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Before we get into the frightful political news, how about some pieces of very good news. Gas Buddy.com provides a graph of retail gas prices for the last six months.
We learn from a Bentonville paper about an effort to apply Wal-Mart’s strengths to reducing health care costs.
Pharmacy benefit managers could soon find themselves contending with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to broker prescription drug prices.
The Bentonville-based retailer is already looking to expand a two-month-old pilot with Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpillar to negotiate drug prices for its 70,000 U.S. employees, retirees, and their spouses and children.
“We are already in discussions with other companies to implement a direct-to-employer initiative,” Christi Gallagher, Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said Wednesday.
It’s an innovative application of the retailer’s core competency of cutting costs in the supply chain while simultaneously expanding its low-cost prescription drug program.
Wal-Mart’s legendary penny-pinching made the retailer an attractive candidate when Caterpillar went looking to weed out inefficiencies in its health care plan, said Todd Bisping, Caterpillar’s pharmacy manager. …
And The LA Times shows us the competitive effect Wal-Mart has had on CVS Pharmacies.
One of the nation’s largest drugstore chains ratcheted up a price war Thursday, offering deep discounts on generic prescriptions amid national concern about the spiraling cost of healthcare.
Drugstore giant CVS Caremark Corp. announced it would sell 90-day supplies of more than 400 medications for $9.99 and offer discounts for cash-paying patients at its in-store medical clinics.
The price war was unleashed by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the country’s largest retailer, a few years ago. Since then, many grocery stores have followed suit.
The price competition makes generic drugs just about the only healthcare bill that isn’t escalating. The lower prices provide a measure of relief to consumers who are struggling with rising health insurance premiums and other out-of-pocket expenses or have lost coverage altogether. …
Mark Steyn says occasionally we get a look at the real Obama.
… The senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he’s not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed nonrelevant to the general hopey-changey vibe. But occasionally we get a glimpse. The offhand aside to Joe the Plumber about “spreading the wealth around” was revealing because it suggests a crude redistributive view of “social justice”. Yet the nimble Hope-a-Dope sidestepper brushed it aside, telling a crowd in Raleigh that next John McCain will be “accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.”
But that too is revealing. As John Hood pointed out at National Review, communism is not “sharing.” In a free society, the citizen chooses whether to share his Lego, trade it for some Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks, or keep it to himself. From that freedom of action grow mighty Playmobile cities. Communism is compulsion. It’s the government confiscating your Elmo to “share” it with someone of its choice. Joe the Plumber is free to spread his own wealth around – hiring employees, buying supplies from local businesses, enjoying surf ‘n’ turf night at his favorite eatery. But, in Obama’s world view, that’s not good enough: the state is the best judge of how to spread Joe the Plumber’s wealth around.
The Senator is a wealthy man, mainly on the strength of two bestselling books offering his biography in lieu of policy and accomplishments. Many lively members of his Kenyan family occur as supporting characters in his story and provide the vivid color in it. But they too are not merely two-dimensional cartoons. His Aunt Zeituni, a memorable figure in Obama’s writing, turned up for real last week, when the dogged James Bone of the London Times tracked her down. She lives in a rundown housing project in Boston. …
Some good news. Michael Barone says the Dems won’t get a filibuster proof senate.
If, as seems likely but not quite certain, Barack Obama is elected next Tuesday, a key question for public policymaking will be how many Democrats are elected to the Senate. Currently, there are 51 Democrats there, including Joe Lieberman, but Democrats are seriously contesting 11 Republican-held seats, and there is a by-no-means-trivial chance that they could win each one. Meanwhile, Republicans are seriously contesting either zero Democratic-held seats, or only one, that of Mary Landrieu in Louisiana. The only public polls there since July are from Rasmussen, and the latest shows Landrieu ahead of Democrat-turned-Republican John Kennedy by 53 percent to 43 percent. So, Landrieu, a narrow winner in 1996 and 2002, seems headed to a third term.
Two and probably three Republican seats seem certain to be gained by Democrats: Virginia, where Mark Warner is way ahead of his predecessor as governor, Jim Gilmore; New Mexico, where Tom Udall, a reluctant candidate at first, is way ahead of his House colleague Steve Pearce; and Colorado, where Bob Schaffer has not been able to overcome the lead of Mark Udall. I have a lot of respect for Schaffer’s campaign manager (and state Republican chairman) Dick Wadhams, but I don’t see how he pulls this one off. Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline gave Schaffer a good issue over the summer, but it has clearly waned in importance. And Colorado, like New Mexico and Virginia, is a Bush ’04 state where Barack Obama has had consistent and often statistical leads in the polls since the financial crisis hit on September 15. …
David Harsanyi on the “redistributionist.”
… You know, once upon a time, the stated purpose of taxation was to fund public needs like schools and roads, assist those who could not help themselves, defend our security and freedom, and, yes, occasionally offer a bailout to sleazy fat cats.
Obama is the first major presidential candidate in memory to assert that taxation’s principal purpose should be redistribution.
The proposition that government should take one group’s lawfully earned profits and hand them to another group — not a collection of destitute or impaired Americans, mind you, but a still-vibrant middle class — is the foundational premise of Obama’s fiscal policy.
It was Joe Biden, not long ago, who said (when he was still permitted to speak in public) that, “We want to take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people.” The only entity that “takes” money from the middle class or any class for that matter, is the Internal Revenue Service. Other than that, there is nothing to give back. …
Thomas Sowell on “ego and mouth.”
After the big gamble on subprime mortgages that led to the current financial crisis, is there going to be an even bigger gamble, by putting the fate of a nation in the hands of a man whose only qualifications are ego and mouth?
Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.
Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise– whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team– is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.
The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama’s trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges– very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in real world. …
So, if Obama wins, Stuart Taylor wonders which Obama we’ll get.
… The first Obama has sometimes seemed eager to engineer what he called “redistribution of wealth” in a 2001 radio interview, along with the more conventional protectionism, job preferences, and other liberal Democratic dogmas featured in his campaign. I worry that he might go beyond judiciously regulating our free enterprise system’s all-too-apparent excesses and stifle it under the dead hand of government bureaucracy and lawsuits.
This redistributionist Obama has stayed in the background since he set his sights on the presidency years ago, except when he told Joe the Plumber that his tax plan would help “spread the wealth.” This Obama seems largely invisible to many supporters. But he may retain some attachment to the radical-leftist sensibility in which — as his impressive 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, explains with reflective detachment — he was marinated as a youth and young man. …
… The pragmatic, consensus-building, inspirational Obama who has been on display during the general election campaign is a prodigious listener and learner. He can see all sides of every question. He seems suffused with good judgment. His social conscience has been tempered by recognition that well-intentioned liberal prescriptions can have perverse unintended consequences. His tax and health care proposals are much less radical than Republican critics suggest.
This Obama has surrounded himself not only with liberal advisers but also with mainstream moderates such as Warren Buffett and former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. He has won the support of moderate Republicans, including Colin Powell and Susan Eisenhower, and conservatives, including Kenneth Adelman and Charles Fried. …
John Podhoretz gives 10 reasons why McCain might win.