 

     We have all heard the horror stories of people doing business with those in government   How it's slow, unresponsive and lacking in concern and feeling.   Just look at how people fly thru the DMV at a snails pace.  People waiting in chairs for hours because it makes no difference to those working in the DMV if they serve 5 or 500 customers a day.   They will still have their jobs and their cushy retirement programs.  But now we have ObamaCare which is the "DMV on steroids" with millions of people waiting line rather than a few hundred.  The federal government's computers and computer networks and databases were never designed to work in the real world and in real time.  They were designed to be accessed by a few thousand government bureaucrats working on government computers.   It was never designed to be accessed by millions of people with a variety of computer interfaces outside the government networks who want answers NOW not in 1 to 3 days.  Some have argued that the IRS deals with large numbers of people so why can't ObamaCare ?  Simply because processing 1040s at your leisure ( you submit your data to the IRS and they get back to you at a later time) is completely different than processing requests real time.  

     I think ObamaCare is a gift to those who believe in small government as it shows us all how bad it really can be.  After all, most Americans do not deal with the federal government on a regular basis.  For most of us, April 15th is really the only time we interface with an agency of our beloved government.  But now, thanks to AHA millions of us will be getting a daily dose of government run healthcare and will see how bad it can get.  I think it to be hilarious that those who have never run a business let alone a website have taken on more they can handle as all it takes to bring the system down is one slow unresponsive database or network and crash goes the system. So often politicians tell us "We sent a man to the moon and back ... we can certainly do ______".   But it's one thing to cram 3 men in space capsule and hurl them 238,000 miles into space and back and it's another thing to handle 1/6 of the nations economy and handle millions of people with millions of differing health issues and needs.

     Of course we are now hearing the excuses from the media about how this is just version 1.0 and things will get better in 2.0 

Why I don't think it will get better

1) ObamaCare is a mess to start with:

ObamaCare Flow Chart

    With over 3000 pages and thousands of pages of regulations and exceptions yet to be added, it is the perfect example of something that was "designed by committee" by people who have never worked a day in their lives int he private sector.  In my company we call this "powerpoint engineering"  where all looks great from a Powerpoint presentation slide but the real devil is in the details of implementation.

2) ObamaCare is a moving target:

    Every day new regulations and exceptions are being added.  Who's not eligible and who is and for how much.  This becomes a programming nightmare for those doing the software development.  The main challenge of ObamaCare 2.0 won't be in fixing the user interface issues, instead it will be incorporating the AHA 5.3.1.2.a  changes that either someone in HHS or Congress has requested.  Going back to the NASA example, the main thing that allowed NASA to land a man on the moon was that the moon has a regular stationary orbit that obeys the laws of physics which does not change.   Government, industry, and the medical field are not.  Peoples needs change constantly.  The medical field is constantly evolving and improving.  Medical procedures that were not even thought of 10 years ago are common place today while methods used 10 years ago are now extinct.  Likewise the business and internet landscape morph as newer ways of communicating and paying for our services come about and business adapts to these changing needs.
   
     If history is any predictor of the future, we will see countless "glitches" to come.  Like a dog who pees on a tree to leave his mark over another dogs, so also bureaucrat after bureaucrat will come in want to "change" the system make their mark on it 

    .... only in this case WE ARE THE TREE.

3) Government systems were never designed to be efficient

     As I mentioned before, it's one thing for a system to be accessed by a government worker who has nothing better to do with their time that wait for a response (they get paid anyway) and it's another thing to have a system designed to be accessed by person who does.   

     ObamaCare is the first time in our countries history that we are witnessing the government try to "compete" (if you can call it that) with the private sector.   In their smugness our politicians have over-sold themselves with their "Yes we can!" chanting and now they must deliver on what they promised and so far many are very very unimpressed. 

4) Enrollment is the EASY part... delivering the goods is the HARD part

    In a famous episode of Seinfeld, Jerry lambasts a rental-car agency clerk who did not have a car for Jerry even though he had a "reservation".   He informs the agent, "Anyone can TAKE a reservation, its the KEEPING of the reservation that is the important part!".   

    Likewise , ask anyone who works in sales and they will tell you receiving the orders is the easy part, it's the delivery of the product that is difficult.  Given this, ObamaCare enrollment should have been the easy part for them and paying for it all even harder because you will have the system accessed by millions of workers from doctors offices, to hospitals and clinics around the country.  All of them trying to access the system for payment or to see if you are enrolled or not and whether or not they will pay for procedure X.   Now imagine, you standing in the doctor's office waiting for them to access your records... waiting ... waiting ... waiting.   It's one thing to tell a person at home on their computer to "Please try again later" and it's another to have them stand there for hours waiting for an answer.  If you think I am just trying to scare you, look at Canada.  A recent government study of their own healthcare system showed that the AVERAGE wait time to see a doctor was 17.7 weeks. That is almost 5 months!   Can you imagine you wake up one day and you have blurry vision or constant dizziness and you need to see a doctor but the soonest they can see you is in 4-5 months?   (also, that is an average wait time which means would could be waiting for 7-8 months in some cases).   That is what awaits us with ObamaCare in the future.

5) ObamaCare doesn't need to get better.... they just have to make the others suck more!

    The only way for government to compete with the private sector will be to constantly change the rules of the game and thus penalize their opponents in order to win.   This puts the government at unfair advantage over its "competitors".

     Take for example the mandate that insurers must take people with pre-existing conditions.  This allows people to hold off on paying for health insurance (they will still have to pay the penalty) until they need it.  But private insurers need these healthy customers to help pay for the less-healthy.   Without them, they will need to raise their rates to cover of cost of the ones who do.  This is liking bring your car on a flat-bed truck to the insurance company to buy insurance AFTER you've had an accident.   If insurers were forced to take you as a customer, no one would buy it until they needed it and all the insurers would go broke.

   Secondly, the government can force the private sector to pay for procedures and drugs that are too costly for them since they don't own a printing machine that prints 100 dollar bills like Congress does.  This leaves the private companies with no other choice other than to raise their rates to cover those costs as well.

    All of this will then force more and more people over to ObamaCare until all that is left is a single-payer system.  (kind of what they had in mind... don't you think?)  

6) The political class will not be using ObamaCare

    You may think that if we end up with a single-payer system, won't it be in Congress's best interest to make ObamaCare work too since they will be using it as well?   Answer: no.    This is because they have (and will always) exempt themselves from their own law.  They will be able to pay for their own healthcare without using the government system.  Watch and you will see the development of a large group of doctors and hospitals grow up around Washington DC to serve the political class directly.  They will get excellent healthcare while the rest of us will be standing in lines that would make a DMV worker blush.   For just like they see no reason to improve the TSA because they fly in their own government-run jets, they will have no incentive to improve the single-payer-healthcare system either.

7) Scam-ers and hackers will make it even worse.

   With every government program that doles out money, the scam-ers are bound to follow.   Medicare, for example, has been a bonanza for scam-ers to tap into and bilking the program for billions of dollars of fraud and abuse every year.   ObamaCare will undoubtedly eclipse Medicare fraud in little or no time at all.   A common way for them to do this is to submit bogus claims and abuse the new ObamaCare medical codes (there are thousands of them now) to get payment for services not performed.   Still others will milk the system by acting as ObamaCare advocates and surrogates.  These people will promise to help people "navigate" the complex world of federal healthcare only to leave the people in worse shape than they started.  They will prey upon the fears of the elderly and the uneducated and will con them out of their hard earned savings by claiming to have connections not available to the average person.   

    

    Finally, computer hackers looking for a new target will set their sites on ObamaCare to:

• Terrorize the system (for fun or for profit)
• Gain access to valuable information (SS#, Tax records, Medical Records, etc..)

     To keep ahead of this, the programmers will have to patch their software on a daily and maybe even hourly basis to close the various backdoor-entries and prevent:

• Trojan horses
• Invalid-code entries
• Worms 
• Viruses 
• Data-miners
• Password-loggers

    So if you still think that ObamaCare 1.0 will get better under 2.0 there is nothing more I can do for you other than to say "Good Luck!" and tell you to bring something to read when you go to the doctor's office .... you'll need it!

An offensive flag

   If you thought I was going to discuss flags like this

or even this ...

you would be wrong.

Instead I am talking about this...

     At Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill California (where else) a principal banned (yes banned!) the wearing of the American flag during Cinco de Mayo (May 5).  While students were allowed to wear shirts with the Mexican flag (and some were even wearing "La Raza" flags), students were not allowed to wear or display the American flag as it might be found to be offensive to some students and insight a riot.  Recently this case came to a federal court and the federal judge agreed with the principal's decision.


    While I do understand that students do not have full freedom of speech on campus and they do have a right to say what is allowed and what is not allowed (do we really want pornographic T-shirts etc.. around the campus?)  but is it too much to ask our youth to RESPECT each others flags and views?  After all, when foreign dignitaries come to our country they raise their flag and play their anthem at government dinners and meetings.  We stand and honor their flag as they do in return for ours.  (Our flag is always flown higher than theirs when in our country).  We raise the Canadian flag at hockey, baseball and basketball games between our two countries and our fans stand out of of RESPECT.

    A while back I wrote a blog about how political correctness in schools removes all opportunities for our children to learn self-control, respect and honor.  These necessary traits for a decent society are not instinctive to use as humans.  In fact just the opposite is true of us.  These traits must be taught at a young age or else they never will be learned and to learn them is to be put into situations where others who are not like you and may disagree with you are present.  But if political correctness takes away all of these learning opportunities then our children will be like kids who never received their measles or diphtheria shots and will be unprepared to handle worse situations when they are older.


  

NBA and ObamaCare

    I am an avid sports fan.  I love watching football (New England Patriots... of course!) , baseball (Red Sox and Cardinals), hockey (Bruins and Blues) and occasionally tennis.  I grew up playing these sports and enjoy watching teams compete at all levels (high school, college, professional).  To many sports are often metaphoric.  They are "the world in micro".   The weak verses the strong.  The little against the big.  The good vs the bad.   The fast against the not-so-fast.   The rich against the not-so-rich.  The under-dog against the big-dog.

   For a few years I even enjoyed watching the NBA.  Living in Sacramento, there wasn't much to celebrate for a long time.   Then in 2000, things changed and the Kings began to have winning seasons and I like many took notice and began to watch.  It was exciting and my kids and I would watch every game we could.   My son and his friends got tickets that allowed them to sit 3 rows up from the teams bench.  My daughter and I even got to see the a playoff game with Utah.   But then 2002 Game 6 with the LA Lakers happened.   We watched in horror as the Lakers were sent to the free throw line 40 times compared to the Kings 25 times.  We gasped as Mike Bibby of the Kings was smashed in the face by Kobi Bryant with a forearm right in front of a referee standing 10 ft away and no foul was called even though Bibby was lying on the floor with blood coming out of his nose.  We cried out when we would see Shaquille stand in the 3 second zone for 5,6 even 7 seconds with no lane violation called.   Webber and Divak were called for fouls that one could only say were because they got in the way of the Lakers movement to the basket. 

    In the end, the Kings lost to the Lakers 106-102 and for days afterward, sports casters and sports writers (many not connected to the Kings) excoriated the NBA for having a playoff game so poorly officiated one can only assume that it was rigged from the top.  It angered not only Kings fans, but also fans across the nation who demanded an investigation be done to see what could be done to prevent such a travesty from occurring again. 

    Clearly the NBA Commissioner, David Stern, wanted to see a Game 7 between the two teams because it would be one of the most watched games ever for the NBA.  But his vision was too short sighted.  While, yes, he did get his Game 7 match-up (the Lakers won and went on to easily win the Championship), he lost the belief of NBA fans in the game.   For a long time many suspected that the league was not officiated fairly, (even during the regular season) and now they had visible hard proof that solidified their views.  

    I was one of those people.

    I never watched another NBA game after that season.  I could not watch "star players" go on being treated differently than "non-start players".   I told my son once, "they should put a big gold star on the front and back of their jersey so the refs, fans and other players know that certain rules don't apply to them".  And I wasn't alone either.   The NBA after that season began to see a slow and steady decline in viewers and fans.  In 2002, the Championship game had a Nielson Rating of 10.2 but the 2003 Championship only garnered a lowly 6.5 rating (second lowest in history).   

    We as Americans love sports.  But what we demand even more than good players is good referees and fairness during the play.  Without fairness and equal application of the rules, the sport turns into nothing more than another version of the WWE were the winner is already known and everything we see is just theater.

    So how does this apply to ObamaCare (AHA) you ask.  Well just like the NBA is playing favorites to some players and giving them different rules to follow, so also our government is picking winners and losers in how it applies to AHA.  No sooner than the law was signed into affect, the President began giving "waivers" to companies who were favorable to him and helped him get elected. Later, when it was found out that government workers were not shielded from the law and would be paying through the nose for their healthcare, the President swooped in to give them an exception. When Union workers saw that they were going to pay more the cried out for an exception too and given their support for the President to win his last election they will most likely get one.  GE also saw they were going to have to pay more because of the medical-device-tax and so they have lobbied Congress hard to make an exception for them as well to protect them from this tax.

    Is this fair?  Is this right?

    Of course not! This defies what we believe in.   We believe in equal-protection-under-the-law.   We believe laws are to be administered equally and justly (like rules on a basketball court) and we are angered when the rich or the politically connected get off with no jail and little or no fines.  Obama ran on being for the little-guy but his last 5 years have shown just the opposite.  

    I don't believe the American people will take this much longer.  I believe (and hope) they will grow tired of watching this game and demand things be changed.  But maybe I am just an optimist.   After all, it's been over 10 years since the 2002 NBA playoffs and people are still wasting their time watching basketball even though "stars" will charge without being called, stand in the lane for what seems like an eternity and move around the court without even trying to dribble the ball.