Maggie's Farm

Toon via theo

How much time do men spend looking at women? Never, never try to tell me that women are not sex objects to men. And if they are more than that too, so much the better for all.

Cries of "Tyranny" in Tampa. Whether Left, Conservative, or Compromising, Americans never take crap from their politicians. A plea to push back when the union thugs show up on their busses.

And, as we predicted yesterday, invited unions fill Town Hall: regular folks locked out in St. Louis

Taking the dissident data base seriously: Powerline. I refuse to take it seriously. Steyn: See you in the database. Maloney: "I'm gonna report myself."

Sibelius to America: Don't sweat the details. Too complicated for the little people.

Bill Clinton had Hollywood arrange the reporting of his N Korea rescue. Why?

AARP has been co-opted by the Left for years. Now they do not want to hear from their members.

You can't make this stuff up: Cash for refrigerators. As for the Cash for Clunkers, read this and weep.

Just like the Russian subs off New York: Russian state security working with Hezbollah. Maybe a beer with Putin might encourage him to give up his nation's pursuit of their own power interests...

Hanson on Congress' new G-5s. 3 of them. God forbid members of Congress fly with the citizens. Citizens might want to talk to them.

Betsy begins:

If you ever doubted that teachers unions were interested mainly in protecting teacher salaries rather than what was best for the students, you should read these two examples of how the unions are trying to block worthy programs just because they are more concerned about their own paychecks.

Nothing wrong with teachers, or anybody else, wanting to make more money. Problem is that it's the peoples' involuntary money. I believe that public employee unions should be illegal (can you imagine the military unionizing?), and that nobody in a unionized job can be regarded as a professional. In fact, I believe that unions are pretty much obsolete today - a relic from the old and truly abusive company town industrial era when there was no effective labor market and minimal mobility.

Robin of Berkeley: How I became Conservative so fast.

Why the uproar? VHD:

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Prairie-Fire Anger. “The approval ratings on nearly every one of the President’s key policy initiatives—cap-and-trade, health care overhaul, government take over of industry and finance, deficit spending, stimulus—are already less than half of polled voters. Obama’s own popularity has fallen dramatically and hovers near fifty percent. A number of well-publicized town meetings have erupted in shouting, as administration and congressional representatives try, often in condescending fashion, to explain the Obama agenda. The Republicans—written off just a few weeks ago as an obsolete party headed for oblivion—are now often polling higher in generic surveys than are Democrats. Why the sudden uproar?”

 From No Left Turns:

To the degree that this old post is on the mark, it suggests some of the reasons why things are getting tense just now. What if Americans are frustrated with the modern administrative/ bureacratic state, and the feeling that they can’t control it?

Re the death of John Hughes, an outtake from Ferris Bueller:

FERRIS:
My uncle went to Canada to protest the war, right? On the Fourth of July he was down with my aunt and he got drunk and told my Dad he felt guilty he didn't fight in Viet Nam. So I said, "What's the deal, Uncle Jeff? In wartime you want to be a pacifist and in peacetime you want to be a soldier. It took you twenty years to find out you don't believe in anything?"
(snaps his fingers)
Grounded. Just like that. Two weeks.
(pause)
Be careful when you deal with old hippies. They can be real touchy.

Powerline on energy:

 If Russia, Cuba and others can drill off the coast of Florida, why can't we?

Over-tax a city, and over-union an industry - and this is what you get. Detroit's feral houses.

Global warming skepticism is now defined as a psychological ailment. Sheesh.

Sad days at the University of Texas

Racism redefined. Pajamas. They have to re-define it - or admit that racism is a thing of the past.

The mythology of cash for clunkers. Furthermore, it increases the prices of used cars.

No kidding. Reuters:

A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday found 52 percent of voters disapprove of Obama's handling of healthcare while 39 percent approve. That was a shift from 46 percent approval against 42 percent disapproval in a July 1 survey. 

Gotta pass it before anybody knows what's in it.

Meanwhile, the DNC released an ad "Enough of the Mob." That mob would be me. A bit surprising, but the mobs are also out in Massachusetts. (Confession: Maggie's Farm is paid millions by the Insurance Cartel and the RNC to oppose Socialism. We do it for the $.)

The resistance grows. Am Thinker. It begins:

Spontaneous, uncoordinated, passionate -- citizen resistance to Obama socialism grows by the day. 

America is no stranger to resistance. The nation was born from citizen resistance that had mixed support among the colonists. About one in five was loyal to the King. Some of the bitterest fighting in the American Revolution was between Loyalists and Patriots. And all of it was between Americans in the Civil War. We know how to resist.

Dino:

Everything about Obamacare seems to have a taint of dishonesty. The true objectives of its proponents are concealed for the most part. And Frank’s explanation for how it can be financed is ludicrous. Heaven help us!

Never in the MSM: Obamacare will replace Medicare

Honoring the disgusting Mary Robinson 

Carbon footprints are for the little people

The O tells ACORN to argue with their neighbors and to get in peoples' faces. Nice.

Americans need to sacrifice more for the common good. At Politico. So my 50% to the Feds and New York isn't enough? Not to mention my charity contributions...

Insty:

NO FEARMONGERING HERE! New DNC ad: Mobs of right-wing lunatics want to feast on your flesh.

Plus this: “No need for outrage, though. Instead, celebrate the fact that even with a Democratic president, a filibuster-proof Congress, and the lure of ‘free’ ice cream in the form of socialized medicine, the left’s somehow managed to turn ObamaCare into a clusterfark of such epic proportions that their health-care message has now actually been reduced to ‘Don’t listen to the Republicans — they’re crazy.’”

Thank goodness we elected a “post-partisan” President!

 

Viking (whence Lucy image): "You got duped, America. Snookered, tricked, suckered, pwn3d."

Related from Ace: Reverse Reagan: Obama Will Blow Up the Deficit So Enormously Even Conservatives Will Beg Him to Raise Taxes, to Stave off Fiscal Ruin

Simple solution to jet lag. h/t, ?

The strange story of America's First Lady

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Appalling

Dynamite: The Power of Negative Thinking, from Nyquist.

Nutmeggers can form their own militias. Cool.

Those Russian subs are testing the O. They wanted to be detected.

Mea culpa: I used the cash for clunkers

Surber:

Six of the Top 10 sellers in the Cash For Clunkers program are Toyotas, Hyundais and Hondas. You know, cars made in America. They have plants here. In fact, Toyota makes engines in Buffalo, W.Va., that it was selling to Pontiac.

Grocery Reform:

His health care plan at least temporarily stymied in Congress, President Obama announced today that he would mount a 27-city tour to promote his new nutrition reform program, dubbed America’s Affordable Grocery Choices Act.

Guidance Counselor in Chief: The O wants everybody to go to college. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Woops, I almost forgot. It's not dumb: cheap money for college is political payback to academia.

Gore Effect:

Global temps have fallen .74F since Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” was released in 2006.

At IBD:

Could Obama have been elected president without promising not to raise taxes on the middle class? Would Americans have trusted him with the highest office in the land if he had proposed replacing all private health insurance with a Euro-style, socialistic, single-payer system?

As Ben Stein put it in his American Spectator diary, "The American people in their unimaginable kindness and trust . . . wanted so much to believe Barack Obama was somehow better and different from other ultra-leftists that they simply took him on faith."

How to participate in the government medicine debate. Hewitt

Government medicine: How it becomes a political football. Medicaid in NY: City Journal

"I am home with a bad case of poison ivy, so I had time to read 500 pages of the health care bill."

A book: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism. Review at Front Page

A family farmer in Missouri defends "industrial agriculture" against critiques by non-farmers like Michael Pollan. One quote:

...farmers have reasons for their actions, and society should listen to them as we embark upon this reappraisal of our agricultural system. I use chemicals and diesel fuel to accomplish the tasks my grandfather used to do with sweat, and I use a computer instead of a lined notebook and a pencil, but I'm still farming the same land he did 80 years ago, and the fund of knowledge that our family has accumulated about our small part of Missouri is valuable. And everything I know and I have learned tells me this: we have to farm "industrially" to feed the world, and by using those "industrial" tools sensibly, we can accomplish that task and leave my grandchildren a prosperous and productive farm, while protecting the land, water, and air around us.  

Much of the criticisms of modern agriculture are, in my view, sentimental rather than realistic. Furthermore, as far as we can tell, "organic" foods have no advantage whatsoever. Food is food, and we are blessed to have enough of it to get fat.

Related, at Reason: A food elitist strikes back

Dems losing the health care debate

Fun prank: The dissolving bikini

The spike in obesity, explained

Huge federal tax revenue drop. Solution? Raise taxes, of course. Says the WSJ today:

The Obama advisers are laying the groundwork for taxing the middle class while claiming the deficit made them do it.

An Ohio health care town hall.

I understand the Dem Plan B in our update. Regulate the insurance companies out of business, then the government can step in as savior. In Reagan's words:

If it moves, tax it. 
If it keeps moving, regulate it. 
And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Steyn:

In my weekend column, I write that government health care "redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in a way that hands all the advantages to statists — to those who believe government has a legitimate right to regulate human affairs in every particular."

But don't worry, you'd be surprised how you get used to it.

Schumer: You will get new health care no matter what. Meaning, I suppose, whether you want it or not.

Thompson reports on a conference you probably missed:

...one can only tremble with regret at missing Richard Twine’s pithy contribution: Embodying Posthumanist Intersectionality and Resisting Transhumanist ‘Enhancement’ Through Feminist Veganism?

Newsweek tells us to get ready for polyamory

How to save the economy. It's simple.

The city of Altinum discovered.

Scientists revolt against the warmening propagandists. A growing movement.

Ellen Degeneris digs deep. Anchoress

The decline of Britain. It begins:

Even in the decades after it lost its empire, Britain strode the world like a pocket superpower. Its economic strength and cultural heft, its nuclear-backed military might, its extraordinary relationship with America—all these things helped this small island nation to punch well above its weight class. Now all that is changing ...

Middle class tax hikes planned

I notice that AVI has listed us as "very smart people." Wrong. We are mostly distinctly middlebrow and intellectually lazy. Sippican is "very smart people."

Althouse on the weather:

I love that we are "warned" not to feel optimistic. How twisted we've become! It's like people are rooting for disaster.

In which the O admits plan to eliminate private insurance. Nothing but a power grab. It's the old story: Invent crisis, grab power from the people. As Tiger says:

If you do not believe conservatives who say that the "public option" is a trojan horse for a single-payer health care system, you're always free to believe the liberals. Obviously that's the reason for it. There is no other even theoretical justification that makes sense.

Related, a reader sends an op-ed from the Greenwich (CT) Time. A quote from it:

(iii) Overall Limitation For Unintentional Failures.--In the case of failures which are due to reasonable cause and not to willful neglect, the penalty assessed under subparagraph (A) for failures during any 1-year period shall not exceed the amount equal to the lesser of--

''(I) 10 percent of the aggregate amount paid or incurred by the employer (or predecessor employer) during the preceding 1-year period for group health plans, or

''(II) $500,000."

If you skimmed, shame on you. You're much like many lawmakers, for whom I, as a money manager and business owner, have a few questions:

- What is that $500,000 penalty all about?

- What problems are you trying to solve with this legislation? I was under the impression that we needed to A) insure the uninsured (it would help if we educate everyone who qualifies for Medicaid to sign up and include illegal aliens); B) get coverage for pre-existing conditions (we could negotiate with insurance companies); C) build a safety net for people who suffer financial ruin as a result of a catastrophic illness (buy everyone an excess major medical insurance policy).

- What's your rush, and what's your objective? To solve problems or to pass legislation before people ask questions?

- Are you seriously going to vote for this 1,000 page bill before you've read it? It is massive, the changes are monumental, the impact is surreal, and there is no way you can honestly tell your constituents that you have formulated a reasoned belief that this legislation is in the best interests of the people that you were elected to serve.

Basic assumptions: Are terrorists warriors or criminals? Moving Gitmo prisoners to Kansas.

How the White House is strong-arming the press

Anti-trust is obsolete. Indeed it is. One quote:

...by the time regulators can assess a technology market, the market has often moved on. Not long ago, Google was the upstart and the search leaders included names like AltaVista and Excite. “Regulatory intervention in the high-tech sector thwarts the natural evolution of the market,” argues Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Worse, it distorts the response of competitors. Antitrust investigations steer the market in unnatural directions, creating instabilities in entire industry sectors.”

The antitrust laws are anachronisms when applied to industries of constant innovation. Even theories about the role of antitrust were designed for the industrial era.

Health care town halls received with hostility

Cars, Bread, and now circuses too. Have we become sheep?

Infantile delusions. Samuelson on California, quoted at Betsy:

National parallels again seem apparent. Federal budget deficits -- reflecting the urge to spend and not tax -- predate the recession and, as baby boomers retire, will survive any recovery. Amazingly, the Obama administration would worsen the long-term outlook by expanding federal health insurance coverage. There's much mushy thinking about how we'll muddle through.

California has pioneered this sort of delusion. The presumption was that a dynamic economy would pay for expansive government. But California's relative economic performance has actually deteriorated. In the 1980s, the state's economy grew much faster than the national economy; annual growth averaged 5.1 percent vs. 3.1 percent nationally. In the present decade, the gap is smaller -- 2.9 percent versus 2.3 percent -- and much of the state's advantage reflects the unsustainable housing boom, of which California was the epicenter.

While I disagree with 96% of Obama's agenda, I think this whole birther thing is nonsense. Critique peoples' policies and their assumptions. Ad hominems and smears are disgusting, even though the Left has no problem with using them, for example, with the latest Palin smears (Gosh, they must be terrified of her). As Surber comments:

The Kenya certificate is a fake. The Hawai’i certificate is suspicious.

There is only one Vulcan-clad logical conclusion: Barack Obama was never born.

Photos: These are popping up all over LA. LA?

I am headed for the beach and the healthy icy-cold salt water for the weekend. Beach scenery by Theo, who has tons of good stuff posted.

A. Elmer Crowell's Cape Cod decoys

Dalrymple: There is no right to health care.

Population of illegals is dropping

Why you ought to be able to buy a kidney. h/t, Cafe Hayek

Do as the Green Gods say, not as they do

Organic food isn't "healthy." h/t, Dr. Helen. We've been saying that for years. It's magical thinking, and a goofy fad.

The O's Science Czar wants to give trees legal standing. The guy needs to get back on his meds.

Our friend Sipp is featured in Cottages and Bungalows magazine - a magazine without which our truant Dylanologist cannot do.

Repubs unveil their own medical insurance plan

Peggy Noonan: Americans say slow down the hopey-changey

Drudge notes that this is the 12th Obama Time Magazine cover photo in 12 months. Maybe they are reading the polls.

Another prominent limo Lib has second thoughts. h/t, Riehl

Reason TV: The case against college as an entitlement

No, every other developed nation does not have government medical care

Related, from Neo-neo:

America is not in favor of the solution they want, or the one Obama is offering. That may not matter to them—after all, they know better than stupid Americans, and we should be wanting what our intellectual and moral superiors on the Left think we should want. But it is certainly a fact that, despite the 2008 election results, America has still not turned sufficiently to the Left for most of these people.

And Obama has been foundering of late as a leader. This should be completely unsurprising—after all, if you look at his history, why would he be a leader?

Related: Paul Krugman blows it (video). h/t, Insty. No, Canadians do not like their medical system. Nor do the people of Massachusetts: they have a mess up there.

From Marginal Rev:

If insurance companies do avoid covering people who are "likely to need care," this suggests that the uninsured are unhealthy.  But 60% of the uninsured are in excellent health (Table 10) (In fact, overall the uninsured are only slightly less healthy than the insured).

To be sure, this doesn't mean that being uninsured is not a problem but, contra Paul, it does mean that insurance companies would be willing to cover most of the uninsured at the same rates as the insured if the uninsured could or would pay those rates. In Paul's story there is a market failure, in the latter story health insurance is expensive and some people don't buy it.  The difference matters because the wrong diagnosis will almost surely lead to the wrong treatment.

People like Paul see market failure everywhere.

Related: Pelosi says insurance companies are "the villains." Language like that is born of desperation.

Related, from Luskin:

WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD WE EVER DO THIS?   I don't think a majority should be able to vote to disposess a minority in any circumstance -- including to force that minority to pay other people's health care insurance costs against their will. But according to the latest polls, doing so isn't even what the majority wants. So why are we even considering doing this?

You know why, Dan. Power and control.

Krauthammer:

Every doctor knows, as I did when I practiced years ago, how much unnecessary medical cost is incurred with an eye not on medicine but on the law. Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health-care news conference. Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.

First they came for the hamburgers

Canada no longer has free speech

At Volokh:

Judge Richard Posner thinks the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009 goes overboard in trying to protect consumers from themselves. Better to treat them — us — as "consenting adults."

Why do people in government think we citizens are idiots? ...but maybe we are, if we voted for these jokers.

From Dr. Bob:

What is it with these so-called policy gurus? Knowing little or nothing about how health care really works, they haul out the bromides and throw around statistics based on taking small numbers and projecting them across large populations, to come up with scary percentages which then echo around the web and inside the hollow heads of the parrots in media newsrooms. Oh, and our politicians then use this crapola to formulate policies, which always end up having massive unintended consequences and which never achieve the results promised. Newt’s a pretty bright guy — generally a far better idea man than a politician — but he’s whiffing at softballs thrown slowly, by and large, with this one.

So what’s my gripe? Where do I begin? How about at the beginning?

Kaus:

Here's a safe political prediction: Despite all the innovative e-mobilization and ad campaigns and town halls and community organizing, the August recess will not produce any effective groundswell of popular support for Obama's health care reform.

Joe Biden has me scratching my head. Powerline

Are the Dems in trouble in 2010?

Prof Gates happy for a chance to play the Race Card. John Stewart. Related: MSM covers for Gates

Related: Prof Gates has a summer home in Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, which is the village the O wanted to vacation in too. Many do not know that Oak Bluffs has been a favored summer spot for affluent black Americans for a century. Martha's Vineyard also still has a good population of Wampanoag indians, mostly in the Gay Head area.

More on the obesity ridiculousness. Q&O

In which Dan Rather beclowns himself

“Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Slotermeyer?" Driscoll 

Steyn wonders Isn't it Islamophobic to characterize Palestinians as homophobic?

Insane: A European Working Time Directive. How do people put up with this BS? Doctors work when they have to. That's what doctors do. That's what all vigorous people do, except for Euro-weenies. I sure hope their rules do not apply to farmers, shop-keepers, or entrepreneurs.

Now I understand: they permit morons to vote in California. Video. h/t, Neptunus

How can you have a medical insurance poll when only 6 people in the US know what's in the bill? Are people taking it on faith? Gotta love this line:

Pg 425 Lines 17-19 Govt will instruct and consult regarding living wills, durable powers of atty. Mandatory!

No laughing out loud at Dr. Obama. It's a cartoon, for heaven's sake. Woops, I forgot. The Moslems made cartoons dangerous. I feel sorry for that neurosurgeon, who was just having a little fun.

Bruce Walker at Am Thinker asks Is the O's Presidency unraveling?

Extreme kayaking. No thanks.

Michelle's new book: Culture of Corruption

The surge in American gun-buying

How to defeat socialized medical care. Vid at PJTV

Prof Gates: Another Lefty tax conniver? It figures.

From Herbert London on the Crisis Syndrome:

Good summary of the legislative stumbles re health care, at Hennessey

World's fastest home internet connection (fixed) 

Brit gummint keeps their climate data secret. Why? Related: Some reality about Greenland's ice

Obama care is worse than you think. Wkly Standard

Ben Stein: We've figured him out

What's up with New Jersey? NYT 

Shoot the messenger. WH attacks the CBO. I thought the CBO was sacred.

I know adults who could probably use this book too, which Insty mentioned: You Don't Have to Learn the Hard Way: Making It in the Real World: A Guide for Graduates

Is it a crime to have a fat kid? I don't think so. How do you control what a 14 year-old eats? The world has always had fat people. Some people like to be fat, like Pres. Grover Cleveland who admitted to only a prosperous 307 lbs but was probably well over that.

Why the Ricci case complicates - but doesn't kill - affirmative action. Related: Prof. Gates says he's 57% white. Lucianne comments "Guess there's no money in White Studies."

Away this weekend, but here are a few links I want to get out there first:

It's better to be tall. I always wanted to be 6'3, and now I see why. I blame my parents.

Academic Groupthink.

I'm bipolar. Cut me a break.

Missed this: The Pope on Love in Truth.

The O's fate depends on Perot voters

Why should our tax dollars be going for stuff like this?

Civil war: Black Caucus vs. Blue Dogs. Where does the Irish Caucus stand?

Gov. Pawlenty: This was a joke on the American people

If Bush made this sort of factual error. What a phoney, as Holden Caulfield would say.

Gov. Perry of Texas, standing up to The Man. That is an American thing to do.

The Krautman on why Obamacare is sinking. One quote:

...the greatest waste is the hidden cost of defensive medicine: tests and procedures that doctors order for no good reason other than to protect themselves from lawsuits. Every doctor knows, as I did when I practiced years ago, how much unnecessary medical cost is incurred with an eye not on medicine but on the law.

Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health-care news conference. Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.

Related: How the O stumbled. WSJ

Related: Medical care? Few care all that much.

Just for laughs, I want to hear these tapes. Related: If he's so smart, how come the Prof doesn't know these basic facts?.

Related, from Rush: "The only racial profiling in Cambridge Massachusetts is in the Admissions Office of Harvard University."

Watch for the OFA to come knockin' on your door

VDH on how the O could have done things right.

The O's problem: Glibness. Powerline:

(he) continues to overestimate his verbal skills. All his life, he has been rewarded for assuming a certain pose and offering up platitudes in a reasonably glib fashion. These are minor talents at best, but they got Obama elected President, notwithstanding his lack of original insight into any issue of public policy. Now that he is President, however, these limitations are starting to haunt him. Obama's foolish and entirely needless assertion that Cambridge policeman James Crowley "acted stupidly" when he arrested Harvard professor Henry Gates is beginning to turn into a political issue that will hurt Obama with broad sectors of the electorate.

Driscoll reported this, and it sounds right to me:

Carol Platt Liebau (Harvard Law Review), February 20th – “[Tom Pirelli] did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he’d leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done.”

The guy likes to slide over the surface. That is a character trait.

 How to pay for the O's plans? It is beyond parody. Related, from Willisms, below:

The Little Sisters of the Poor

Upping the ante again: Climate change a threat to national defence. Gimme a break. Another new study blames everything on the Pacific Oscillation. I doubt mankind can control that thing.

Leszek Kolakowski died.

Stunning photo of Mt. Everest (h/t, Miller)

Brits considering school vouchers. Good on 'em. I guess they don't have teachers' unions.

A movement to make hot dogs politically incorrect. Nice try. Loonies and cranks are trying to run the world.

Rove:

Team Obama was rushing to pass health care before the August recess out of fear that allowing members to go home for an extended spell before voting on the bill would give them an opportunity to hear from their constituents. They fear that the 300 protestors who showed up at a town hall meeting in Panama City, Fla. held June 30 by Democrat Rep. Allen Boyd shortly after he voted for the cap and trade energy tax) are only the start of a larger backlash.

A good defence of American medicine by Cardinal at Tiger. One quote:

That's why the debate about the uninsured is BS. Universal healthcare is intended to stop the spending - and that in turn will stop innovation and development. We will underproduce healthcare products and services, and while more people will have "coverage", they will queue for these underproduced services which in turn will also be denied far more regularly than is the case with insurance. Count on it. Americans don't go to the UK and Canada to get healthcare; it's the other way around. Now they may go to Canada to get certain products available in both places more cheaply. But I promise you that product is only available in the first place because it was developed here. The rate of healthcare innovation in the UK and Canada is dwarfed by that of the US. And furthermore, if the US market didn't exist, the rate of innovation around the world would collapse.

We have a great healthcare system. It works for most of our 300 million people, and works pretty well by any sensible historical measure. Yes, it's expensive. ..

From The Unbearable Whiteness of Maureen Dowd, at Am Spectator:

At the core of the beating intellectual heart of the left-wing establishment where such things are studied with the detail of Talmudic scholars, the New Haven fire department is doing more than three times better on race than the very liberal elites who have set themselves up as its sniffy critics. Perhaps instead of seething about "Firefighters and Race" the Times would have been better served by pondering "Editorial Writers and Race." Or perhaps: "Too Black to Write; New York Times Column Writing and Race."

Dick Morris on the polls

Layers of bureacracy at UNC-CH. Your tuition dollars at work.

The US immigration Diversity Lottery. No Brits need apply.

Dems go after the Career Colleges. I happen to think that Career Colleges are a great innovation.

What is Russia up to? Nyquist

From a Rasmussen medical care report:

Another factor that may be playing a role is underlying public skepticism about the legislative process. Americans, by a two-to-one margin, believe that no matter how bad things are, Congress can always make it worse.

Americans aren't stupid. Only the terminally naive think otherwise.

The Blue State Meltdown. The American 

Smart political advice via NRO 

Abortion and assisted suicide would not be rationed! 

Honduras throws out Venez diplomats. Good idea 

A Republican! At my cocktail party? 

The government has spent 79 billion on climate studies

The press conference fellatio fest. And why try to demonize Docs? People trust their Docs far more than their pols. If Docs are the enemy, we're in big trouble. I want my Docs working for me, not for the government.

Viking:

There goes your health insurance - Betsy has a long post detailing how a public option plan will crowd out private insurance because it doesn't play by the same rules: the government-run will be subsidized by taxpayers and will dictate payment terms to doctors and hospitals, just like Medicare does now.

Here's the nightmare scenario: companies drop private insurance for the government plan, the program becomes huge and thus hugely expensive, while hospitals go bankrupt due to reduced reimbursement rates.

What's not to love?

The world values survey, Could spend lots of time perusing it. Darned interesting. h/t, Gene Expressions

Just like they changed "Global Warming" to "Climate Change." It's now "Underrepresented Groups" instead of "minorities." Right out of Orwell's handbook. The darn Asians and Pakistanis and Indians messed it all up by being so successful, and opted out of the "rainbow coalition."

Public laughs out loud re Obamacare. Video at Michelle. Sheesh.That's bad.

Two kinds of moonwalks

Sissy: Why can't they just leave us alone?

The new Depression begins to bite. Good grief. Must be NYC workers.

Are there linguistic tells for narcissism? Dr X considers

Everybody I know has stopped spending on useless crap too. Relationships are all that matters...except guns and guy toys and new camo and stuff.

The governors hate Obamacare. I think ObamaCare is in the ICU, dying on life support. But it's a scorched earth approach, says Wiz.

More: 100 million citizens would get screwed by ObamaCare.

More: The O taps into the useful idiots

Image above from Iowahawk, of course

I heard on the radio news today "The US is the only of the advanced industrial nations without government medicine." I wondered "What's wrong with that?" No NHS, Please. We're Americans.

The O's Green Jobs Czar: We stole stuff. Another honest fellow in DC.

Statistics on the sun and sunspots.

I'm not dead yet. Via Insty:

ANOTHER HEALTHCARE BILL NUGGET: “The section, titled ‘Advanced Care Planning Consultation’ requires senior citizens to meet at least every 5 years with a doctor or nurse practitioner to discuss dying with dignity.”

Does dying of a heart attack on the tennis court qualify as "dignified"? I think it should, but it does rudely inconvenience the remaining three - assuming it's doubles.

The demographic death of Japan

The Great Uniter. (h/t, Driscoll)

Wilkinson on Peter Singer on medical care rationing

The AMA betrays its profession. Civil servants cannot be professionals because a key part of being a "professional" is being beholden to your own conscience and judgement, not outisde forces.

Another Sen. Dodd update. Just the usual sleazy, lying, greedy pol.

WSJ: The Obama Agenda Bogs Down. Democrats got what they wanted in the stimulus bill. The public knows it.

Good example of why Conservatism sucks right now.

George Will on why it ain't smart to soak the rich

The O is slipping faster on key issues. Duh. Guy is an amateur, and his issues are nuts.

Corzine is gonna lose the election. He is dead meat, but nobody can fix NJ's mess.

The WH hides the budget mess. Wait 'til everybody's on vacation.

From Front Page:

If priorities are to be believed, the priority the Obama administration has placed at the top could become a flop. Political pollster Daniel Yankelovich says that Americans are slowly leaving the “wishful stage” of the health care debate, when polling data showed broad support for a larger government role in medicine. Yankelovich predicts “in the next few weeks, when voters discover what national health care will cost and how it could affect their own care, romance will give way to reality.” Studies already show the legislation's eroding popularity, as citizens find out the problems inherent in socialized medicine, the tax increases necessary to finance it, and the deception politicians use to inflate the number of uninsured Americans.

Watch out, NYH-Presbyterian, Mass General, and Mayo Clinic. Via Viking:

Large urban teaching hospitals - including hospitals that are the biggest engines of the Boston economy - are facing the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars under national health care reform as rural lawmakers on Capitol Hill wage a fight to win more federal cash for their local institutions.

When pols run car companies. Betsy Related: Will small be beautiful for GM? WSJ

Sacha Baron Cohen will kill Bruno 

NYT considers foundation support for news. Buzz Machine wonders whether there is a new model for news collaboration.

Russia's Got Talent

Who says there's no competition in medical insurance? 

Vote us the medical plan Congress has. Details at Surber

ACORN take note: Zelaya had vote figured in advance 

ObamaCare would cover 12 million illegals

Ex-cons counsel cons-to-be

Rush on Sarah:

Name for me any Republican or conservative who has had a 72% approval rating in the party after a year of trashing by the State-Run Media and the Democrat Party.  Name for me one Republican candidate who has maintained a 72% approval rating while their life and their career has been under assault for the purpose of destruction, which is the case with Sarah Palin. 

Do I understand cardinal vs. ordinal understandings of well-being?

And that's the way it wasn't. Driscoll with a good history of "the news". Related, Wizbang is not praising Cronkite

Inside the monstrous ObamaCare bureaucracy. Michelle 

"We gotta do it now" doesn't always work the second time around. 

Add it to the list: global warming causes squid. Me likes to eat squid, lightly sauteed with white wine, butter, olive oil, parsley and garlic.

"By then it's too late." Insty: 

 HEALTHCARE UPDATE, from the Los Angeles Times: “The president knows his keystone program is in deep trouble and losing momentum. That’s why his organization is sending out all those e-mails and organizing local discussion groups to mobilize grassroots support and why he drags the subject into everything he talks about. . . . Obama’s current problem is actually crumbling support among Democrats, dozens of whom are beginning to waver over the scale of such spending, whether some of it eventually gets covered by savings or not. They know that conveniently-predicted future government savings have a way in Washington of not actually ever materializing. But by then it’s too late.”

Cheetos-flavored lip balm

1925 Bugatti from Lago Maggiore

Ten weird ways we deal with the dead

Iran: still in turmoil

The CIT story: It's a big deal for many businesses

Is it Pelosi Payback?

The Sun of Songun Shedding Its Rays All over the World

How the trillion-dollar Federal takeover works. Pajamas. It is a stealth bill designed to eliminate private choice in medical insurance, and thus to eliminate choice in insurance plans.

A Lib says pass health care now: do the rationing later:

Do remember that even if reform ends up without game-changing cost control, it may create political conditions that make future cost control more likely. That seems to be happening in Massachusetts, which enacted sweeping coverage expansions a few years ago. 

Via Viking:

Head of CBO rips Dem medical care plan. They overreached.

At Althouse, a commenter re the rushing of the Dem plan:

This is arguably the fourth time that Obama and the Democrats have pulled this off, if they indeed do succeed this time. The previous examples were: the "stimulus" bill; the budget; and cap and trade. The "stimulus" bill was rammed through the House less than 24 hours after being disclosed - and then Cap and Trade was rammed through based on amendments to the bill that had not be consolidated, so no one, even those running the House, actually knew what was in it.

It was one thing to do this when the "stimulus" was urgent. Of course, we find that most of the "stimulus" won't be spent for years to come, but... Again, Cap and Trade was absolutely urgent, since if Congress didn't act immediately, parts of New York City might (if you believed Al Gore) be under water by the end of the century. But health care reform? Someone might die if it isn't enacted immediately, a victim of some evil insurance company denying a worthy claim. (Of course, Obama doesn't mention that the difference is that under a government payer system, those denied treatments have no recourse).

Related: Make Congress sign up for the government plan. Related: A pdf of the House Bill, with other info, at Classical

Biden: We need to spend more money so we don't go bankrupt. Ummm, will that work for me too?

A reckless Congress will take US taxes higher than France's

In the USA, this case would be a $50 million malpractice suit but it seems normal in the UK

Not satire: Britain building ecotowns in the countryside. Destroying beautiful countryside in the process.

Not satire: Britain has "I am not a pedophile" cards

Not satire: The O's Science Czar used to be a global cooling fearmonger. Just a typical nutty crank.

Not satire: Minneapolis has a Department of Walking. Where would we be without government's wisdom?

A confession from a climate-changer in a book review at Am Thinker:

"We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us." According to Hulme, climate change can do a lot: "Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs."

Speak for yourself, shmuck.

Meanwhile, global cooling attacks the Northeast

Re Black Studies:

"If I couldn't study something that's about myself then I wouldn't want to be here," the black sophomore once told me, explaining how crucial to him it was to be able to major in African-American Studies.

I'd recommend math or physics. It's not about you, Mr. Young Student.

Photo from theo

Taxes: You're next. But first, drowning the rich

NYT: Why we must ration medical care

Related, remind me: What problem is a health care bill supposed to be solving?

Why the Dems are in a hurry: dropping poll numbers. Some Dems feel the O could be a handicap

Thinking about consciousness. Rick Moran

Moonbat Czar du jour. Says he's a Communist.

In Tennessee, you can now bring your gun to the pub. You can still smoke in some of them, too.

Where taxes will have to go without entitlement reform (details at Willisms):

Photo above from Gateway's Dems want to pass socialized medical care in weeks

After 20 years in jail, lying kids offer Dad a hug. During those years, real witch hunts were going on. h/t, Overlawyered

Did you know they have tiger farms?

Is your thinking "impure"?

This John Holdren is a real nutjob. Where do they find these people? RCP calls him The Science Fiction Czar

The Car Czar turns out to have been a possible crook

Obamacare and other disasters. Surber. Related, Pethokoukis on why the health surtax is a disaster

Shocking. CIA had plans to kill Al Qaida leaders

Soto: lying or stupid? I'll go with lying. One lib law prof says:

I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate-that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments. To claim otherwise-to claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results-is to claim that whenever Justices disagree among themselves, someone is either a fool or acting in bad faith. What does it say about our legal system that in order to get confirmed Judge Sotomayor must tell the lies that she told today? That judges and justices must live these lies throughout their professional careers?

Tiger's news that will not make headlines:

In the category of news that will make no headlines, "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

Via Icecap, an attempted exchange of information with Sen Lieberman re AGW.

At No Pasaran:

Think about it – the French and the British – two of the societies with a past history of the proponency of freedom of expression, and both with no shortage of understanding of the burden and suspicion that a state-run media can burden a society with STILL have state run media establishments, but Poland is simply disposing of theirs for precisely the right reasons.

At American Spectator, re 2010:

The medical care bill. From Steele:

“The Democrats’ priorities for health-care reform are now clear: a government-run system financed on the backs of Americans and small businesses with higher taxes,” said Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee.

From the AP, which begins:

House Democratic leaders, pledging to meet the president's goal of health care legislation before their August break, are offering a $1.5 trillion plan that for the first time would make health care a right and a responsibility for all Americans. Left to pick up most of the tab were medical providers, employers and the wealthy.

No, it doesn't make health care a right. It makes insurance a right - if you can call something a "right" which is enforced and required by the government and paid for by us, whether we want to or not.

What do I want? I want free housing in Manhattan, free food and beer, a free car with free car insurance, a free boat with free dockage, and free legal coverage if I get in a scrape.

And I do not want my doc subject to "best practices" as determined by Washington wonks. I want him to work with me and for me, and I want to pay him to do so. Cooky-cutter medicine is crazy.

Palin strikes back. Photo: Sarah Palin in youth. The ingenue, the gal next door. Cute. 

Sen. Pat Leahy: Liar. But he seems so grandfatherly.

The greatest American preachers

The public has cold feet about government-run medical care

6% of Americans are paranoid nuts

Guns: what are they for?

Bill O'Reilly knows no science, drinks the Kool Aid

Lots of discussion of academic tenure at Phi Beta Cons. I think the concept is obsolete.

Israel needs "serious self-reflection," but Iran doesn't?

Why Goldman loves Cap&Trade. They ain't stupid.

I think this graph from Synth makes the same point as The B's post last night:

Related - something fascinating: Vet costs have been rising in synch with human medical costs! Also related: Hugs as healthcare.

Why Maggie Matters. A quote from a Claremont review of a new book on Maggie Thatcher:

In Britain at that time, the more enterprising people despaired of its future. Britain was retreating from empire, and industrial managers no longer had the power to manage. This feebleness was not just a British disease. It was widespread throughout the Western world. John Hoskyns, one of Thatcher's advisers, observes that Thatcher was in part a trail blazer for Ronald Reagan, because under President Jimmy Carter, "America was suffering, in a less extreme form, from the same fashionable left-of-center waffle that we [in Britain] had been doing in spades, for years." One can only say (and as Berlinski recognizes) that the "waffle" still hasn't gone away. It survives in universities, bureaucracies, and large areas of the judiciary. In Britain it may currently be identified with the causes favored by the late Princess Diana.

It was Thatcher who rejected this feebleness, and her triumphant government from 1979 to 1990 was a succession of battles against what often seemed at the time like a classical hydra. Along with her Conservative colleague Keith Joseph, Thatcher espoused a Hayekian version of the free market. The result was not merely a changed policy but something like a moral revolution. She denounced socialism as an immoral system that enfeebled those who lived under it (much as Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet Union an evil empire), leading to the same sniffy disapproval in Britain that Reagan inspired in American liberals.

In The Consequences of Big Government, Samuelson begins:

The question that President Obama ought to be asking -- that we all should be asking -- is this: How big a government do we want? Without anyone much noticing, our national government is on the verge of a permanent expansion that would endure long after the present economic crisis has (presumably) passed and that would exceed anything ever experienced in peacetime. This expansion may not be good for us, but we are not contemplating the adverse consequences or how we might minimize them.

Conservatives fear the monopolistic power of the State and view expanding businesses as a blessing; Libs fear the power of private enterprise and big industries, and view expanding government as a blessing. I view the former as more in the American vein. We too often forget that it was the Brit Parliament that we warred with in 1776 - not the King. And all they wanted to do was to collect more taxes...