Do you ever feel like you're losing your country?

Robert Krentz might have, before he was brutally murdered on his own land. This is outrageous.

DOUGLAS, Arizona (Reuters) – The murder of a prominent Arizona rancher near the Mexican border is spurring charges that Washington is doing too little to stop Mexico's raging drug war from spilling over into the United States.

Robert Krentz was shot last Saturday while working at his remote cattle ranch some 30 miles northeast of this city on the Arizona-Mexico border.

Investigators tracked the footprints of the suspected gunman about 20 miles south to the border with Mexico, prompting some authorities to blame smugglers or illegal immigrants for the killing.

"The ranchers have feared for their lives for a long time and they've told the people from Washington, but they don't pay attention to us," Michael Gomez, the mayor of Douglas, told Reuters.

"This continues to be a hot area for illegal crossings and they have to do something to stop it."

Krentz, 58, was well liked and respected in southeastern Arizona, where his family's ranch sprawled over 35,000 acres.

No arrests have been made and there is no clear motive or any named suspect, the Cochise County Sheriff's Office said.

The killing comes amid ever-more brazen and brutal attacks by cartels in northern Mexico that are fighting for control of lucrative drug smuggling routes into the United States.

Last month, gunmen killed two Americans in Ciudad Juarez, south of El Paso, Texas, renewing fears in the United States that escalating violence may spill north over the border.

More from a column by Lionel Waxman.

Rancher Robert Krentz didn't deserve to die on his own land in the USA

By Lionel Waxman, Inside Tucson Business

Published on Friday, April 02, 2010

Robert Krentz was a good man. People who knew him say he was a humanitarian and a Good Samaritan. He didn’t deserve to die in the dirt - on his own land - at what law enforcement investigators believe was the gunpoint of an illegal border crosser. His family didn’t deserve to lose him. The nearby Cochise County communities of Douglas and Portal didn’t deserve to lose him. But all did some time on March 27. And why?

There’s plenty of blame to go around.

Let’s allocate some of that blame. Maybe it will become obvious what we have to do to make sure we don’t lose more good people in this fashion.

Most of the blame falls on the Mexican drug cartels. They are willing to do anything for money. The Mexican government has been unsuccessful in curbing their reign of terror. It is almost as though the cartels are fighting it out to prove one or more of them is the government.

Next, blame goes to the United States government. Notwithstanding many requests, federal officials have failed and refused to militarize the border which desperately needs military control. When Janet Napolitano was governor of Arizona, she seemed to understand the problem, not that she ever did anything about it. Now that she is in Washington, she serves only her beltway masters. No Army troops for the border. Not even National Guard troops are allowed.

One way the feds ensure that Arizona will not put National Guard troops on the border is by calling them up for deployment to Afghanistan. And that’s where members of the Arizona National Guard are headed this month to Afghanistan when they are needed in Douglas.

But President Obama has bigger plans for the border. Heap blame on him. He wants illegals to flood across the border because he has plans to grant them amnesty so they can vote. They will vote Democratic, and that’s more important to him than the lives of a few Americans living on the border.

To be fair, we ought to assign some small amount of blame to the farmers and ranchers who refuse to get out while the gettin’s good. They are living in a war zone. That’s not a good idea.

What can we do about it? There isn’t much we can do about the Mexican government or even the Mexican drug cartels. But there is something we can do about the U.S. government. We have to make it clear to the bozos in Washington that we will no longer tolerate being deprived of the services of our National Guard. If the feds want to fight a war in Afghanistan, that is what the regular Army is for. We must demand that the Arizona National Guard be released for service in Arizona. And we must demand they be adequately armed to meet the challenge.

And we must make certain the Washington politicians understand that we will not permit illegal aliens to vote. We’ll do this by denying them entry.

This is the only way we will ever get our state back. Otherwise, we’ll wake up one day and find ourselves living in Aztlán with bandits running wild in the streets.

And if we don’t do that, then the bulk of the blame must fall on ourselves. This is still the United States of America. This is our country. We make the rules. We must enforce them.

The health care debate is already over

I present my two cents on the issue. And it's not likely to win me much popularity. But as far as I'm concerned I don't understand why we're debating anyway. The issue reflects the larger shift society is making toward obsessive and insufferable "health" and "safety", unreasonable regulations, and micro-management of all facets of daily life. In my completely pessimistic view, the debate is pointless. Even if the current health care "reform" push is defeated, it will just come back again and again until it is fully realized. On that sunny note, let me begin.

There are many factors but mostly we have ourselves to blame for the mess that our health care system is in.

For starters, the real cost of medical treatment is hidden to the average person because insurance companies or the government pays those costs. You have an out of pocket co-payment or deductible, which is generally small, compared to the hundreds and thousands doled out by that third party. But the actual cost of the doctor's expertise and the drugs and technology is nebulous because it is not market-determined but determined through bureaucratic and administrative and middle-man costs. The patient's ability to pay does not factor into the pricing of medical care in any way.

Also, in recent years doctors have had to increase prices to help pay for the unreasonable rise in malpractice protection costs. Doctors have no choice but to pass that cost on to the customer. And no, that customer is not you, but the insurance company who pays on your behalf. Since the insurance company must pay more, it stands to reason they are going to charge you more to carry that policy. The insurance company is in the business to provide a service and to make money — that should not shock anyone — so when you file frequent claims and over-use your insurance, as many do, it should not be hard to understand why they are raising your premiums when the policy renews. You are costing them more, and you are still paying a very small fraction of what they pay on your behalf. And that's just for private individual policies. Imagine the complexities insurance companies deal with trying to price group coverage for employers and large companies? This is not to defend insurance companies or single out the unfortunate souls with insurance horror stories. I am simply pointing out a fact about how insurance works.

Also, I don't think it's strictly anecdotal because I know and work with plenty of folks who do this, but a lot of people run to the doctor for just about every little problem these days. Yes, it's a cliché, but is it not true? Think of the people you know. How many of them are like that? A headache, sniffles, a mild fever, a stubbed toe, the blues, et al. Can it be denied that many doctor visits occur for non-chronic, minor conditions that could probably be treated at home? Or ridden out? And, of course, everyone wants the best doctors, the best diagnostic tests and equipment, the fanciest MRI machines and newest technologies. None of these are cheap. Yet we all expect and even demand them and have no real sense of the cost because, in reality, someone else is paying. If people paid directly out-of-pocket for most of the medical care they received, and only used insurance for the most catastrophic situations, it stands to reason they would be more discerning and "consume" less health care generally. Prices would automatically come down because all of those for-profit doctors and wellness centers and hospitals and drug companies would have to compete better for your money.

Competition is the key. And an honest person admits there isn't anything in the current legislation being discussed that truly addresses that. Adding a "public option" — essentially a government insurance company — does nothing to increase competition or address the core issue: the direct cost of health care. It simply creates another insurance company to choose from when deciding on who will pay the ridiculous medical costs for you. And since government consistently underpays doctors and providers this really will have no impact on reducing costs. It just means a larger share of health care expenditures will be underpaid.

On top of all of that, and perhaps most importantly, we refuse to change our lifestyles in any significant way. We continue to eat fast food and processed junk, smoke, drink and lead sedentary lifestyles with little or no exercise. We know all of that is bad, but we are too lazy to do anything about it. In other words, we want to have our cake and eat it too. And by the way, personally, I am completely in favor of letting people do whatever they want, no matter how bad, dumb or harmful. More on that in a moment. But we want to do whatever we want, then have the consequences of those behaviors taken care of by the best health system in the world, and we want to pay very little for that quality and excellence. And if things go wrong, we want to make sure we can file a mega-lawsuit as well.

Many people would be just fine with the government taking over all aspects of the health care system. Do away with private insurance and just have a huge universal Medicare system for every citizen. "Health Care for All" as they say. We're already paying a lot through insurance, what's the difference if we just replace those insurance premiums with taxes to Uncle Sam? The irony is, private insurance has no say-so in your lifestyle, but all of those people who love the idea of a "universal" health care system can be sure that when government is invested in your health, they certainly can and will have an interest in monitoring and managing your lifestyle.

Universalizing health care forces me to be an investor in your lifestyle. Currently, I don't care what you do. But when taxpayers are footing the bill, you can be sure we will all take an interest in what you do, even if on a philosophical level we couldn't care less. And that is the problem. In a free society, I don't want to take an interest in your lifestyle. I don't want to be forced to care about what you do. Because I might have some crazy ideas about what your lifestyle should be, and you might have some crazy ideas about what my lifestyle should be. So why would we want to do that to each other? Why would we want to take that power out of the disinterested private sector and hand it to the very interested public sector?

To take this back where I began, frankly speaking, I think this whole debate is a moot point anyway. I believe we will not only have health care "reform", I believe eventually we will indeed have a fully socialized universal system where the government funds all health care expense and it is paid for through taxes. It may be 10 years or 30 years, but it will happen. Why? Because there are just too many people in this country who feel entitled to it. Who believe it is a "human right". And those people reproduce, and their offspring will have the same mental condition. Combine that with the fact that it's just an emotionally appealing idea that's very difficult to oppose. After all, who can be against "health care for all"? What person wishes to be labeled cold and heartless for saying no to something that feels so good and right? It's an unfortunate but unstoppable tide.

I'm sure the intentions are pure. It's not a "bolshevik plot". But if the end result looks the same, what's the difference? I am not worried about death panels and abortion funding and "cornhusker kickbacks". It's not the delivery of health care that's going to be rationed, it's those cheeseburgers and beers and sugary treats and countless other little liberties that will be. Smoking bans and trans-fat bans are only the beginning. The red-tape killjoys of the world are ready and willing to hang the figurative hazard sign on just about everything you do. And when all health care is governmentalized, they will. So be sure and turn out the lights on your way out, America, the party's over. We'll have only our very safe selves to blame.

Some have an amazing ability to self-delude

President Obama said this on January 5, 2010 during his remarks about the pantybomber:

But make no mistake: We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda. In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And, as I've always said, we will do so – we will close the prison in a manner that keeps the American people safe and secure.

I am not even going to address in-depth the question of how Gitmo has "damaged our national security interests." But I would like to know exactly what Obama means by this and in what specific ways Gitmo has "damaged our national security interests." Did it "damage our national security interests" before 9/11 when it did not even exist as a terrorist detention center? Could it be there are other "recruiting tools" – such as the chance to kill Americans – that attract these fools to the jihadist death cult?

More importantly though, based on The President's logic, would it be fair to say that one of the objectives of the terrorists is to have Gitmo closed? So, by closing Gitmo, we will be doing something that the terrorists want. In other words, terrorist activity directly results in a desired goal and a change in American policy. They commit slaughter, babble on about holy war, and The Great Satan decides to close Gitmo.

Yes. This certainly seems like it will help to discourage future terrorist activity.

Or. Maybe. Perhaps. Just maybe. Appeasement and weakness actually encourage and motivate terrorists even more.

After all, it was Bin Laden who famously said, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse."

America did not ask for this war and would be happy for it to be over tomorrow. But the other side is not interested in ending this war.

And that is really unfortunate since America just doesn't seem to be interested in being the strong horse anymore.