Tuesday, February 23. 2010
 "Contemporary mainline churches have confused the Blue social model with the Kingdom of God." Bingo.
One way to drive them out of business: Obama to Urge Oversight of Insurers’ Rate Increases. Hey, why not do the same with the cost of cars, and tuition...and the cost of government?
Are all narratives untrue? Jawa
Senators do not want Obamacare restrictions. Says Legal Insurr:
Obama's plan (and so too the House and Senate versions) is the worst of all worlds. It is a replica of the housing bubble, thrill for the first few years, and then the bill becomes due without any way to pay for it.
The trap. Q&O via Blue Crab:
Obama gets his moment recorded by the TV cameras no less. And mournfully he pronounces the Republicans as obstructionists who refused to negotiate in good faith as the great and wonderful Democrats have offered to do. And because of that, it is with a heavy heart and reluctantly he is forced to agree with the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that reconciliation is the only route left open to them to do “what is right” for the American people.
Insty:
I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT when U.N. “climate change” commissars are meeting on Bali — again. “Yet again, we are asked to believe the UN deserves special exemptions from its own preachings. Its conferees are jetting to Bali for the greater good of all the little folk, whose job is merely to pay the bills for such pleasures, and live with any resulting rationing and regulation. According to the Jakarta Post, some 1,500 people from 192 countries are expected to attend this shindig — where UNEP claims that envoys of some 140 governments will be present.” Somebody tell these people about Skype.
Getting rich off climate, Via Hot Air:
“According to Mr Schapiro, carbon trading is now the fastest growing commodities market on earth. Since Kyoto signatories bought in to the cap and trade concept in 2005, there have been more than $300bn carbon transactions, prompting several investment banks, including Goldman Sachs and Barclays, to set up their own carbon trading desks. But that’s just the start. If President Obama and his supporters can institute a cap-and-trade system in the United States – and that’s a big if for this increasingly marooned presidency – demand could explode into a $2 to $3 trillion market…
“‘Carbon developers’, many of them employed by large multinationals, travel the world in search of carbon reduction projects to sell, while firms of carbon accountants have been established to verify on the United Nations’ behalf that those reductions are real. The whole thing, though well intentioned, looks wide open to abuse and scams. Mr Schapiro’s account of the carbon trading market is obviously a sceptical one, and no doubt there are others that take a less cynical view. But I wonder what all the wide eyed climate change campaigners are going to say when the first scandals begin to break, still more what they’ll make of it when the whole thing turns out to be another giant asset bubble – if indeed the non production of carbon can be described as an asset.”
Monday, February 22. 2010
Related to our previous post, From Drudge:
Boehner: New Obama Plan Doubles Down on Failure, Puts Summit in Peril...
SWALLOW: White House Warns Republicans: We'll Pass It With 51 VOTES...
PROPOSAL SUMMARY USES WORD 'TAX' 35 TIMES...
'Increase in Fees on Brand Name Pharmaceuticals'...
Broaden 'Tax Base for High-Income Taxpayers'...
Orders 'Comprehensive Database' On Health Claims...
FORCED: 'Raises percent of income assessment that individuals pay if they choose not to become insured'...
BACKDOOR FIX: Healthcare 'Funds will be transferred to the Social Security Trust' if necessary...
White House Endorses Sen. Landrieu's 'Louisiana Purchase'...
President Obama’s proposals for health care legislation fiddles and fizzles, hardens disputes with opponents, excludes bridges to agreements, and ignores the root cause of overwhelming public unease. Rather than “change” he continues and exacerbates failure.
Summaries, inadequate, are available from the New York Times and Washington Post. The Washington Post, also, offers – more usefully -- the White House provided sketch of details. All leave out in-depth analysis.
Essentially, Obama’s proposals are compromises between the entirely Democrat House and Senate legislation. It actually increases some taxpayer and industry garnishments to pay for enlarged entitlements, adjusting or delaying some. Similarly, the imposed mandate on the states to fund enlarged Medicaid eligibility is delayed a few years but remains a fiscal time-bomb impacting all other state services and driving tax increases. The penalty on large employers who do not provide medical insurance is slightly eased, for the first 30 employees, but the penalty increased, and it is still a sub rosa “mandate” and economic and competitive burden. Some additional database measures are added to perhaps and marginally combat Medicare fraud.
In essence, the Obama proposals continue on the path of grossly enlarged federal government intrusion into and control of individual choices and states’ variations that fit their circumstances and resources.
Indeed, it goes further than before in adding wholesale federal control over insurance premiums, imposing rates, exploiting ignorant furor at large increases in individual coverage premiums by Wellpoint (Blue Cross) in California. The Associated Press provides, however, some of the facts: the individuals segment is deep in the red; it is unfair for the employer segment or other states’ insured to subsidize it; overall profits are 35th out of 53 industries in the Fortune 500 list. Obama’s proposal only deepens the cost pit for 90+% of insured, while driving private insurers out of business which impels a default to more government-provided and dictated, taxpayer-paid medical plans.
The Obama proposals are meant to bridge differences among Democrats in control of the House and Senate, so they can turn the small procedural loophole of “reconciliation” into an override of all other procedures and precedents, not to mention public opposition. Further, Obama does not mention elements of the House and Senate legislation like wholesale cuts to Medicare spending (primarily of provider reimbursements, already low, which would drive more to not take Medicare patients) thus leaving the cuts included as a false way to mask the enormous budgetary costs because such drastic cuts are politically unlikely to actually occur. Meanwhile, taxes on high earners are increased even further than in the House and Senate bills.
“Reconciliation”, purportedly, allows the House to accept the Senate’s bill. There’s reasonable vote-count doubt about that, as well as legal challenges. President Obama’s proposals are, in effect, a new bill to be agreed by the House and Senate that fiddles with a “reconciliation” ram-through. If the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) provides an estimate of the Obama adjustment proposals together with the remainders of the House and Senate bills, it should be evident that the costs will be much larger, especially if unrealistic ploys are identified and full implementation time periods are included. (See footnote, added)
Obama fails to address the fundamental opposition to vastly increased federal control over 1/6th of the US economy and the lives of 100% of Americans, while deepening the race to national bankruptcy.
Obama fails to address the cost-driver of excess defensive-medicine, by various measures 10-30% of medical spending, that providers use to avoid excessive tort liability. Democrats’ largest contributors and supporters, tort attorneys, are left immunized from impact. Similarly, the impact on rich union benefits – unions being the other largest Democrat contributor base -- is delayed and reduced.
Reductions in the ability to save pretax dollars for health care remain, via health savings accounts and cafeteria plans, reducing individual choice, rather than maintaining or spreading them to more. Taxpayers or insureds who don’t use or support it are still likely to fund abortions. Sponsors of legal immigrants are still able to avoid their promised financial responsibility for legal immigrants’ medical care. Insureds are still unable to choose benefit plans allowed by other states that better fit their needs and budgets.
Obama’s proposals are nothing more than a campaign ploy to appear reasonable but they actually emphasize and enlarge the distance between Democrats’ floundering take-overs and the alternatives or discreet incremental measures that are widely supported.
Obama’s proposals are a transparent and hole-filled veil over what most already recognize as ugly and unacceptable. And, it isn’t closing time, when vision is blurred or judgment desperate. The public isn’t befuddled, and imperiled Congressional Democrats recognize that.
Rather than score, Obama again demonstrates himself as a crassly partisan loser, “arrogant” in the words of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, when it comes to accomplishing anything beyond words, his words no longer masking his ideologic inability to be practical.
House Republican Leader John Boehner sums Obama’s proposals as an “infomercial,” to be tuned out:
The President has crippled the credibility of this week's summit by proposing the same massive government takeover of health care based on a partisan bill the American people have already rejected. This new Democrats-only backroom deal doubles down on the same failed approach that will drive up premiums, destroy jobs, raise taxes, and slash Medicare benefits.
* The CBO just wrote that President Obama's proposals lack sufficient details to "score" (i.e., cost) it, and even if it did that scoring would take longer than this week, past the so-called TV infomercial "summit." How convenient for hollow proposals to have no relaible numbers. More "ramming" with hidden horns.
Rasmussen said on TV last night that 71% of Americans view government as a special interest group.
Who said Americans were stupid?
I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde
 George Washington: The man, the myth, the legend.
How to kill Cane Toads
Sol Stern: The Ramparts I Watched -Our storied radical magazine did transform the nation—for the worse.
Faux nostalgia for American manufacturing
Climategate: The World’s Biggest Story, Everywhere but Here
Related: Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels. Another "Woops, we goofed".
Pajamas: The glory of gridlock
Bolton: The O "not qualified" to be Pres
Beware the health care reform zombiecrats. Related, from Jules: 50 Votes In 60 Days! ROTFLMAO!
How the O has lost voters like me: Althouse. She quotes Chris Rock: "'He speaks so well' is some sh*t you say about ret**ded people that can talk." I think Ann A. was duped by her own wishes. Quite related: Was Chris Matthews born yesterday?
We have met the enemy, and it is the Anglo-Saxon media
If I had a nickel every time a conservative said "limited government" and didn't mean it, I'd be a very rich man.
Back from the dead? The John birch Society
An interesting legal challenge to the EPA
100 years of shale gas. That is plenty of time to get a lot of nuke plants up and running.
Der Spiegel takes a look at the Nazis
Stolen from Jungleman:
A DC-130H Hercules drone control aircraft banks to the left while passing over the guided missile cruiser USS Chosin (CG-65).
U.S. Air Force photo by Michael Haggarty
Sunday, February 21. 2010
We were fortunate to get to David Parson's Remember Me last night at the Joyce. Even if you have minimal interest in dance, it's well-worth it. The performance is stunningly good. The style, Mrs. BD tells me, is inspired by Paul Taylor whose work I always could enjoy.
New to me was the East Village Opera Company (providing most of the music), which rocks classic opera. As an aspiring curmudgeon, I would not have thought that I would have found that to be as wonderful as it is. Here's their Nessun Dorma. Their stuff is dynamite and reminds us that Italian opera was the pop music of its time and there is no reason for it to become "museum music."
Check it out, Anchoress! The interesting story of the East Village Opera Company is here.
You can buy their Olde School CD here.
Somebody has given AVI a book. He is funny. A quote:
I read the blurbs - Howard Zinn, Garrison Keillor - and scanned the table of contents. I know already a lot of what will be in this book. Voltaire, Freud, Hume; a collection of Jewish writers, tending strongly to the mystical and the reformed; Buddhists and related Chinese writers; a few Marxists and Existentialists; as the author is female there will be a collection of feminist writers. Physics will be dragged in inappropriately, showing that in the 20th C we learned that everything is relative, because hey, even Science admits of uncertainty now. Chesterton, Lewis, Wright, Flew, will be studiously avoided. Jesus is mentioned as an example of a doubter. We know where that's going.
I left the book at work so I can't check if I'm correct. But you know I am.
 A serious point and shoot: the Leica D-LUX 4 Camera
You can get an old-fashioned leather case for it too.
Do any of our readers have this thing?
 William Tyndale was the Oxford-educated polyglot theologian and reformer who produced the first printed Bible in English.
His translation was from Erasmus' Greek-Latin Bible, the same one which Luther used to translate his German Bible. Tyndale's Bible was banned in Britain: you can't trust the rabble to read it themselves. He famously said that he wanted a Bible that "every plowman" could read the Scripture for himself.
Tyndale was executed by Henry Vlll for his efforts. It is believed that Thomas More was pushing for the execution.
It is thought that up to 80% of the King James Bible - the most printed book in the world - is Tyndale's product. For hundreds of years after the first printings, Protestants avoided the Anglican King James Bible, preferring the Geneva Bible (which is very similar). The Pilgrims used the Geneva Bible and, no, Anglicans are not historically Protestants and neither are their American Episcopalian brethren.
Excellent summary of the history of the Bible in English here.
 Rend your heart, confront your flaws and weaknesses, pray for forgiveness, grace, and for the uplifting of the Holy Spirit's redemption. I love and need the terrible journey of Lent, and I always like the way Anchoress talks about it:
And so we begin, again, the forty days of finding our way back to the God who says, “even now, return to me with your whole heart . . . rend your hearts, not your garments and return to the Lord, your God.”
I have always appreciated that idea of “rending” the heart. Take your hands and tear it open, and expose yourself to God, willingly, needfully, humbly. Open wide the heart; let the poisons that have hardened it or fouled its workings drain out. Make room for God, who will replace our stony hearts with flesh, and renew our spirits.
Saturday, February 20. 2010
From some good ones from Neoneo's commenters:
- So this baby seal walks into a club...
- A dyslexic man walks into a bra...
- A fellow goes to a restaurant and asks the waiter for a cup of coffee without cream. A few moments later the waiter returns and says, “Sorry, we’re all out of cream, it will have be without milk.”
- An out of work geophysicist goes into a McDonald’s to ask for a job. He fills out an application and as the manager reads it he says, “I know I'm overqualified but I can do the work and I need the job”.
The manager answers back “It’s not that, it’s just that most of our geophysicists have PhDs.”
And of course, there's always this one:
Counterfeit Cubans, from JR. Nicaraguan. Mine just arrived today, and I just smoked one. Cheap, legal in the US, and plenty tasty as a medium-strength everyday smoke with a hearty earthy tanginess. I am told that those Sumatran wrappers were grown from Connecticut seed. I can't say they are as good as a good Habanos, but quite enjoyable for the price. Perfect for this Obama economy.
Why does the O smoke cigarettes instead of cigars, anyway? Who does he think he is? FDR?
Via View from 1776:
I will grant you that liberals always have the best of intentions. They are always trying to make things better. In doing so, they victimize many. When I was growing up in rural Louisiana in the 1940s, both blacks and whites had strong, church-going families, low divorce rates, low rates of out-of-wedlock births and the crime rate was low. Abortion was virtually unknown, and was certainly not a means of birth control. All of that changed with LBJ’s Great Society programs. In an effort to “help”, liberals gave people (both black and white) incentives to have children out of wedlock. The result was several generations of welfare mothers, disintegration of the family, indigence, government dependency, soaring crime rates, etc. All of this was predictable, but it was only ended in 1996 when, after two Presidential vetoes, a Republican Congress finally shamed Bill Clinton into living up to his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it”. Yes, the Great Society had noble intentions, but it harmed poor whites and poor blacks indiscriminately, almost destroying the black family. Liberals always have the best of intentions, but the results are often disastrous.
Redstate:
The country is not in danger of ObamaCare passing via reconciliation.
The country is, however, in danger from politically desperate and irrational leaders who are intent on the political equivalent of self-immolation.
MIT Prof. Lindzen on the failure of computer models. Models aren't reality. That's why they are called models.
If you aren't familiar with Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) - most of our readers seem to be - here's his CPAC speech this week:
Reshaping the Guggenheim. Not a bad idea.
Climate exile speaks out. I wonder whether Maggie's Farm would be legal in the Netherlands.
Our favorite Congressman, Thad McCotter, on love and sex.
More NASA climate corruption reports at Pajamas. A blockbuster NASA story which the MSM avoids. The NY Post: The crackup of the climate 'consensus', a quote:
...the climate campaign's most ludicrous contortion is its response to the recent record snowfalls across the eastern United States. Ordinary citizens, repeatedly shoveling snow from their sidewalk, see global warming as a farce.
In answer, the climate campaigners note that "weather is not climate" and that localized weather events are consistent with climate "change." They may be right -- yet these are the same folks who jumped up and down claiming that Hurricane Katrina was positive proof that catastrophic global warming had arrived, even though the strong 2005 hurricane season was followed by four quiet years for tropical storms that made a hash of that narrative.
The ruckus exposes the greatest problem of Al Gore & Co.: They've pointed to any weather anomaly -- cold winters, warm winters, in-between winters -- as proof of climate change. That is, they can't name one weather pattern or event that would be inconsistent with their theory.
Not again! Dems with new government medical plan. I thought it was dead and buried. But we have some States Rights rebels. I love it.
Related: Trial lawyers threaten the O. Related: John Edwards, Mesothelioma Man, and Health Care Reform
Newspapers: Atlanta paper rejects objective reality. Reality is, no doubt, an evil, reactionary concept. See the NYT's Zernicke, who also will not permit facts to get in the way of the narrative.
American households, from Will:
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