Opinion Forum

An Immodest Proposal

April 21st, 2011

By Brian Bagent I may be mistaken, but it has probably been a couple years since a trial-balloon was floated regarding implementing a Value-Added Tax (VAT) here in the States. With the way the budget, revenue, and debt are being discussed, it is bound to come up again as a means to “solve” the problems [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: business, debt, Europe, Fair Tax, income tax, profit, taxes, U.S., VAT
Categories: Economics, Politics | Comments (5) | Home

Are We There Yet?

March 30th, 2011

By Brian Bagent Every parent has heard this more times than we care to remember, but this isn’t about parenting. I’m talking about the days of the ultimate inversion. The set-up has been a long time coming, but I think we’re about there. Year before last, when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked about constitutional authority [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: Commerce Clause, Filburn, free trade, freedom, healthcare, Obamacare
Categories: History, Law, News, Politics | Comments (4) | Home

Observations from the Trenches

March 13th, 2011

By Brian Bagent The trenches of health care delivery, that is. Recently, I had three ladies in my care at the hospital where I work. One of them was just post-op for a prolapsed bowel (where part of your bowel goes inside itself, not unlike what your socks look like just after you take them [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: dependency, drugs, ER, hospital, malingerer, Medicaid, narcotics, nurse
Categories: Life, Politics, Science | Comments (1) | Home

No Constitutional Scholar

August 13th, 2010

By Brian Bagent Judge Susan Bolton must be impeached and removed from the bench. There is no other recourse for a federal judge who is so grossly ignorant of the Constitution. And I’m not even referring to the idiocy of her decision against Arizona’s SB 1070, I’m talking about the fact that she even made [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: Constitution, federal, impeachment, judge, jurisdiction, states
Categories: History, Law, Politics | Comments (6) | Home

Lefty Media Bias? Say It Ain’t So!

July 23rd, 2010

By Brian Bagent I tune in to Rush Limbaugh every couple weeks or so. Earlier this week, he was nearly apoplectic over more discovered left-wing media bias. I had no idea what had set him off because he’s always railing against left-wing media bias. Well, I subscribe to The Media Research Center and get e-mails [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: distortion, JournoList, leftist, lies, media bias, Palin, partisan, racism, Wright
Categories: Media, News, Politics | Comments (14) | Home

Perhaps Angelinos Should Boycott Themselves

May 25th, 2010

By Brian Bagent I think I’m going to build a trebuchet outside Brownsville and start a campaign to launch all of these hypocrites over the Rio Grande. It’ll be a big trebuchet, maybe with a 40 foot arm and about a one-ton counterweight. I might even be able to toss them all the way to [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: 1099-misc, Arizona, border, California, illegal, immigration, Mexico, trebuchet
Categories: Humor, Law, Politics | Comments (10) | Home

The Expansion of Power Continues…

May 24th, 2010

By Brian Bagent The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. It is a grave error to suppose that a [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: 1099-misc, enforcement, health care bill, IRS, small business, taxes
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (3) | Home

The Little Victories

May 21st, 2010

By Brian Bagent I recently left the full time employ of the hospital where I worked for a little more than two years on a medical/surgical floor to take a job with a hospice agency. Patients can be put on hospice only if the medical diagnosis is such that an ordinary progression of their terminal [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: cancer, death, dying, families, health care, hospice, nursing
Categories: Life, Science | Comments (5) | Home

King for a Day, Part I

January 21st, 2010

By Brian Bagent How do we disentangle ourselves from the Gordian Knot that can characterize what has become many of our foreign affairs, especially what is going on in the Middle East? How can we reduce unemployment back to an acceptable level of 3-5% and sustain it indefinitely? How can we reduce our staggering $12,000,000,000,000 debt [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: deficit, drilling, environment, Middle East, oil, production, unemployment
Categories: Economics, Politics | Comments (4) | Home

Enjoy It While You Can

December 4th, 2009

By Brian Bagent No politics. No philosophy. No religion. No moralizing. Dear Readers, Pour yourself a glass of Merlot, turn on The Nutcracker Suite, sit down, and just listen. You don’t have to watch it live, or even see a video of it. And if you don’t have a CD of it, you can listen [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: Beethoven, Christmas, concert, Mozart, music, Nutcracker Suite, Strauss
Categories: Arts, Life | Comments (16) | Home

More on Money

November 3rd, 2009

By Brian Bagent Love him or hate him, this latest by Glenn Beck must be watched. He gives an excellent synopsis of the financial mess we now find ourselves in. In addition, he gives some historical perspective both of the Jimmy Carter/Paul Volcker years of inflation and high interest as well as of how the [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: currency, Glenn Beck, inflation
Categories: Economics, Politics | Comments (3) | Home

The Fallacy of Global Warming

October 27th, 2009

Now comes a man of letters on the fallacy of global warming, Lord Christopher Monckton. He recently addressed the Minnesota Free Market Institute regarding the scam being perpetrated upon us by the global warming crowd. Here’s a link to the speech he gave. It is an hour and a half long, but it is well [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: Christopher Monckton, climate change, climate treaty, global warming
Categories: Life, News, Politics | Comments (32) | Home

The Beating Continues…

October 18th, 2009

We have an ugly little saying in nursing and medicine when a patient isn’t long for the world: we say that they “are swirling the drain.” Alternatively, they “have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.” Whichever metaphor you prefer, that’s where the dollar is headed. For the first time ever [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: China, currency, Federal Reserve, US dollar
Categories: Economics, News, Politics | Comments (6) | Home

More Left-Right Legerdemain

September 14th, 2009

About a year ago, there was a big kerfuffle over what was going to happen with 401(k) plans. Congress held hearings on whether or not to eliminate the tax advantages of the 401(k). Contributions to a 401(k) plan presently defer taxes until the money invested is removed, either in part (as one would do after [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: 401(k), IRA, retirement, stocks, taxes
Categories: Economics, News, Politics | Comments (19) | Home

You Are Above the Law

September 1st, 2009

That’s a bold thing for anyone to say, especially someone who used to be a peace officer, but I’ll repeat it: you are above the law. I do not mean to say that you are free to injure people, far from it. What I mean is that you are above the law when you sit [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: juror, jury nullification, Law
Categories: History, Life, Politics | Comments (9) | Home

Hubble Up and Running

July 26th, 2009

The Hubble Space Telescope got some amazing shots of the aftermath of the collision between a celestial body of some sort and the planet Jupiter. Check out this report from Fox News. They estimate that the object was up to a few football fields in size. The photos in the link show a massive, dark gash [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: collision, Hubble, Jupiter
Categories: News | Comments (4) | Home

More on Nationalized Health Care

July 25th, 2009

As I indicated a couple of days ago, my primary disagreement with nationalized health care is philosophical. For those who don’t care much for philosophy, here’s something to chew on from the BBC. If you want the best odds of surviving cancer, you should probably want to get it in the United States, and not anywhere [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: health care, taxes
Categories: Economics, Life, Politics | Comments (6) | Home

Busybodies

July 24th, 2009

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: economy, minimum wage, small business
Categories: Economics, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Nationalized Health Care

July 22nd, 2009

There are several problems with a federal takeover of health care. Some of these problems are issues of pragmatism, but they are largely issues of philosophy. The first problem is that doing so worsens the logical contradiction that already exists within the welfare state. The federal government is going to take, by force or coercion, [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: government power, health care, taxes
Categories: Life, Politics | Comments (21) | Home

Repeal the 17th Amendment

May 26th, 2009

Does it strike no one else as odd that we have what amounts to two Houses of Representatives? Does it strike no one else as odd that with two (unequal) Houses that even the least populated states get the same representation in the Senate? Why would the framers have done something so redundant when nearly [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: Law, Senate, U.S. Constitution
Categories: History, Politics | Comments (9) | Home

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