Tuesday, June 9. 2009
From Dick Morris: Here comes medical rationing:
Now that the cameras have been put away and the media is no longer watching, their secret emerges: They are going to cut medical costs by cutting medical care. Right now, they cite four targets. They plan to:
1. Cut diagnostic imaging tests like MRIs and CAT scans.
2. Reduce the use of antibiotics.
3. Perform fewer Caesarean sections.
4. Cut care for management of chronic back pain
These decisions will not be medical but financial. They will not be based on a doctor’s opinion of what his or her patient needs, but a bureaucrat’s and an accountant s opinion of what the new health care system can afford.
Related: Obama's health care cost illusion. WSJ
Related: If you can save 30%, why not start with Medicare?
Related: Obamacare is like RomneyCare - sign up or get fined. Ace
Related: Neoneo suspects that they don't believe a word they are saying about costs, and I agree with that.
My opinion? I think much of medical "wasted spending" is to avoid lawsuits. "Please tell the jury, Doctor, why you didn't bother to get an MRI for Mrs. Jones' heachaches?" "Please tell the jury, Doctor, why you decided to do this when some recent studies show bla bla bla." In the end, "wasteful medical spending" is always the spending on somebody else - not on yourself.
Monday, June 8. 2009
 Image on right via Driscoll's Newsweek meets Muggeridge's Law
From space biz to govt: Get out of our way
By far, America's best-selling vehicle
No sign of housing recovery yet
The effects of the proposed Weather Tax. Just the most recent excuse for another tax on the American economy to expand government's dominion over our lives. Governments are power-sponges, and I do not know why. Perhaps it's about their job security, since they probably can't do anything else.
Why would they blame Harvard for this? Sheesh. All Harvard did was to give her the chance of a lifetime, and she acted like a normal teenaged idiot.
Like we predicted: Stimulus Bill officially a failure. But not really, since its real purpose was election pay-off.
Related: George Will gets it -
The administration is determined to prop up GM as a jobs program for the UAW and Midwestern states rich in electoral votes. This frenzy will intensify as the administration's decisions deepen the debacle.
Propaganda or Economics? Elizabeth Warren and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, Utterly Misleading Bankruptcy Study
The Kennedy bill would force employers to pay for medical insurance. More on the Dems' medical care plans, and how they want to pay for it (we will pay for it, of course). Their plan is to subsidize this "insurance" with tax dollars in order to drive private insurors out of business, and to reimburse docs and dentists and hospitals at Medicare rates - which will drive them out of business. I would term this a very aggressive Socialist plan to politicize medical care and to place medical care completely in the hands of the government, with their expert, cost-conscious panels deciding what you can do based on the data du jour and cost-effectiveness. By the way, this is "insurance" in name only - it's supposed to pay all of your medical expenses. That ain't insurance - it's an entitlement.
Anchoress:
Even Vanity Fair understands that the press is nothing to the man they love, but a bunch of useful idiots.
VDH via SISU:
In short, Obama reminds me a little of myself — at 26. I had left the farm for 9 years to get a BA in classics, PhD in classical philology, and live in Athens for two years of archaeological study — all on scholarships … I had forgotten much of the culture of the farm where I spent years 1-18.
Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to farm 180 acres with my brother and cousin — and sadly was quickly disabused of the world of the faculty lounge.
Cornell West's prophetic public intellectualism
 Via the IMF: Where Does the Public Sector End and the Private Sector Begin?;
Summary: The boundary between the public and private sectors can be defined on the basis of ownership of institutional units. Nonmarket government-owned entities and corporations that are owned or controlled by government units belong to the public sector. “Economic ownership” is more important than majority ownership. Joint ventures, public-private partnerships, and social insurance funds (including for public employees) can be unambiguously allocated to the public or private sector on the basis of international public sector accounting standards. Boundary problems within the public sector are just as acute as those between the public and private sectors, mainly because of ambiguities in distinguishing “market” from “nonmarket” activities.
From Peter Robinson at Forbes:
May I ask a question? Where does President Barack Obama's agenda come from?
Just a generation ago, you will recall, Reagan revitalized the nation, and then the Soviet Union, long calcified and staggering, at last collapsed. Free markets were good; statism, futile. Didn't everybody learn that lesson? Didn't it prove, in some utterly basic way, decisive?
I repeat, where does Obama's agenda come from?
Charles Kesler knows the answer.
The most troubling aspect of international security for the United States is not the killing power of our immediate enemies, which remains modest in historical terms, but our increasingly effete view of warfare. The greatest advantage our opponents enjoy is an uncompromising strength of will, their readiness to “pay any price and bear any burden” to hurt and humble us. As our enemies’ view of what is permissible in war expands apocalyptically, our self-limiting definitions of allowable targets and acceptable casualties—hostile, civilian and our own—continue to narrow fatefully. Our enemies cannot defeat us in direct confrontations, but we appear determined to defeat ourselves.
Lower photo from I Suck at Golf, via Theo, I think
Sunday, June 7. 2009
 The man who cried "Doom" - James Hansen. Also, Freeman Dyson takes on the climate establishment
Related: Scientists line up in DC to combat alarmism:
...the fiery madness is fueled by a number of complicit and self-serving groups. First and foremost, the thousands of scientists that depend upon government grants to fund their climatology research, which would disappear should they fail to find either a human connection to or some new negative impact of climate change. Then there are the environmental organizations that depend upon sounding the alarm to keep the donation coffers full. And the journalists who see a “free ride” to nab front-page newspaper positions by echoing the alarmists. And the Capitalists who see, well – capital, prompting huge corporations to jump on board to exploit renewable energy subsidies and R&D grants from the federal government. Meanwhile, politicians see a great opportunity to posture about “knowing something about science” and to appear concerned for the long term and about public health and environment. And that, explained Heartland’s president and CEO, is what we’re up against in battling the bad-legislation-breeding hysteria.
The O is getting a pass on the economy:
Double standard? Today's 9.4% unemployment rate "fueled hopes" that the economy was recovering, but 4.6% unemployment rates during the Bush administration were characterized as "job growth slowing to a crawl."
 Related: Hinderaker via The Corner:
Yes, that's Obama all right—"standing above the world." Good Lord. Reporters are often compared to teen-age girls with crushes on Obama, but, as the father of three present, former or about-to-be teen-age girls, I object to the analogy. I personally have never seen a teen-age girl make a fool of herself over a boy the way many—most—mainstream reporters have over Barack Obama.
Related, re jobs:
Total job losses in May were 345,000 which put the unemployment rate at 9.4%. You have to dig a little further to find out that there were 70,000 jobs created in May by the government, not the private sector. Private sector employment fell by 611,000.
How's that stimulus working out for you?
The only smiling statue in the Rotunda
Matthew Lesko does Free Government Money
Enhanced interrogation saved lives.
A lobbying frenzy re cap & trade
Upper image: A Wigwam (technically a Tepee) Village in Horse Cave, KY (story here, via Thompson)
Lower image: Stolen from Am Digest, where there are many good things
Saturday, June 6. 2009
Tomorrow is (obviously) Sunday, so we thought you might want to know before you go to church that Newsweek has declared Obama to be God. Silly me to imagine Newsweek to be a secular humanist rag, when they are seeking a god like everybody else.
I doubt that the O is God: he seems too ignorant to be God but, on the other hand, he does resemble a dark Narcissus. He might be a naiad or one of those Greek metrosexual things that skitter through the forest.
Auster discusses: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/013362.html
There are more than two defense attorneys for each Guantanamo detainee, many from the US’ most prestigious law firms providing free services. Have they accomplished an extended rule of law, or have they degraded it? They’ve tied the US in legalistic knots, delaying justice, defamed the US before the world, and reduced respect or fear of penalty for those who terrorize and seek our destruction.
Arthur Herman writes in Commentary about “The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard”:
The enemies of Bush and Gitmo have succeeded brilliantly. But in so doing, they have done grave violence to the truth about the Guantánamo Bay facility, have aided in the release of prisoners who have since committed acts of terrorism outside the United States, and may yet succeed in having Barack Obama’s government release young men with terrifying ambitions for murder and mass destruction onto the soil of the United States.
I just started reading my friend Gordon Cucullu’s intensive first-hand study of Inside Gitmo. (Cucullu also has a website about the matter.)
As Cucullu says, read the truth and decide for yourself whether Gitmo has been and is the right way to deal with enemies sworn to murder and to abet our downfall.
The Gitmo detainees have able counsel from our lawyers, and liberal allies in our and the world’s media, to trumpet manufactured or exaggerated grievances, claims and rights. But, you are really the jury. Herman sums up for you: “the entire Gitmo myth…was constructed to ruin the Bush administration and blacken the reputation of the United States.” They got what they wanted, and now “However, human-rights groups and lawyers are just getting warmed up. They are now laying the ground for a similar legal assault on the American detention center at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, which they call Gitmo with a different zip code.”
Who is defending your zip code?
 Today is Canada's Tax Freedom Day
Viking:
The big one – The Corner: "On Tuesday, President Obama sent a letter to Senators Kennedy and Baucus outlining what kind of bill he wants and will support. And what he wants is a government takeover of American health-care, plain and simple." This will be the largest expansion of entitlements since Medicare and Obama doesn't have the slightest idea how to pay for it.
Extra - More on the health reform cramdown at Patterico.
Related: Fools rush in
Can there be Peace Through Weakness?
Pols as loan brokers. Driscoll
AOL reporter fired for reporting the obnoxious Playboy news
Major O supporter threatens to move jobs overseas
Goldman: Oil to $85
The Left loves diversity, except in ideas:
...the leftist bon mot “respect diversity” is but a twisted joke. The radical’s concept of diversity is limited to encountering someone of a different sex or hue who feels exactly the same way about politics as they do.
To the left there is no such thing as a loyal opposition. Any contact with conservatives must be avoided. We are morally unclean and they fear contamination via exposure to our speech.
Their malignant mindset poses serious obstacles for those who work alongside them. Political correctness and the sanctimoniousness of Democrats have made interactions with them a truly nauseating experience.
In Chicago, there’s no getting around all the pseudo-liberals. Despite dwelling in a city and state rendered broke and dysfunctional by a corrupt Democratic Party machine, statists remain as ubiquitous as broken glass on the sidewalk.
The same can be said about New York City, a place in whose environs Harry Stein, a contributing editor at City Journal, has lived the majority of his life. Perhaps a desire to commemorate his fellow sufferers is what caused him to pen his latest book, I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous.
Friday, June 5. 2009
 Lefty: Maybe it's OK to hate f- Michelle Malkin. Good grief. The hatred is unbelievable.
Vanderleun on prayer.
50,000' thunderheads! The possible last 14 minutes of the Air France flight
Benefit spending is soaring. Who's supposed to pay for that? Little ol' me?
What did you expect? Congress is already running GM, for its own advantage
The teacher's unions strike back against school reform. Crickets chirping, as we used to say.
No relationship between CO2 and climate warming.
How the Admin controls the WH press
The domestic cat is no more "natural" than a cow in a field. Why wildlife-lovers hate house cats:
People who wouldn’t dream of taking a shotgun and blasting a bird out of a tree let their cats outside, which accomplishes the exact same thing but in a slower and more horrifying way. The cat doesn’t need to tear the bird to pieces, either: one tiny nick will of a cat’s claw or tooth will subject the bird to enough bacteria to kill it, only it will take the bird one or two days to die. If the bird is a single parent feeding nestlings, they will all starve to death.
Precautionary measures simply do not work. During an 18-month period, a single cat roaming a wildlife experiment station killed over 1,600 birds and small mammals. A study in England showed that cats wearing bells killed more birds than cats without them; during a study in Kansas, a free-roaming declawed cat killed more birds than the cats with claws.
How Hillsdale College beat Harvard. Related: Jules on Gen. Petraeus at Harvard. I though Jules' family padlocked his computer...
The O visits the Arabs. He really buttered them up. However, via Classical,
The president's error is in attributing "Islam" to the accomplishments of the Arab world of a thousand years ago. The president couldn't be more wrong.
It was Arabs qua Aristotelians and not Arabs qua Islamists who are responsible for the accomplishments described by the president.
Boob bait for the burkhas?
Also, what's with the moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the Palis? "on the other hand..." That isn't buttering them up - it's bending over, dude.
Related: Is the O our first female President?
Thursday, June 4. 2009
The O tries to sell hopey-changey to the Middle East. Good luck.
I think the sales trick would be to give them some fresh new target for the hatred. Maybe the infidel Eskimos? Or maybe those crazy Aussie Aborigines who don't give a dang about Mohammed (pbuh)?
But hey, what's with that little mustache? Is that to look more Moslem or something? Good grief. That seems strange.
 Never a place to be outdone in the PC department, Harvard begins a Chair in Sexual Perversion Studies. But they don't call it that.
My only question is why it isn't in the Medical School, where such things could actually be seriously studied. After all, I have never met a gay or whatever person who really wanted to be like that if given the choice.
 No national sympathy for the Marines - yet the late-term baby killer is mourned and lamented. As Jammy put it:
Maybe if Private William Long performed partial-birth abortions his killing would have caught the attention of Barack Hussein Obama a little quicker.
But since he was an Army soldier murdered by a Muslim jihadist, it wasn't worth mentioning for over two days, and until after Obama left the country.
18th Century coiffure. Crazy, but good habitat for lice.
10 common misconceptions about blogs. h/t, Norm
Britain on the Brink.
Chavez: "Comrade Obama may be to the Left of me and Fidel." Related: Canadian Socialist leader visits Washington re health care.
Acting like a jerk: US one of the largest Moslim countries? That's plain stupid, worthy of "all 57 states" or Dan Quail. When will the MSM discover that there's less horsepower under that shiny hood? More at Surber
Nostalgianomics from Krugman; corrections at Reason.
A job for a Diversity and Equality Supervisor in England. Not satire.
The hatred. Now it's about hate-f-ing Palin. Against my will, I am introduced to that progressive concept.
My time working in the real West Wing. Hennessey
 Dr. Clouthier:
My biggest concern with Government Run health care is that the government will run it and run you. That is, your life will be controlled from cradle to grave. You will eat a certain way…or else. You will do certain things…or else. And the government will have every motivation to force you down a path.
Ultimately, this is a civil liberties issue. Some people say that not having health care for all is shameful in such a wealthy country. Shameful is the notion of a bureaucrat deciding whether you live or die based on the metrics of a chart. That’s shameful. And that would be our future. It is a future I don’t want to see.
Just look at the big government, totalitarian groups that are for this mess. It should give you an idea of what you’d have to look forward to in the future.
Related from Kudlow: Obamacare will bankrupt the US:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=051409A
What books should the O read? Powerline
This recession more mild that 1982. All my kids have jobs, including my youngest soon-to-be HS grad who has a summer acting job in NYC - and my dau-in-law-to-be just nailed a good one in NYC too. That makes 3 working in NYC. Good on them. All young folks need to spend some time there, I believe.
Hey parents - Leave them kids alone
From the UK re car companies: The US is committing suicide. Related: Iowahawk's take on the new green gummint cars
If the O had Jimmy Carter's fortitude
The O Admin is in permanent campaign mode. Magician in Chief
A European election? WTH? Who will vote? Who has any affinity with the "European Commission"?
Wilkinson: Repubs still the party of Nixon. Truth to that. A very good Pres, overall - if not the most likeable fellow. Too bad he didn't have the cojones to say "We screwed up."
Surber:
55% of Americans want to abolish affirmative action, while 36% support it. Given the great strides minorities have made in the last 45 years under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, most people believe it is time to take the training wheels off.
Photo on top: Vanderleun
Middle Photo: Moonbattery
Toon: Theo
Wednesday, June 3. 2009
The Maggie's Farm fun-loving and amoral fact-checking and bookkeeping staff invite you to play the ancient traditional New England festive Springtime game called Name That Tractor:
How deeply will the O grovel? Related: Romney roasts the O's posture of apology
How GM lost its way. Ingrassia Related: Brooks on The Quagmire Ahead
The Dems are the Party of Hate. Driscoll
I survived two years of Teach for America. Sex in the stairwells
How Brit hospitals try to keep their stats good
David Warren: We Canadians are stupid
Massive estimates of death are in vogue for Copenhagen
Kasich will run for Ohio gov. Good.
Not a peep from the O on the murdered soldier. Palin knows better
We told you Geithner was funny
How to discuss issues with Lefties. AVI
I had the same thought: Is this murder, or not?
Vast Right Wing Conspiracy posted a remarkable Memorial Day piece
The bloodthirsty Presbyterians are back at it
The GM bailout only delays the inevitable
California: The lunacy of the process argument. One quote:
The thing that absolutely drives me up the wall about the argument that California's biggest problem is a process problem -- the two-thirds rule to adopt budgets and raises taxes -- instead of an inability to live within its means is that the process argument implies that California has been governed in a starve-the-beast mode. In other words, that minority Republicans in the Legislature have managed to keep taxes absurdly and unrealistically low.
Instead, the truth, of course, is that California has the highest gas and sales tax; the highest- or second-highest income tax; and the highest corporate tax rates in the West. Our property taxes are about average nationally, thanks to Prop. 13.
How can anyone look at this picture and make the starve-the-beast argument? How come no one ever points this out on the news pages of the L.A. Times or Sac Bee?
It's not a tendentious, impossible-to-document claim. It's a simple fact: Whatever the barriers are to higher taxes, California has still indisputably ended up with high taxes.
Tuesday, June 2. 2009
 President Obama says that if his health care program doesn’t pass Congress by this summer, it’s dead. It’s dead already among Americans, but that hasn’t yet penetrated the heavily Democrat Congress or the liberal majority of boosters among the major media, seemingly determined to proctologically ram it in.
Rasmussen sums up the polling: (here and here)
· 50% more Americans say reducing the federal deficit is more important than a new health care scheme;
· Just 25% are willing to change their current coverage;
· 29% say a government-run health system would be better than now;
· 77% are opposed to taxing employer-provided health insurance;
· 19% believe a new health care scheme will lead to lower costs.
In poll after poll, basically, those favoring the Obamacare schemes are those at the leftmost wing of the Democrat Party. Probably progeny of former snake oil purchasers.
See Wall Street Journal: Why the health care rush? Democrats don’t think their bill can stand public inspection. “Democrats are trying to rush the largest entitlement expansion since LBJ into law with a truncated debate and as little public scrutiny as possible.”
Re our link today to John Bogle's talk about Wall Street, a young fixed-income friend (the one who warned everybody to get out of both debt and equities in Spring 08), emails me this:
You know what is ironic about the Bogle piece? It's that I spend all day every day working for the public sector coming up with really smart ideas to save states and local governments money to lower tax rates, fix their deficits, find ways that they can actually afford their capital plans and if they can't - we tell them that. We don't convince them to do fancy structures they don't understand (although they don't understand much) and we don't wait until we are paid to offer advice or analysis either. Half my time is spent working on unsolicited stuff. You know what usually happens? They pick a worse firm and a not as good a proposal because of probably some political or golf relationship or pay-to-play scheme, and they end up wasting taxpayer money. Some smart govt people get it and do the right thing, but not many. One thing I have learned over my years in fixed income is that 99% of the people in government are idiots.
"The financial-services sector subtracts value from society," he said, comparing it with gambling, law, and government as entities that simply move money around and extract a bit for themselves.
The US produces 90% of the new medicines in the world. The absence of price controls on drugs makes that possible, and the rest of the world benefits from the work done in our research labs.
It's not easy being a drug company. Most research hits dead ends; the government has endless hurdles, litigation can drive you into bankruptcy - and everybody wants the stuff for free.
The WSJ says that this bounty of new treatments will be eliminated by price controls.
 Photo of cute toes from Theo -
No wonder Liberals hate charter schools so much.
How wrong is Paul Krugman? As we have asserted many times, the guy has become little more than a partisan propagandist.
Why the EPA gives a darn about hydraulic fracturing is beyond me. Unless they simply want to restrict domestic energy supplies...and raise the price.
The vast mammalian, especially ungulate, migrations are almost extinct now. It's a damn shame. Man is a terrible steward of this earth. h/t, Jungleman
The new Under Secretary of Naivete. Sheesh. She needs to grow up.
The myth of "a Muslim world." Asia Times
For our hard-earned billions, what do we get from GM? Bupkus. Even Nader thinks it's nuts. And the kid they put in charge has no biz experience, when what is called for is an expert analyst of distressed manufacturing assets.
Samuelson on The Obama Infatuation. Of course the press hasn't reported on their own sexual fantasies. Why would they report on them when they can simply enact them with virtual oral and anal sexual activities?
Your family owes the Feds $668,000. How ya gonna pay it?
VDH tries to tackle the labyrinth of race
Bruno flying in to the MTV awards:
Monday, June 1. 2009
The sheer size of the fiscal hole that the Obama administration is digging us into, or burying us within, is mindboggling enough. But, that isn’t stopping them from purposely adding to our confusion as they try to dig the hole deeper.
Tom Blumer exposes the tomfoolery at his valuable everyday read Bizzyblog.
Until now the US Treasury has hidden the size of our deficits by including Social Security taxes, and treating them as if in a Trust Fund although there is none and the monies have been spent, so Social Security is actually in negative cash flow within the next two years.
Now Blumer finds the Treasury Department under Wall Street-import Tim Geitner bringing along the tricks that sank Wall Street. The Treasury is now reporting the deficit of receipts versus expenditures as $175-billion less between last October and March. How? The Treasury is somehow calculating a Net Present Value of its TARP bailout expenditures, in other words what they think they’re going to be worth.
As Blumer points out:
Mixing hundreds of billions of dollars of NPV into what has essentially been a cash flow report turns the Monthly Treasury Statement, and deficit reporting in general, into an exercise that will become not only become ever more difficult to comprehend, but one that will also be routinely subject to political manipulation. Judgments as to what discount rate to use, how collectible loans are, and even what should and should not be considered an “investment,” will have multi-billion dollar impacts on the publicly reported deficit. NPV might even directly affect policy. Why should Geithner or Obama allow banks chomping at the bit to get out from under TARP to do so, when their repayments will only increase the reported deficit? Already, the administration, which has projected a fiscal 2009 deficit of over $1.8 trillion, has avoided the political embarrassment of estimating a shortfall that would round off to $2 trillion using true cash-flow reporting.
Hope ‘n Change requires prestidigitation, otherwise known as quick fingers, picking our pockets.
 Mr. Sun remains on vacation. It has been pleasantly cool.
At best, government economic stimulus is just a sugar high
LAPD High. Run by the cops. Sounds good to me. I never met a cop who assumed honesty, and that seems about right, statistically speaking.
Why are Conservatives so mean? That Andrew Klavan link is superb and right to the point.
Who is going to want to buy a Chrysler or GM car now? Chrysler is now Italian, and GM is Government Motors, from the folks who brought you the DMV and the post office.
This harsh detention has to stop. Gitmo inmates get free laptops
Our friend Jules bids us summertime blog adieu with many Brit Civil War links. (I will betcha the wife and kids padlocked his machine and threw the key into Boston harbor.)
Practicing medicine in MA. One quote:
She said, “I calculated that every time I have a Medicaid patient, it’s like handing them a $20 bill when they leave;”
Where are the serious men?
..foreigners have gone from owning $1.3 trillion (of US debt) at the beginning of the decade to now owning $3.3 trillion of such securities — a $2 trillion increase. More important and interesting than that, of the $2.8 trillion in net new issuances of Treasury securities during this decade, foreigners have bought $2.0 of the $2.8 trillion, a stunning 71%. (China alone appears to have bought over one third of the total of foreign purchases.) Who will purchase the debt to fund the upcoming $10 trillion in deficits is anyone’s guess, as the bond market seems to have figured out.
Put it another way. The US government is grossly negligent in creating the conditions that necessitate America’s importing up to 70% of its oil, making the country dependent on countries that are strategic adversaries. Now we also import 70% of the financing of the US government’s budget deficits, again making America dependent on potential adversaries or enemies. This can’t end well. Where are the serious men to address these strategic vulnerabilities?
The greedy, entitled American children all have their hands out for freebies. One quote:
Epiphanies are a dime a dozen among congressional Democrats as they discover urgent new reasons to experience the almost erotic pleasure of commandeering other people's money. For example, freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat whose district includes Disney World, was recently there and was inspired.
The world, he realized, would be a sweeter place if Congress mandated that all companies with 100 or more employees provide a week of paid vacation to those who work at least 25 hours a week. After three years, they would be entitled to two weeks, and companies with more than 50 employees would have to start providing a paid vacation week. Grayson would not mandate that paid vacations be spent at Disney World. With the welfare state approaching insolvency and businesses sagging, this is an odd time to augment Americans' entitlement mentality. But the travel and tourism industries think that Grayson's idea is neat.
No slobbering press in the UK:
The White House press corps is now completely supine, utterly shameless in its groveling cowardice. Stalin himself couldn't have wished for a more slobbering press corps. Rather than mailing them nice little Lipton tea bags, millions of sane Americans might consider sending air sickness bags to our Reigning Media.
But not, thank haven, across the broad Atlantic. There free speech and even laughter are still alive, among the well-lubricated scribblers of Fleet Street. The journos of Britain show little respect for American Presidents regardless of race, creed or color. They laugh hysterically at all of them. Not that it takes much imagination.
The Telegraph has done the awesome, and called Michelle's wardrobe "frumpy."
Sunday, May 31. 2009
You cannot be too cynical to understand politics. How the Dems killed Estrada's judicial nomination. A quote:
It was precisely the fact that Estrada was Hispanic that made Democrats and their activist allies want to kill his nomination. They were determined to deny a Republican White House credit, political and otherwise, for putting a first-rate Hispanic nominee on the bench.
Durbin and his colleagues did as they were instructed. But they had nothing with which to kill the nomination -- no outrageous statement by Estrada, no ethical lapse, no nothing. What to do?
They brainstormed. Estrada had once worked in the Justice Department's Office of Solicitor General, right? (Appointed under the first President Bush, Estrada stayed to serve several years under Clinton.) That office decides which cases the government will pursue in the Supreme Court, right? And that process involves confidential legal memoranda, right? Well, why don't we suggest that there might be something damaging in those memos -- we have no idea whether there is or not -- and demand that they be made public?
Durbin and his colleagues knew the Bush Justice Department would insist the internal legal memos remain confidential, as they always had been. It wasn’t just the Bush Administration that thought releasing the documents was a terrible idea; all seven living former Solicitors General, Republican and Democrat, wrote a letter to Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy begging him to back off.
But the Democrats didn't back off. They had a new, very serious question to ask: What is Miguel Estrada hiding?
The answer was nothing, of course. But the strategy worked. Democrats stonewalled Estrada's nomination, and, after losing control of the Senate in 2002, they began an unprecedented round of filibusters to block an entire slate of Bush appeals-courts nominees, Estrada among them. The confirmation process ground to a halt. More than two years after his nomination was announced, Estrada, tired of what appeared to be an endless runaround, withdrew his name from consideration. Instead of being on the federal bench, he is now in private practice in Washington.
Moonbattery notes that the photo above makes it clear that some forms of "freedom" may be preferred over others.
A look at Cuba before the socialists destroyed it and turned it into a third-world country
The O admin attempts to stifle criticism of stimulus
Related: Betsy on the Chicago Rules
Looks like a true thriller. Yikes.
The Lituus:
Bach's motet (a choral musical composition) "O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht" was one of the last pieces of music written for the Lituus.
The unreliability of eyewitnesses. h/t, Dr X
Are the O and the Dems playing a deep game or, as our Roger said on Friday, a simple game?
Makes sense to me: 82 year-old strangles 71 year-old girlfriend for loading the dishwasher wrong.
Biggest mystery in American history. A quote:
The U.S. spends a huge amount on education; more per student than anyone else; more and more every year. Simultaneously, over the last 70 years, literacy has fallen, SAT scores have fallen, American competitiveness has fallen, and the general knowledge of ordinary citizens has fallen. Teenagers graduate from high school who can't read their diplomas; the country now has 50,000,000 functional illiterates. I recently saw on television that the wealthiest, most successful country in the world--that would be us--hovers around 18th internationally on reading, and 25th in science.
I submit that all of these facts taken together are paradoxical; one might say, impossible. It's as if I told you that an ordinary man consumed 5000 calories a day and lost weight. So this, I submit, is the greatest mystery in our history.
I am past the point of doubting that the climate change hysteria is anything more than the latest excuse to grab power.
School Choice: the new civil rights struggle
The Denny's Octomom Special
A definitive, updated history of West Germany’s depraved Baader-Meinhof terroristsOpen-source software wins the day. But there is a cloud. The Incredible Shrinking Clintons. Dick Morris. That was the plan. No oxygen use, and no emissions. A quote:
Just as Lincoln buried his rivals Seward, Chase and Stanton in the Cabinet and then on the Supreme Court, and Wilson buried Bryan at the State Department, so Obama has hidden his predecessor and his rival in plain sight at the upper reaches of the government.
Saturday, May 30. 2009
I am not sure what Pravda is anymore, but Pravda opines:
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.
Via Insty:
The political class in Sacramento believes the people of California exist for the state government, not the other way around.
Via Neptunus:
“Western colonization of nearby Muslim lands lasted 130 years, from the 1830s to the 1960s. Muslim colonization of nearby European lands lasted 1300 years, from the 600s to the mid-1960s. Yet, strangely, it is the Muslims…who are the most bitter about colonialism and the humiliations to which they have been subjected; and it is the Europeans who harbor the shame and the guilt. It should be the other way around.”
The railroad cars of the old tycoons. Much more comfortable than private jets.
Keeping our kids safe from science education
Climate change already killing hundreds of thousands
McQuain:
Our problem in health care is not insurance company profit. It is the structure of the system (employer based) and the lack of competitiveness in the insurance market. As economist Arnold Kling once declared, we don’t have health insurance, we have health insulation. Compared to any other insurance product, health insurance is a definite outlier. We’d laugh if someone said car insurance should cover oil changes. That’s because we understand that car insurance is there to cover expensive and catastrophic events, not routine maintenance. We understand that to do that, we’d have to pay much more in car insurance than we now do. Yet we expect health insurance to cover that routine maintenance when it comes to our health.
A good rant at Minding the Campus. A quote:
While the mind-boggling damage done to higher education by multicultural activists, diversity-mongers, and all-around leftist jerks is a subject very much on the minds of conservatives, liberals seem truly not to care. More precisely, they actually regard it as progress. Shakespeare elbowed aside by Maya Angelou? Hey, education's got to change with the times, just like the Constitution. Mandatory sensitivity training for incoming freshmen to instill appreciation of transgendered persons? What kind of monster has a problem with sensitivity? Conservative students getting charged with hate speech for daring to take on affirmative action or women's studies zealots? Exactly - that kind of monster. Even the occasional report in the mainstream press of epidemic ideological conformity on the nation's campuses fails to elicit a reaction. So what if, as the Washington Post reports, 80 percent of faculty in America's English literature, philosophy, and political science departments describe themselves as liberal and a mere 5 percent as conservative - with ratios of eighteen to one at Brown, twenty-six to one at Cornell, and sixteen to one at UCLA - or that a study after the 2004 election showed that the Harvard faculty gave John Kerry thirty-one dollars for every dollar donated to George Bush, with the ratios rising to forty-three to one at MIT and three hundred to one at Princeton? (And you think when someone gets around to a comprehensive analysis of the 2008 campaign donations, that will be any less lopsided?) For liberals, the only important question remains what it's always been: How can I get my kid into one of those places?
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