Miss Fowler and her usual band of merry liberal pirates were at it again on Friday, June 15th in the Year of Our Lord, 2001.   The panel reflected a striking spectrum of viewpoints, including Stephanie The Post-Modernist Hostess, Colin Fogarty, a flaming liberal PBS reporter/analyst, and three others.  David Steves is on staff at the People’s Republic of Eugene Register Guard.  Based on the views he expressed, he isn’t their token conservative.  Brad Cain seems to be a mild-mannered lefty who works for either the Daily Planet or the Associated Press.  Steve Law writes for the Salem Statesman Journal, which is hardly Oregon’s version of the Wall Street Journal. 

Thus, this panel was a political rainbow coalition, stretching from left all the way to lefter  We'll guess that not one of them who was old enough at the time voted for Ronaldus Magnus,  the Redoubtable Reagan

The opening discussion was about Kitzhaber’s “formulary” proposal, which would limit drug prescription options for Oregon Health Plan patients.  This works as follows.  A panel of “experts,” who according to Fowler are more knowledgeable about medicine than your doctor (who sometimes/often doesn’t know what drugs cost – her words) would make up a list of acceptable drugs to be used to treat various diseases. 

Let’s say you’re an epileptic and take Dilantin to suppress seizures.  Since it is effective mainly in milder cases , it might be replaced with another drug on the list – a more powerful drug that is effective in a greater number of cases, dealing as it does with a wider scope of dysfunction.    The fact that this new drug on average does more damage than Dilantin, generating a higher number of cases of liver cancer, might be acceptable to the panel if it was also less costly. 

For these reasons, in fact, it may be their only option under the protocol, which is, after all, designed to cut costs.  If it is, let us hope you aren’t both poor and about to begin experiencing mild epilepsy, because the drug they’re going to force your doctor to give you will eat your liver, baby.

Now, pay attention.  Following this bit of bad reasoning, supposedly aimed at reducing unnecessary expenditures, Stephanie Fowler began to talk about the evil Republican attempt to thwart liberal plans to cover contraceptives under the Oregon Health Plan! 

You read that right.  She and her panel of Oregon media experts support Kitzhaber's plan to restrict drug options for the sick as a cost cutting measure,  then in the next breath propose that the OHP cash register be opened up to pay for contraceptives! 

Could Mengeles do better?

It is air-headed logic like this that long ago caused me to make up my mind about liberal press conspiracies.   They don't exist.  You need an IQ over forty to form a decent conspiracy.

Following this magnificent thread of logic, the good old liberal boy and girl network dallied for a time over the obvious political machinations of the evil Republicans in the area of post-census redistricting. 

Democrat legislatures doing this, of course, are completely logical when they create congressional districts that are in places the exact width of a yellow highway stripe – which has happened.  That deserves praise, because that little project guaranteed a quota of black Democrats in Congress.  Quotas solve racism.  But, Republicans don’t gerrymander to favor Democrat special interest groups.  They are evil because of that. 
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Yes, that’s what’s wrong in Oregon.  The people of Oregon voted for Republicans who don’t do what the press tells them to do!  The people of Oregon need to be re-educated.  We will laugh at the Republicans and teach the people how stupid they were to vote for Republicans who aren’t moderates.

This Seven Days was perfect.  Colin Fogarty said life is tough for moderate Republicans, these days. 

He obviously thinks that the pro-life, right-wing Christian religious hicks from the sticks badger them, complaining about urban heathens (he used this exact term) and their constant euthanization of undifferentiated non-viable tissue masses, or what conservatives refer to as the ongoing mass murder of unborn babies. 

Miss Fowler then said that she expected some weird bills to pop up during the final days of this session.  And, guess what?  Some have.  One of them they laughed about was the silly idea of capping state expenditures by tying the budget  to a percentage of citizen income.  Limit the state budget to a specific fraction of citizen income?  Caps belong on consumer prices not government budgets!

 And, they talked about how the Republicans are hiding from the energy problem.  The panel, of course, believes California’s rolling blackouts were caused by deregulation.  All liberals believe that.  The reason why they do is that they haven’t the faintest idea why things happen on this planet. 

They don’t know that power grids aren't beefed up by consumer price caps any more than New York apartment buildings spring up under rent controls.  They don’t know their beloved renewables like wind and solar could sit in front of every west coast breeze and on top of every household roof and still fail to meet twenty percent of our energy needs.    They don’t know that California has the nation’s best state record in terms of “conservation, “ the traditional liberal solve-all, and so has proven that this option can’t solve the problem, either. 

They don’t know that California, with a fast rising population, hasn’t even started a large scale electrical generating facility since the Democrats took over down there.  They talk about California being forced to buy in the horrible open (spot) energy market, but don’t know that the reason why it has to is because without sufficient in-state generating capacity the energy companies have no other place to go for power.  (I have read that California regulation has forbidden them to purchase long term contracts at better prices.)

It’s a nice picture, isn’t it?  A rocketing population, consumer price caps that freeze revenues below product cost, no new generating facilities and regulatory limits that force them to buy power from the most pricey source.  A perfect plan for an energy disaster, designed by the liberal Democrats that run the state.

Why don’t these people know all these things? 

In my opinion, it’s because they don’t want to know these things.  They don’t like facts very much because facts often get in the way of their fantasies.  And that, my friends, is what a liberal is all about – fantasies.  Which is why I make a point of always watching Seven Days.  It’s a perfect replacement for the Wonderful World of Disney, yet only lasts a half an hour.  (LL)