Category Archives: Tulsa Speaks

Washington doesn’t create jobs

I began running a business when I was only 20 years old. Back then it if you worked hard and followed the rules; you had a pretty good shot at getting ahead.

Today it seems the deck is increasingly stacked against those who work hard and pursue their own dreams, especially if you are a business owner.

More and more, we are faced with constant uncertainty caused by Washington’s inability to take action on today’s pressing problems.  This failure results in uncertainty with tax rates, near chaos in the markets and a never ending stream of impractical regulations handed down from misinformed bureaucrats.  A cloud of doubt is rising over our entire economy. For most business owners, it is a daily struggle just to keep the doors open in large part because government is a constant obstacle.

Continue reading →

Mayoral candidates stirring

Analysis:  Bill Christensen announced his candidacy for mayor months ago and yesterday former-mayor Kathy Taylor (who declined to run after one term) announced she will campaign again.  Most Tulsans expect Mayor Dewey Bartlett to fight to retain his office, but his answer at the moment is “don’t interrupt, I’m working.”

More important than who runs, if you don’t mind a huge lack of preference, is what are the issues of the Mayor’s race and how will each candidate define Tulsa’s future?

Continue reading →

OK Congressmen differ on “No Budget, No Pay”

House Republican Policy Committee Chairman James Lankford (R-OK) applauded the passage of H.R. 325, the “No Budget, No Pay” bill, in a vote of 285-144 today, January 23, 2013.  Oklahoma’s First District Representative Jim Bridenstine voted against the bill and explains his reasons in detail.

In a statement, Lankford wrote, “The No Budget, No Pay bill is a simple solution to a systemic problem in Washington: almost four years without a budget.”

Continue reading →

Coulter on mental health and guns

Updated:  Ann Coulter in a recent column posted on WND.com suggests “Crazies need to be committed, not given civil-rights protection.”

Coulter is correct as usual.  Insightful, articulate, passionate, merciless in debate and stunningly attractive; she hits the target dead center:  “Guns don’t kill people, the mentally ill do.”

Coulter then goes through the details and specific signs that could have prevented so many tragic deaths in massacre of unarmed innocents if only America had a functional and responsible mental health profession.  Would someone please explain why “mental health professional” is NOT an oxymoron as currently practiced in 2013 worldwide?

Continue reading →

Medicine and the Twilight Zone 2013: To Serve Man

Opinion: During a discussion on the future of health care, a clinician-turned-healthcare-executive told me that the way we “deliver health care” (not the same as “practicing medicine”) will change. It will be a “process”—a more mechanized one.

She spoke enthusiastically about the advantages, such as electronic health records. These can improve fraud detection in government programs with computerized cross-checking of services delivered and payments made.

This of course misses a larger point. If we didn’t have enormous government programs, fraud would not be so easy to perpetrate. It’s pretty hard to double-bill a patient when there is no middleman. Patients generally remember whether they were in the doctor’s office last month. A patient who was not in a coma would immediately let the doctor know that she did not have that colonoscopy.

Continue reading →