Dang.....

(Image swiped from Culture Catch, at the inspiration of Purple Avenger over at Ace's Place.)

I was outside pulling some weeds and trimming some roses, and instead of being productive and shit, instead I should have been inside glued to the TV with a big bowl of popcorn on my lap.

"...Sen. Coburn demanded that the full text of the 767 page Sanders amendment be read by the Senate clerk...."

....followed by (socialist) Bernie Sanders withdrawing his amendment, which itself is questionable (from the Malkin citation above)....

...How Sanders was able to withdraw his amendment is unclear — under the chamber’s rules it appears that a motion to withdraw would not be in order during the reading of the bill. However, the Senate Parliamentarian — in what a GOP aide called “an incredibly bizarre decision” — ruled Sanders’ request was allowable....*

And now, the SEIU--whom Zero has leaned on heavily--has backed away from his Healthcare Reform (sic).

And Drudge is reporting under the headline "Pelosi: No Health Care Deal this Year".

Those weeds aren't going to pull themselves, but that said, I hope I have enough popcorn.

* For as much fun as I'm having watching this whole thing self-destruct, there are serious issues here.

• It is clear that Coburn and the Republicans are pulling every trick imaginable to stop this thing. Healthcare Reform (sic) has been at the top of Zero's agenda since the summer, and the more Americans know about the bill, the less they like it. Coburn delivered a shot-across-the-bow with the idea of reading into the record an amendment from a socialist that was never going to pass as a means to test his on-again/off-again threat to have the entire Healthcare Reform (sic) bill read into the record.
• This, of course, plays right into Zero's promise to govern with "transparency" and his campaign promise to debate healthcare on CSPAN.
• The Left and the D's have long claimed that the R's are the "Party of 'No'", and this action makes that claim more valid.
• The R's do risk losing some cred' by slowing the Senate's business to a crawl--even if for a good reason.
• But the D's lose cred' too by taking action through the Parliamentarian to prevent the Senate and Americans from hearing exactly what is in a bill of this import.
• I expect the R's to attempt to get some clarification on the Paliamentarian's ruling here, if for no other reason than to preserve their ability to pull this stunt when the entire Healthcare bill comes up. But it is important to remember: Sanders pulled his amendment to stop the reading. The D's certainly will not pull their entire bill if Coburn and the R's insist that it be read. The R's still have a bullet left here.
• But it's their last bullet, and once it's fired, it cannot be called back. If they do fire it, we should all expect that regardless of which party controls Congress, an insurgent in the Senate can stop the action by simply having everything read into the record.

The lesson here is this: Zero made a fundamental error when he said "I won". He had a chance at true bi-partisanship helping him with his agenda, but with these words, and with the remainder of his actions this year, he has shown no interest in Republican concerns, and the problems he has had all this year show because of this. Sixty seats in the Senate isn't enough. Not nearly enough.

There's just so much wrong here.....

Background....

As you see in the sidebar to the right here, I am an airline pilot.

And, maybe you haven't thought of it in the past, but occasionally law enforcement officers travel with their weapons. I'm not going to go into any details here, but there is a procedure for them to do this.

Again, you probably haven't even considered any of this, but when a law enforcement officer travels on my plane, the airline makes sure that I am notified of this. I hope this makes sense (and conversely, I hope that it wouldn't make sense if they didn't.).

Anyhoo, one of the things that sort of bothers me is the number of .gov employees who are armed. Case in point: I once had a guy from the Inspector General's office of the Department of Agriculture. This bothered me on two levels: An IG generally works with internal problems. Why would an IG employee need to be armed? And secondly, what is the Dept. of Ag. going to do with a gun anyway? Are there felony meat-packers out there?

Another case that bothered me was an EPA official. Do they envision a scenario where he'll need to shoot a polluter?

Enough of that, though.....

Courtesy of Doug Ross at Director Blue, I see that the EPA Criminal Investigation Division is in need of 40 new Glock 19s.

NAICS code 332994 – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Criminal Investigations Division intends to award a sole source firm-fixed-price Purchase Order to Glock, Inc. under the authority of FAR Part 13, Simplified Acquisition Procedures for 40 Model G-19, 9mm frame handguns with finger grove and rail frames, Tijico night sights, extended magazine catches and 3.5lb/NY1 Trigger magazines. The Glock model G-19 is the Agency standard firearm and is the only pistol that fits our training, certified repair technician contracts, and equipment capabilities without a major change to Agency operations. Our agents are trained with the Glock pistol, and changing to another manufacturer would require transition training for each agent that could range from 1 to 3 days depending on the manufacturer. Additionally, our Agents are outfitted with holsters and magazine clips that are fitted to the Glock model firearm. Furthermore, EPA-CID has a large amount of spare parts for the Glock weapons and to retool these parts would require substantial expenditure for the Government.

I hope that the rest of the EPA (especially their armed officers) are better at their jobs than the contracting officer who requested this order. "Tijico" night sights do not exist. Trijicon night sights, on the other hand, do. Also, I'm wondering if Ms. Lynch knows what a "3.5lb/NY1 Trigger magazine" is. I know what a 3.5lb trigger is. And I know what a NY1 trigger is too. But I don't know what a "3.5lb/NY1 Trigger magazine" is, and I suspect that Ms. Lynch doesn't either. Finally, there are magazines and there are clips. There is a difference, and this contract proposal doesn't seem to know that there is.

So, anyway.....

I'm not much of a gardener. We generally start out with the best of intentions each spring and plant a full garden. We've got a tree adjacent to our garden which puts too much shade over it, so half the garden generally doesn't grow well. And then the summer starts, and its hot, and it takes effort to keep things alive, and we lose interest. I really need to get my rototiller into the garden soon.

However, one of the biggest reasons that I don't (besides this being low on my list of priorities) is that despite the time of year and the fact that we largely ignore this section of the yard, believe it or not, we still have live plants in the garden.

More surprising is that these plants are still producing!!

There are three bell pepper plants which are at least three years old, and the peppers above came out of the garden today.

Likewise, the Sweet 100's tomato plant planted in the spring is still thriving and producing tomatoes.

Gee. What could possibly go wrong....

Yahoo Finance....
Senator Dodd to press financial reform ahead: aides

Yes....this Senator Dodd.

Two plus Two....

A while back, I posted a link to the chart seen here. Its a scary chart, but the thing I just noticed is that it is from almost two years ago...January of 2008.

And today, I was referenced to this chart....



...which I saw via the blog, Calculated Risk. As an Arizona resident, I don't take great pride at having 3% of the nation's Option ARM risk, but man....anyone in California is in for another big hit.

As they say, Read The Whole Thing, and read the links. This ain't over. Not by a long shot.

Sarah Para Bellum...

[BTW. For some reason, this image is a bit fuzzy here. Click it for a better view.]

I am mostly a Sarah Palin fan. She was absolutely the salvation of McCain's disastrous campaign last year. The Left hates her with a passion that I cannot remember. Tina Fey's rendition of Palin was cutting, and David Letterman is just a jerk (and he's earned my turning away from him).

That said, I don't quite know how to take Palin. She lives her convictions, but I'm often not quite sure what those convictions are. Last year, she was invited/scheduled to be at the NRA convention here in Phoenix, but then decided not to appear. It appears that her treatment by the media (Couric and Gibson, but others too) has made her very controlling of how she meets them. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but in some way makes her a politician saying nothing just like all the rest of them.

Anyway, I want to like her, and think that at this point, if anyone can get the Tea Party movement to coalesce in one direction, it will be Palin, if she's willing.

h/t: A blog new to me that is a bit snarkier than I try to be, but being snarky is sometimes fun too. Pierre Legrand's Pink Flamingo Bar.

Another blog post.....

I've been less-than-verbose here lately, as the Healthcare Reform (sic) debate has quieted down, and America has been focused on the People Magazine story of how a bankrupt polo player and his sorta-kinda cheerleader wife could crash the party at Captain Utopia's State Dinner.

That said, I watched Zero's speech last night at West Point regarding his long-delayed decision on what to do in Afghanistan.

One thing struck me during the speech--the Cadets. Maybe I'm just seeing things through my own prism, but the shots of the audience showed me blank, uninterested faces. I'm certain that the Cadet Corps was ordered to fill the auditorium, and that doesn't surprise me in the least. But during the speech, they appeared to be less-than-enthusiastic about both being there and the message they were hearing. (One caveat: After the speech, Zero did the rope-line thingi, and there were a handful of Cadets who were there shaking his hand, and taking his picture.)

I do like Captain Ed's take on things this morning. He read the transcript, so he wouldn't have the observation that I did, but generally, I have to agree, and especially with this point...

...In defining our mission’s expiration date as 18 months, Obama has undermined whatever good the counterinsurgency strategy will do. For COIN to work, forces have to “flood the zone,” but they also have to build trust with locals and encourage better intel. The only way to do that is to impress on locals the notion that we’re sticking around....

I just love the internet. There are a lot of really, really talented people out there who are not only talented in their fields, but can write about their fields, and we can read their thoughts without the filters of the (largely stupid) media. One blog I check in on regularly is The Captain's Journal. Maybe it was there, or perhaps somewhere else (I also check in with Michael Yon, The Long War Journal, and others) that I saw a point that the Afghans look at our forces there and wonder: Americans build tents. They're not here to stay.

But it was at The Captain's Journal that I saw this point:

“You [Westerners] have the watches, but we Afghans have the time,” Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand province, has been quoted as saying at a recent gathering.

Even as the Americans are proud of the progress made here, there is a sense that all could be lost quickly if the U.S. military leaves prematurely.

“I think we’re succeeding in Nawa, but like the elders say, if we leave, it will all be wasted,” said Army Sgt. 1st Class Reggie Fox, a member of an 82nd Airborne platoon assigned to mentor Afghan security forces. “The insurgents aren’t dumb. They want to outlast the American population.”

And Zero has just allowed the insurgents to set their watches. As Captain Ed said,

Having an 18-month timetable may or may not be a mistake, but announcing one is a terrible blunder in wartime.

and

That’s no way to fight a war.

I agree entirely.

Bumpersticker...

As I have said a while back, I have been reading Atlas Shrugged. I'm enjoying the book, although I'm finding it a difficult read and it is taking me longer than usual to finish it. I am into the final 100 pages and am right at the point where Rand has John Galt giving a 47 page monologue.

Anyway, the prescience that Rand has been demonstrating with Atlas Shrugged is simply amazing. A book published 52 years ago is full of elements that are relevant today.

And today, I saw this bumpersticker on a car as I was on my way to the Post Office.

Yikes!!

It looks as though the TSA is gonna have to find a way to see this thing on their x-rays.

H/T: Mxpatriot51 at AR15.com, who has other pictures that you ought to check out, seen via SayUncle.

The last thing you see....

...if you're a field mouse.



h/t: The Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys, companion to one of my old favorites, Sippican Cottage.

Gawd....

I'm lovin' me my Glenn Beck. Yeah...sometimes he's a little over-the-top, and he certainly has got a Howard Beale vibe going on, but the guy is making scary sense.

So, yeah...I admit it...there's a lot of video here to watch....but do watch it. We're headed into totally uncharted waters.







I owe my h/t to Karl Denninger at market-ticker.org for these three videos. I read him all the time because he scares me worse than Stephen King.

Now let me add my amateur-economist's analysis to a point Beck touches on at 8:15 or so of the last video.

With words to this effect, Beck asks if the other countries in the world aren't going to be in the same sinking boat that we find ourselves in. I think he's exactly right, and underestimates this point. Take a look at yet another video.....



Yes...its al Jazerra....and there is a point to be made there too. But discounting that for the moment, this story illustrates the problem that China faces too.

For the last 30 years, China has been trying to get their peasant Third-World country into the First-World. To do this, they have kept their currency artificially devalued, so as to facilitate the export of the products that they make. What they're most concerned with is jobs...not the products of those jobs. They're quite content to spend money on cities that no one will live in because they need to keep the construction jobs (read: "economic activity") going.

We're not seeing this reported on any of the American (or Western) media because we're beholden to the debt that China holds. al Jazerra, in essence, the media organ of the Arab OPEC states, has a different set of priorities. They can report the Chinese problems in a candor that Western media cannot. However, the OPEC states are not without their own problems. Absent their oil, they have almost no industry. Their people are not far removed from living in the desert, and many are illiterate. They have few skills, and have to import white-collar and blue-collar labor to give them what they now have. They can operate what are in effect, massive welfare states because they are able to poke holes into the ground and pump out the wealth that supports it.

And here's where my fears are headed.....

All wars are economic.

We're broke.

China can't keep inflating their "production bubble".

And since the world runs on oil, the OPEC states will grind to a halt. (Not to mention the crazy-mad religious motivations that they have.).

These three groups all want to keep things going when we can't keep things going. And something's gotta give. Who'll give first?

What a great idea!!

Since the Democrats in Congress are all about requiring us to buy something we may not want to buy, at a price that we may not agree with, what's to prevent them from going whole hog with that approach?

So [h]ere it is: a modest proposal even Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley can agree on. If we're willing to require people to buy health insurance, why not require them to buy guns?

h/t Hotair headlines.

Alright: Unlike the last time I did this....

....I won't completely rip off Ace, but with regard to Zero's penchant for bowing down to foreign leaders, here he makes a very good point.

"....Greg Gutfeld (was up late last night) noted the bowing controversy and called it, using Andy Levy's phrase, a "blog issue." By which he meant a topic that gets predictable heat on blogs, but when you try to discuss it in the "real world," the reaction is "ehhh."

That may be so. To be honest, I had a bit of trouble drumming up a lot of passion about this. My real beef here isn't that what Obama is doing is wrong.

My actual beef is that the crap Obama is doing is irrelevant. No one gives a flying fuck if you bow to them, or you say nice things about "working together to reach our collective goals," or this ridiculous conceit that just because of Obama's "personal presence" -- a historic presidency, drenched in drama, topped with butter-baked crumbs of hope -- is going to make a lick of difference. Nations pursue their own policy goals -- period. You change the goals a nation might pursue by offering carrots and sticks, by buying them off or making it so costly to pursue a particular goal they refrain from doing so.

"Diplomacy" is merely a polite manner of announcing these carrots and sticks.

So my point, then, is that what Obama is doing is perfectly trivial, and to get all outraged about it actually invests his empty and feckless symbolism with a power it doesn't have. Obama's bowing to a Saudi king does nothing to improve our relations with the Islamic world. And neither, frankly, does Cheney shaking his hand as an equal. Neither matters -- and the problem here is that Obama is convinced these things not only matter, but are well-nigh determinative.

This malignant narcissist thinks that nations will change their fundamental national goals based simply on the (purported) fact that Obama is charming, nice, and awesome.

It's not so much that he's doing the wrong things -- he is; but these things are utterly trivial. It's that he's investing far too much time thinking about trivialities, convincing himself that the trivial trumps the substantial, that he invests no time or effort at all in substantive manners. Look at Iran. Rather than facing the grim reality he needs to confront Iran and make it too costly for Iran to continue building nukes, he convinces himself that if only he can be charming and nonthreatening enough he will neatly avoid having to face that reality.

He is indulging in fantasy at the expense of reality, and therefore at the expense of US national interests.

Now, all that said, all that acknowledgement that maybe this is a "blog issue," as Greg Gutfeld said, let me note again something that makes it not just a "blog issue" at all: Obama lied. Gibbs lied. White House sources lie. They all denied down the line that they were offering a sycophantic servility -- bowing like an inferior -- to royalty, and they now are forced to admit it was a lie all along.

They were deliberately bowing to royalty, and just lying about it to the American public. Because, I guess, sometimes a lie is "diplomatic."

So it seems while foreign royalty gets deep bows, the American public gets lies and fast-talk about it.

Actually... also taking it out of the realm of "blog issue" is that any symbolic act stands for something concrete and real. And Obama isn't just showing the symbolism of deference, weakness, and appeasement; he's actually practicing deference, weakness, and appeasement. His symbolic gesture then is simply confirmation of objective reality."

Hey....

Anybody else remember back a year and a half ago when Zero's low-level staffers were being thrown under the bus? Or even when some not-so-low-level staffers were thrown under that same bus (but later, miraculously, recovered from her injuries)?

Point being...Zero has habit of blaming others for things he ought to be standing up for.

Like.....his oft-repeated claim of the benefit we're deriving from his Stimulus-inspired "saved or created jobs".

And now this charade is coming apart too. The numbers he is reporting are outrageously inaccurate. So inaccurate, in fact, as to be claimed from Congressional districts that themselves do not exist. So, who is to blame for the reporting of this inaccurate data? Yeah...you guessed it...

"...Late Monday, officials with the Recovery Board created to track the stimulus spending, said the mistakes in crediting nonexistent congressional districts were caused by human error.

"We report what the recipients submit to us," said Ed Pound, Communications Director for the Board.

Pound told ABC News the board receives declarations from the recipients - state governments, federal agencies and universities - of stimulus money about what program is being funded.

"Some recipients clearly don't know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on jobs numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes," Pound said...."

[emphases, mine]

Yes. You, the dumb public, are to be blamed for the bad data being reported by Zero's administration.

I engaged in a little activism tonight.....

So, anyway....today was yet another "medical day".

Background: I have been battling what I've been lead to believe was a bad salivary gland since late July. It usually begins with what I've been told is a cracked tooth on my lower left side. The pain develops to the point that it is indeterminate where I can't tell if it is on my upper jaw or lower, and then the pain radiates down my tongue. Finally, it settles into the glands.

My initial question regarding this was with my dentist, who pronounced it "pulpitis" or something. When it didn't go away, I went the medical route where the salivary gland thingi was both self- and medically-diagnosed...and they have had me taking steroids to the point that they don't want to give me any more, and have recommended that I have this gland removed.

So, anyway, today I finally was able to get into the ENT doctor...one very highly recommended. WifeofAzlib went with me, so as is my habit when I'm out with my family, I strapped on my CCW. The doctor didn't see the gland problem that I'd been lead to believe I had, and asked that I get a panoramic dental x-ray.

Back to the dentist.....

And guess what? I finally have a diagnosis: An abscessed tooth which will require a root canal on Wednesday. Yeah--me! [Seriously, I am very glad to have a diagnosis, which will hopefully lead to having this thing cleared up.]

In celebration (and because the both of us had wasted most of the day on these medical matters), we decided to go to our local Serrano's Mexican restaurant.

And guess what I found? An A.R.S. §4-229(C) sign prohibiting my carrying my concealed weapon inside their restaurant. One of our favorite restaurants, close to the house, reasonably priced....a family favorite.

Not wanting to ruin the night, I retreated back to the vehicle and put my gun away, but I told my wife that, while I would eat there tonight, I would not be returning.

Moreover, after remembering this post of Kevin's, I was determined to not just disappear from this restaurant's clientele. As we were leaving, I made a point of asking for the manager, and I very politely told him that I'd been in his restaurant at least once a month for the last 19 years, and that I wouldn't be back as long as that sign was in his window. He was polite too, and mentioned that he'd received a number of comment cards regarding their sign. We both made our points.

The family doesn't necessarily agree with me, but I'm not going back.

I don't often do this...

....(except for the photos which I snatch at will use freely...and which, if I knew how to host them myself, I would do so willingly), but this very good article from Ace warrants a full viewing. View it here, but his comments are worth your time too, so make some time to view it over at his house.

Ace: "Pelosi: It's Very Fair That We Jail You If You Don't Buy Health Insurance"

Seen on Hot Air, Infidels are Cool has this exchange:

Stone: Do you think it’s fair to send people to jail who don’t buy health insurance?

Pelosi: … The legislation is very fair in this respect.

The left continues pounding the table, insisting that right-wingers are "paranoid" and "extremist" to call Obama a socialist, or to use totalitarian imagery in posters to protest his agenda. Why, it's just so not true! they bleat. You'd have to be a maniac like Sarah Palin to make these delusional claims! Why, it's like bad science-fiction!

Really?

Socialism never attends a party without an escort of coercive state behavior. It is a historic fact -- indeed, an economic fact -- that as the state seeks to regulate and control more and more economic activity, they must, of course, control more and more human activity.

Economic activity is human activity, after all. Economics is not somehow divorced from humanity. Economic choices are not made of their own volition, passive-voice, without an actor. People make economic choices -- and socialism demands an ever-increasing control over those choices, and therefore the people who make those choices. (Or, more accurately: formerly made those choices.)

Furthermore, apart from the basic definitional aspect of socialism that requires a loss of freedom in exchange, supposedly, for economic security: Socialism has almost never worked as intended, but rather creates new problems and new poverties and new ways to exploit the system (black markets, for one); socialism therefore always requires even additional laws against once-unobjectionable and perfectly-legal behavior. In other words, not only does socialism require a small buy-in, in the form of loss of freedom, but it is always accompanied by unplanned-for (?) additional losses of freedom to "correct" for all the systematic irrationalities and distortions it creates.

And then it gets even worse after that, because it always fails, whenever it's been attempted, and the newly-empowered state will fight to survive, as any organism does, and any organism is willing to do an awful lot of violence when its very existence is threatened.

Note that the third part of that is the scariest step in the socialist takeover of the human condition, but even if that is avoided, the first and second stages are plenty objectionable in their own right. Although socialism has had a pronounced tendency to lead to full fascism and totalitarian control over the increasingly miserable citizenry it supposedly "serves," and that is the point of all those Nazi posters, it cannot be emphasized firmly enough that even if Stage Three of socialism is avoided, Stages One and Two are anti-freedom and frankly anti-human as well.

Just less so.

On a personal level, I go 'round and 'round with myself as to whether Nazi imagery is "civil" or helpful, politically: On one side I know for a fact that socialism tends in this direction. Every. Single. Time. Even in socialist states where fascism is avoided -- Britain, say -- it is nevertheless the case that the citizenry there exists under a much-diminished concept of "freedom" than your average American would find tolerable, or even imaginable.

On the other hand, I doubt the effectiveness of such imagery, for the simple fact that few can imagine such things, they seem too speculative and too impossible to contemplate, and so I usually make the case that rather than talk up the farther-off (yet still quite possible, and not quite so far off as some would like to imagine) possibility of Stage Three socialism, we should talk up instead the quite-objectionable-enough and much more immediate and imaginable defects of Stages One and Two.

Back to this leftist insistence that we're all paranoid to even think this way, to even define "freedom" in an antique, right-wing fashion, meaning "stuff you are permitted to do or not do without penalty and coercion from the state:" It is especially risible to me, in gallows-humor way, that the left continues to call us lunatics for fretting about increasing state control and increasing state coercion and increasing state outlawing of previously-legal behavior and freedoms even as, in their very first bill out of the socialist box, they propose jailing Americans for engaging in unobjectionable behavior which no one ever before dreamt of being a crime.

Think about this.

The left says: You are crazy to claim your so-called freedoms are being taken away, and you are a lunatic to scream about an overly powerful state which will use violent coercion (no one goes to jail without the threat of violence if he doesn't, after all) to enforce its notions of the "economic good."

And with the next breath the left says: By the way, you shall either buy health care insurance or we will throw you in prison for two or three years.

I'm paranoid? Really? I am not fretting here about some remote and unlikely possibility. We are not speaking here of "slippery slopes" or in terms of "what comes next?"

We are instead objecting to a black-letter law spelled out for all to see in the very first piece of legislation you're proposing.

Right out of the box. The state here -- Pelosi, Reid, Obama -- are claiming that they can imprison people for behavior that has never before even been hinted as being a crime, on the theory that such behavior constitutes unpatriotic economic behavior which is detrimental to the state's balance sheets.

Think about what a broad, all-encompassing term "economics" is. 80% of our waking hours are spent in economic activity of one sort or another. The state here is asserting the right to imprison people for behavior they consider not actually morally reprehensible or harmful as other crimes are, but instead merely detrimental to the Great Push Forward, the state's master plan of economic health and well-being.

Right out of the box they propose sending people to jail for acting as economic subversives and economic traitors and yet I am, somehow, paranoid if I point out that the first step here is to reduce human freedom and increase state power.

And this is just a down-payment, remember. This is merely the first of many freedoms you previously believed sacrosanct to be lost. This is merely the first freedom they've realized, in advance, will have to be taken away. When their Rube Goldberg system of cross-subsidizations and stealth-rationing produces a slew of irrationalities and evasions they did not anticipate, we will have a welter of new crimes to correct all that human behavior they now find constitutes bad economic hygiene and must be outlawed.

But we're paranoid. We're lunatics. We're "extreme."

Used to be in this county when we proposed making an entire category of human behavior a crime, that was cause for debate. Civil libertarians on the left would join those on the right in wondering what has so changed in the past several years to require an entire new category of criminality, an entire sphere of human activity now removed from the column of "freedom" and moved to the column of "forbiddance."

But not this time. Fascism, as they say, tends to come with a smiling face, and there's hardly a face more surgically stretched into smiles than Nancy Pelosi's, quite chipper and blithe as she proposes that she will begin filling America's prisons with a whole new category of criminal, the economic saboteur.

And there is no argument about it, and no debate. We are creating an entirely new type of "crime" that could end up imprisoning millions (or -- very nearly as bad -- compelling behavior and restricting freedom due to threat of incarceration) and the entire left and the entire media (but I repeat myself) blows it off as no big deal.

It's just What Must Be Done. Omlette, eggs, some breaking required.

But I'm a paranoid and extremist to take notice of the fact that what was once my freedom in 2009 shall become a cause for imprisonment in 2010.

I have a very good friend who is a Federal Marshal. He spends his days running around catching some of the very baddest of the bad guys who are out there. And one of my deepest fears, both for him and for me, is that one day he's going to be asked to grab up one of these future healthcare scofflaws, and that one day I might be one of them.

What will each of us do on that day? I don't really know the answer, and that scares me too.

OK, you morons....

Nobody--and I mean nobody--reads this crappy product I call "my blog".

But if you've clicked through from that comment I left over at Ace's place, and want to look around the place a bit, here is a somewhat larger comment I wrote back when UsAirways 1549 was fresh news.

An Update....

WSJ: Pfizer and Kelo's Ghost Town

While Ms. Kelo and her neighbors lost their homes, the city and the state spent some $78 million to bulldoze private property for high-end condos and other "desirable" elements. Instead, the wrecked and condemned neighborhood still stands vacant, without any of the touted tax benefits or job creation.

The taking of the Kelo property was bad enough: The Supreme Court decision on the taking was horrible. And now we see the justification for the taking--the increased tax benefits to the community--has turned to dust.

We should always guard against giving up any of our freedoms--no matter how small, or how slight.

h/t: SayUncle

So.....

I'm starting to wonder: Would a smart investor be investing in one of those private prison companies?




h/t: Captain Ed over at HotAir.

Another in a series of....

....Really, really dumb ideas.

Fry's, Safeway gird for strike

I saw this through Kevin at The Smallest Minority, but WifeofAzlib mentioned it last night too.

First of all, being a grocery store clerk isn't exactly skilled labor. As an airline pilot, I know (believe?) that if I ever were to go out on strike, that my company would have some difficulty in replacing me. But a grocery store clerk just runs your items across the scanner. Many grocery stores have installed those self-check-out lanes where you do this yourself. The decision to go out on strike has to be made with an assessment of how easy it is for the company to replace the striking workers.

And that brings me to this point: Unemployment.

None of the charts here are happy charts, but if you're going out on strike in Arizona, you might want to keep these two in mind....




If you're thinking of going out on strike, you had better be thinking of the other Arizona folks who are out of work. You're saying that you're willing to walk off your job for a better whatever-it-is-you're-striking-about, but you ought to remember the folks who are out there who are perhaps getting a little hungry.

And walking off your job now, means you're out of work too. While the grocery-store unions are certainly figuring that the holidays are the right time to have their workers go on strike, the union-members ought to consider that they're about to be unemployed over the holidays too.

A Case For Government Healthcare?--There Is None

A co-worker wrote this, and I have to say I agree with pretty much all of it. The only changes I made were to remove his name (given that I'm anonymous here, I thought I'd make him anonymous too), and some minor formatting to make things look right here on the blog.

Ask any politician to cite government’s constitutional authority to enact national healthcare. They can’t. It doesn’t exist. The federal government can only do what it is enumerated to do. The fact is there are no provisions in the constitution authorizing the state to interject itself into the healthcare decision-making processes of the American citizenry. None!

Then what business does the government have dictating the terms of private healthcare decisions for our selves and for our families? The government has no business doing this. But Democrats, the Obama administration, and the liberal left are poised to enact legislation that will ultimately enable the government to control every aspect of our lives, and to punish those who do not live in accordance with government’s benevolent standards.

But what is the harm in the government ensuring equal access to healthcare for everyone? Isn’t healthcare good? Healthcare is good. But every program the government enacts results in the same: regardless of good intentions the consequences, intended or unintended, are always: higher cost, reduced quality, loss of personal freedom, and destruction of the private sector.

But a national healthcare option is necessary to eliminate the great disparities in quality and cost of care. And only government programs can ensure equality of access. Wrong! Proponents call their proposals reform, compassion for the disenfranchised, and equality. But in actuality, state healthcare programs, like all government social programs, affect none of those ideals, but always result in the opposite: poor quality; high cost; lack of access; inequality; and equal distribution of misery.

The true aim of state run healthcare goes far beyond seeking equality of access. It would allow the ultimate in government control of its citizenry. It would allow the government to assert control over every aspect of our daily private lives – our diets; our exercise habits; our choice of transportation; our lifestyle, our doctor, our medical treatments… everything. And any behavior determined to be unhealthy or unseemly to the state, the state would have the power to punish or tax - in the interest of healthcare, of course. But far more devious, the government would have the power to employ healthcare as a tool for social engineering. Healthcare would be rewarded to those who are in compliance with government agendas and are in the political favor of the state, but denied to those who are not.

A national healthcare program would only make problems worse. As do other government agencies, healthcare commissions would conduct means testing, ration care, and employ “social justice” by race, gender, income, or creed authorizing or denying medical care on the basis of “fairness and equality”. Treatment for the elderly, disabled, or those who could not provide an adequate “return for the government’s investment” would be denied. If an unborn child is determined to be disabled (or otherwise) the panel would likely fund or even require an abortion, or deny prenatal and pediatric care to that child. Governmental health commissions would employ means testing and affirmative action to determine if individuals are worth the government’s “investment”. If not, treatments will be withheld or denied completely. In other words, government-appointed wogs (or death panels) would implement political policy in making life and death decisions for every American forced into a state-run healthcare program.

The political left has pushed for national healthcare for over sixty years. After all, why should the wealthy have better healthcare than those less fortunate, the less fortunate being the young, the old, minorities, etc… The arguments in favor of President Obama and the Democrat’s current healthcare campaign are emotional and can be difficult to refute without accusations of heartlessness. But conservative sentiments among the American electorate have awakened to the dangers of the government healthcare agenda, which they find to be in direct contrast to their natural desire for liberty.

Throughout the summer of 2009 American citizens across the country stood up to the charges of hatred and selfishness and stunned Democrat congressmen and senators via phone, mail, and email campaigns, and at town hall meetings affectively expressing suspicions of their government and displeasure with current healthcare proposals. They do not want higher taxes, lack of choice, social engineering, or government commissions ruining the quality of healthcare they currently enjoy.

Conservatives are clearly winning this debate, and Democrats have responded by evoking class envy and hatred, and charges of greed, anti-Obama racism, and right-wing Nazism – all charges recently leveled by Democrat leadership toward Obamacare opponents. Initially stunned by the anti-national healthcare sentiments expressed at their town hall meetings, Democrat supporters have countered by loading town hall meetings with their own vocal supporters in an effort to mitigate, and sometimes intimidate the affects of the conservative grass-roots message.

The liberal left is losing the debate on national healthcare. Next, they will back away from an all-encompassing healthcare agenda to one of compromise and repackaging – no doubt they will concede for now and settle for something less with the intention of seeking incremental expansion of state control in the future.

The problem in America isn’t the quality of healthcare. The United States has far and away the finest quality of healthcare available in the world, bar none. Accessibility is not the problem. The elderly, the young, the disenfranchised, and even illegal aliens can walk into any emergency room and receive medical attention twenty-four hours a day. Even Medicare and Medicaid are available.

The problem is not the lack of government involvement in healthcare. The problem is too much government involvement in healthcare, which over-regulates the industry and dramatically decreases accessibility and increases costs.

That isn’t to say there isn’t room for reform. Costs could be reduced significantly by implementing true reform. There are many free market ideas employed already that have shown positive results. Reform could begin with the following: 1.) Mitigate the cost of malpractice with tort reform. To put it another way, reign in ambulance-chasing lawyers. Not an easy thing to do, since the Democrats are in the pocket of the American Bar Association; 2.) Health savings accounts similar to an IRA – your money, your savings, you keep it to spend as you see fit for you and your family healthcare needs; And 3.) Point-of-service payment for healthcare - in essence, medical services are paid for by the patient – not by the cumbersome health insurance companies, and definitely not paid for by the government. Such a system could be likened to going to a restaurant and reviewing a menu before ordering a meal. One can shop for a quality product at a reasonable rate. And healthcare insurance would then be used as intended – to mitigate the risk of a major expense, not to cover everyday healthcare costs. With the patient intimately familiar with costs up front medical providers would naturally try to provide the best value at competitive rates.

These are only a few of the possible solutions to reduce healthcare costs. Many other valid solutions are being implemented throughout the country and are lowering the cost of health care without resorting to additional government intrusion. Reform solutions such as these are the result of basic American capitalism, which functions and succeeds through the competitive free-market process.

The healthcare debate is truly life-or-death. There can be no government healthcare, no low-cost government option plan, and no compromise plan. No foothold. Blue Dog Democrats can not be counted on to hold the line. They only claim to be worried about cost, not liberty or principle. They ultimately seek compromise – a lower cost version of the Obama plan, which too will bring about government intrusion and incrementalism. Continue telling politicians No! No! No! No!

The healthcare industry does need reform, true reform, but not this government “reform” plan. Government needs to act in the interest of free market solutions, not further restricting them. The solution will not be found in the Obama plan, what is certainly a blatant government takeover of our most intimate decisions – the personal healthcare decisions of our loved ones and of our selves.

No matter where government run healthcare has been implemented it has proven to be a deadly heartless failure – increased costs, lower quality, less accessibility. Healthcare costs are high. But the solution does not lie in more government. It lies in less government, greater competition in the marketplace, and competitive solutions brought about by the marketplace of ideas.

The lesson to remember is simple. In any debate - every time government ventures into the private sector the result is always the same: higher costs; reduced quality; loss of personal freedom; and destruction of the personal sector.

An ever expanding government minimizes the individual. This is true for public education, the postal service, AmTrack, General Motors, Cash for Clunkers, you name it. It is true for healthcare. And once the state wedges an opening into the healthcare door (even a compromise government option plan) we are on the road to further government intrusion and further loss of liberty. There is no case for national healthcare – none.

Download this and other articles available for distribution on the subject of INDIVIDUALISM Versus the State at ourobamadrama.com

Also, visit reason.com, and heritage.org for other free-market solutions to national concerns.

A Case for Government Healthcare? – There Is None

Oh, you just know.....

....That this will not end well.


George W. Bush Secretly Visits Fort Hood Victims

A decent President, and for that matter, a decent man would have made mention of the event at Ft. Hood before giving a "shout-out" to cousin Pookie, or Dr. Joe Medicine Crow, a "Congressional Medal-of-Honor winner" (who, in fact, does not have a MOH, but rather was awarded a Congressional Medal of Freedom), not to mention knowing that the Congressional Medal of Honor is not "won", but rather "awarded".

But Zero has not, now a year after he was elected, found his feet as our Commander-in-Chief, but still acts as our Community-Organizer-in-Chief. A man who was a real C-in-C would have canceled his golf game this weekend, and asked his allies in the Congress to postpone their debate and vote on his key domestic agenda item until next week while he went to Ft. Hood to be the Commander-in-Chief that he was elected to be. As it is, Bush gave Zero ample opportunity to do this, and when he had not, made the proper effort to attend to the troops.

I have to believe that somewhere at Camp David,
Michelle is flinging the crockery.

You know what?

Pretty soon, we're gonna need a bigger chart.



h/t: As always, the fellas at Innocent Bystanders.

Every now and then.....

....I get reminded that a place one would consider to be one of the safest places on the planet can, in a moment, turn quite dangerous.

I don't carry my CCW often, and when I do, WifeofAzlib often thinks I'm crazy for doing so. But this event can happen any time in any grocery store, mall or movie theater in America (and frankly, I'm surprised that it hasn't happened more frequently). WifeofAzlib, SonofAzlib, and Dau#1ofAzlib are all old enough to CCW, yet each for their own reasons have chosen to not get their permits. I'm hoping that they each reconsider. SonofAzlib has a nice CCW weapon, a Walther PPS, but he rarely shoots it. Dau#1- and WifeofAzlib each have .380 handguns, but they get to the range even less frequently, and frankly the .380 is a sub-standard caliber anyway. They don't know this yet, but they may be getting something in a 9mm sometime before Christmas.

And I will be carrying my Glock23c more frequently.

BTW, the media are now wondering how a shooter with two handguns could get off so many shots. Its not hard at all. A Glock17 has a standard magazine capacity of 17 rounds, and third-party magazines are available up to 33 rounds. Do this with two handguns and you're at 68 rounds without having to reload....more than enough to kill 11 and injure 31.

Nope......

You could not possibly make this stuff up.



This is Susan Rice dressed as Goofy.

That would be United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice dressed as Goofy.

And they wonder why they're not getting any respect around the world.

h/t Michelle Obama's Mirror's Blog.

Obama-Weather.....

Via Gerard, I see that this site offers an Obama which will tell us what to wear for the week.

And for the record, I do have cargo shorts (and pants) that I wear when the occasion suits. I even have casual sandals, although mine are a Cabelas knock-off of Teva's, and there was a day when I wore Birkenstocks. But I have never worn a t-shirt with an Obama image (or for that matter, a t-shirt with an image of any politician).

This, along with another site I found via Gerard, The Art of Obama, are either very clever commentaries on the adulation of Zero, or they are unwitting part and parcel of the same.

Clunker GDP Data.....

This chart ought to tell you something......

The just-announced 3.5% increase in 3Q GDP is fake. We are not out of the recession. This is not over. In fact, its going to get worse. That spike on the chart above is going to correct lower....much lower.

And when it does, they're going to say that it was "surprising".

They're lying to us. Politicians. Media. All of them.

This is too good.....

....to not post.

h/t: Mætenloch over at Ace's Place.

Is it premature to ask if....

....the alternate headline here would be "Dodd Thrown Under A Bus"?

"Oversight panel to subpoena Countrywide info"

"...Oversight Chairman Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) issued a statement saying: "It is my goal to work through this matter in a bipartisan fashion and conduct a complete review of the role of mortgage companies in the current financial crisis. As part of this, we need to clarify unanswered questions about Countrywide Financial's VIP program, so I am issuing a subpoena to gather information about how that program worked and whether it provided special benefits to government officials. I am prepared to issue additional subpoenas if other companies fail to respond to our document requests."

Notably, Towns added that "the subpoena to Countrywide covers records that could show special treatment for Members of Congress," and that if such information is produced, the Oversight panel will forward it to the House ethics committee for consideration...." [my emphasis]

And, oh-by-the-way, did you notice that this announcement came on a Friday afternoon? Not that the R's aren't equally good at doing this sort of thing, but Friday afternoon is becoming an important time of the week to be paying attention to what they don't want you paying attention to.

h/t: Riehl World View.

Hoookay.....

Just when you think you've seen just about the dumbest thing ever, along comes someone else plumbing a new depth.

How to Build a Bluetooth Handgun Handset for your iPhone.



I guess the question of "Why" doesn't occur here.

Darwin awaits, fool.

h/t: hell in a handbasket

Saw this a week ago....

...And if I had been 'bloggin' then, I'd have remembered where the h/t ought to go (Gerard, perhaps?). As it is, I stumbled on it again over at the videos at Strategy Page. Pretty cool, if you ask me.

A little late at....

....Getting to this, but Chris Muir nailed things down pretty securely with this one....

[Click image for a better view.]

Geez, Geez, Geez.....

There are some very smart people out there on the intertubes who can speak of horrors coming our way beyond imagination.

The Virginian: Protection against hyper-inflation. Do read the whole thing, but here are a few quotes....

"...In the middle of 1914, just before the war, a one pound loaf of bread cost 13 cents. Two years later it was 19 cents. Two years more and it sold for 2 cents. By 1919 it was 26 cents. Now the fun begins.

In 1920, a loaf of bread soared to $1.20, and then in 1921 it hit $1.35. By the middle of 1922 it was $3.50. At the start of 1923 it rocketed to $700 a loaf. Five months later a loaf went for $1200. By September it was $2 million. A month later it was $670 million (wide spread rioting broke out). The next month it hit $3 billion. By mid month it was $100 billion. Then it all collapsed...." [Dollars have been substituted for Marks, but the point remains.]

"...People’s savings were suddenly worthless. Pensions were meaningless. If you had a 400 mark monthly pension, you went from comfortable to penniless in a matter of months. People demanded to be paid daily so they would not have their wages devalued by a few days passing. Ultimately, they demanded their pay twice daily just to cover changes in trolley fare. People heated their homes by burning money instead of coal. (It was more plentiful and cheaper to get.) The middle class was destroyed. It was an age of renters, not of home ownership, so thousands became homeless.

But the cultural collapse may have had other more pernicious effects. Some sociologists note that it was still an era of arranged marriages. Families scrimped and saved for years to build a dowry so that their daughter might marry well. Suddenly, the dowry was worthless – wiped out. And with it was gone all hope of marriage. Girls who had stayed prim and proper awaiting some future Prince Charming now had no hope at all. Social morality began to collapse. The roar of the roaring twenties began to rumble. All hope and belief in systems, governmental or otherwise, collapsed. With its culture and its economy disintegrating, Germany saw a guy named Hitler begin a ten year effort to come to power by trading on the chaos and street rioting. And then came World War." [my emphases, obviously.]

And that is my fear.

Family Traditions.....

Awright....I'm back to bloggin'.

Such as it is.

The computer is functional. But let me qualify that.....I use Vista. I've still got some "housecleaning" items to take care of, and in a perfect world, I'd have Quicken up and running, and that may take some work to make happen, but mostly, I'm back.

But tonight, we went to LJ's Pizza for dinner.



So, anyway, I've never really liked the pizza at LJs. I don't really like the Chicago deep-dish style, but I do like a more "bread-y" crust than LJs puts out. Its like a big cracker.

And their meats are greasy, which is beginning to become a bigger issue for me than it used to be. Not the best pizza, in my opinion. They've got a crappy salad bar, and they serve soft-serve ice cream for dessert.

However......

It is a family favorite none-the-less. We had a bit of good news to celebrate tonight, and Wifeof- and Sonof-Azlib both like the pizza. Wifeof- went to high school with the current owner, who is the son of the original owner. She's been eating at this LJ location (it has been located elsewhere many years ago) since she was 18. They cater to an older crowd, and being in my 50's, it is sorta weird to be one of the youngest people in the place. The atmosphere is what I call "small-town cheese-y". Not really much interesting in the place, but neither is it overwhelming. Tonight, they had a New Orleans jazz band, The Cats and Jammers, and I enjoyed them quite a bit.

Anyhoo...bad pizza, lame salad bar, cheesy band all made for a good night.

But speaking of....

The intertubes, and linkery, and my meager readership, I was looking through my readers, and found a guy who came to me through Theo Spark (who has kindly, and inexplicably, included me on his blogroll).

I'm not much of a "totty-blogger". I don't mind looking every now and then, but really don't focus on it too much. That said, I had to have a chuckle at this book shown in a post at Theo's house.



Yes, there are things better than boobs, but damned few. October, of course, is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and who doesn't love breasts? Even bad breasts are good.

I'm not fully....

...up to speed yet with this computer, but I am making progress. I prefer to use Firefox, so all my bookmarks are yet to be restored, and I've got other improvements to make with this thing.

Other impediments to my active writing here include....

• What I believe is either a cracked tooth or inflamed sub-mandibular salivary gland, which is absolutely killing me, and which makes most everything else I attempt to do more difficult than it ought to be.
• A very busy first half of the month, followed by a trip to Dallas for a school I need to attend, then a trip to California to see my dad, and ending the month with a trip to NYC to see our daughter run in the New York Marathon (And no: I can hardly believe it myself either).
• A growing interest to work up the nerve to actually exercise. I've had the P-90X program for almost a year now, and may finally be ready to start it.

I do, however, remain amazed at even the very few readers I attract here. Dunno what brings you here (usually a picture I've snatched somewhere), but I do hope you enjoy things.

OK....

OK. The laptop is (finally) back in business, but that doesn't mean I'm back in business yet.

I've got a very short weekend, a ton of stuff to do around the house, a daughter to see for the first time in weeks, a possible trip to an IDPA match in the afternoon, and bunches of stuff to reload on this thing. The best I figure, I've got 36 hours of stuff to do in the next 24.

Prolly not going to get back to this bloggin' thingi in the next couple of days.

I'm pretty sure its a rule somewhere....

....Anytime you read an article which includes in it's title the words "Tsunami", "Aggressively", "Irresponsible" and "Loans", its not good news.

The Consumerist...
Newsflash: The Next Tsunami Of Aggressively Irresponsible Loans Didn't Magically Disappear

Also, see this really scary chart of our upcoming second wave of mortgage based problems.



Its going to a long time before we're out of this.

In which I try to explain....

....My recent and (probably) future absences.

Its an old story, but my laptop is acting "hinky", which harkens back to a great TV character, and is one of my favorite, and totally undefined words and as such, is an apt description of this boat anchor I call "My Laptop".

This all began a couple days ago, when I was unable to log onto Blogger. I could read everything, but no logging on. I was able to clear this up by clearing my cache, but then things really started downhill.

I really hate Windows, and specifically, Vista. I don't know that heading to the Apple way would be any better, as doing so would put me in the smug crowd who believe that all things Apple are superior to everything else.

Anyhoo, I've long had problems with this thing. I'd like to use Outlook as my calendar and address book, but I've never been able to get my Palm phone (which was probably a mistake too) to sync right with it, so my calendar and address book are only on the phone. Quicken has never worked right, so I've abandoned using it too. My bidding software now won't boot, and this thing has crashed three times today. I haven't decided if I'm going to take it on my trip this next weekend, but one way or the other, it's headed into the shop.

Oh, by the way....

I'm sitting here watching Fox News coverage of the memories on 9/11, and one thing just struck me: Once it was clear that airliners were our enemies' chosen asymmetrical WMDs, the decision to immediately land every airliner was just a stunning and completely unforeseen achievement.

Diverting an airliner is no small feat. Before I head off to some divert field, I have to know that I have enough fuel to get there (obviously). Less obviously, there are some airports which are not suitable for some airplanes. The length of the runway, the width of the taxiways, the weight-bearing capabilities of the same, and the available ramp space are all concerns here. Also, given that a divert field may be a suitable divert location for my plane, it is very possible to overwhelm that airport with too many planes.

Once they landed, the questions only then began to be brought. Were they there for an hour? A day? What? Can they get fuel? Are they at a location that has services by their airline? Can they get a flight plan and be dispatched? If they're staying for a while, how do they take care of their passengers? Do they buy them bus tickets? Rent them cars? Find them hotel rooms? Pizzas?

The inside story in the airline industry is that this was simply a stunning achievement, done completely off-the-cuff. The phone lines into our dispatch were melted down. Crews spent days in hotels trying to get a phone call into our scheduling people to see what they wanted the crews to do. Many simply just gave up and rented cars to make their way home. I was at home on 9/11/01 so I missed this confusion, but I did fly the following weekend when they opened up the airspace, and it was still chaotic.

Crimes....

1. It is a crime that those terrorists attacked us 8 years ago.
2. It is another crime that we still have not crushed al Qaeda.
3. It is still another crime that we elected a man wholly unqualified to lead us in war.
4. It is yet another crime that 8 years after the attack, the WTC remains little more than a hole in the ground.

My life has changed measurably since 9/11, both personally and professionally. Part of me wishes that I still lived on 9/10, but given that time does march on, I think I am a better man for confronting the world as it is.

Hillary flashes us....

...Her set.



"...Hillary Clinton is considering stepping down as Secretary of State this fall in order to run for Governor of New York."

h/t for the visual: Commenter Curious at 5:56 here.

A sign of...

The profoundly inexperienced executive that many of us said he was.

As I await a doctor's appointment this morning, I've been sitting here trollin' around the 'sphere while having Fox News on in the background and, of course, the big story today is what is Zero going to say tonight when he addresses the special joint session of Congress he's called to address the health care debate.

It is now approximately nine hours before he speaks, and we don't know what it is he's going to say. He's used the primetime programming at ABC, and he's devoted a news conference to the topic. He's been talking about reforming health care for months, and other than knowing that he wants Congress to produce something for him to sign, we still don't know exactly what he thinks. He's for a public option, but doesn't think it's necessary. Abortion services have to be in insurance plans, but it won't be funded in a public plan (or some other confusing stance). Point being: The American public is confused about what is, or is not in the plan, and don't have confidence that Zero knows what it is that he wants (other than that he wants to win).

I'm just sayin'....

Today is September 9, 2009.

09/09/09.

And in two hours it will be 9:09am, which on a military clock is 0909.

0909 on 09/09/09.

You simply must....

Read both these accounts courtesy of Sean Linnane.

Twin Towers 9/11: A First Hand Account Part 1.

Twin Towers 9/11: A First Hand Account Part 2.

Sean promises more to come, and I'll update this when it appears.

Update: And here is the conclusion.

Twin Towers 9/11: A First Hand Account (Conclusion).

Go. Click. Read. Now.

Yessir.....

That's my Congressman who went all Chuck Noland on me....

"My diet was coconuts and a lot of crabs. I lit fires with a magnifying glass and a coconut husk, too."

h/t Hot Air Headlines.

Buzz Aldrin: Hip Hop Artist......

Making of Buzz Aldrin's Rocket Experience w/ Snoop Dogg and Talib Kweli from Buzz Aldrin

h/t A couple of clicks past the sidebar at Ace's Place.

VDH....

Courtesy of Gerard, (although I've skimmed parts of this article elsewhere), I can recommend this Victor Davis Hanson article (although I guess I'd have to confess to rarely not recommending anything VDH writes). A few paragraphs.....

[A]lmost everything Obama had done is consistent with his past associates (Pfleger, Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, etc.), his past vocation (grievance organizing), and his past methodology (most partisan in the Senate, surrealistic Senate campaign in which foes mysteriously dropped out, the Axelrod/Emanuel Chicago way, etc.).

But Obamacare is not really about medicine. It is rather aimed at absorbing more of the private sector—once more, to create a vast new constituency of government workers and beneficiaries, to ensure an equality of result in treatment and access, and to replace private health insurers with public bureaucrats. (I got a taste of the future of the government octopus when I went yesterday to a California DMV office, and noticed that all the state employees at the windows had on purple union T-shirts with “organize” and “solidarity” emblazoned across them.)

In other words, in the Obama mind, would you want an autonomous family practitioner, entrepreneurial, keen to adopt to patient needs and tastes, juggling 10 employees and a 2-million-dollar family practice budget, grossing $400,000 a year in profits, highly opinionated and self-reliant, using his profits once in a while to ski or buy a BMW—or have him transmogrified into a GS-something, at $100,000 a year, with government benefits, unionized, docile, and waiting to go home when his shift at the dreary government clinic ends, wearing his doctor union T-shirt to work and eager to vote in politicians who ensure him lifetime tenure, generous retirement packages, and guaranteed pay raises?

Well, the post-racial candidate had given us a 95% black monolithic voting pattern in the primaries against a fellow liberal candidate. Add up Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, the clingers speech, an exasperated Bill Clinton’s assessment of “playing the race card on me”, “typical white person”, ‘wise Latina’, the Skip Gates mess, the Van Jones’ white polluters, the satraps like Gov. Patterson and Reps. Rangel and Watson reverting to blatantly racist scapegoating, and so on.

I fear that this is the most polarizing administration we have seen in matters of race since the 1920s. If those around Obama, and his supporters in Congress, had just substituted the word “black” each time they have angrily invoked the word “white”, they would have been branded abject racists.

Orwellian

In America of 2009 the following are “true”:

The Arabs invented the printing press, and spurred us on to the Enlightenment and Renaissance. Muslims in Cordoba advised the brutal Christians to show tolerance during the Inquisition. Slavery ended in America without violence. The Berlin Airlift was a worldwide effort. The Americans liberated Auschwitz. There are 57 states. FDR was President in 1929 and gave television addresses. We can either drill offshore or inflate our tires properly.

There are no terrorists or a war on same, but only overseas contingency operations and man-made catastrophes. Those who object to health care are ungodly, and the nation’s children must go to school and see the messiah address them en masse on state-run television screens. Nazis, brown shirts, a mob, insurance lackeys, Brooks brothers elites, etc. all go to Town Halls. Doctors chop off limbs and gleefully take out tonsils for profit. George Bush is our Emmanuel Goldstein whom we must hate collectively each morning for a couple of minutes.

The Public "Option"....

Scare quotes intended.

Although I don't talk about it much, I'd like to briefly explore what a public option in airline travel might look like.

Imagine after a clamor to bring down the cost of airline travel, we added a "public option" to the private air carriers out there. In addition to American Airlines, Southwest, and all the others, the .gov created an alternative. Call it BarryAir.

So, we would have one branch of the .gov charged with regulating the industry, and another which would "compete" in the industry. Let's ignore the possibility that BarryAir could tap the infinitely deep pockets of the .gov if they got into any financial trouble, and instead ask: Is there any illusion that a government that regulates an industry cannot fairly compete in that same industry?

So here's what brought this to mind....

This morning as I was eating my complementary hotel breakfast o' carbs, I watched the TV set to the local news. And their commercials were the following...

• Hometown Buffet
• Vons Grocery
• Hawaiian vacations
• Wells Fargo

Every one of these institutions* have competitors. Someone is out there trying to get the consumer into their store before one of these four. Therefore these four have to advertise to get the consumer to spend their dollar with them.

* It is a fair point to say that the banks, especially the big banks, are de facto arms of the Fed and/or the Treasury.

And here is the fifth advertiser that caught my eye....

Kaiser Permanente. Their ad, coincidentally, was focused on this website which they claim is a great way to integrate all the care that a patient might be needing.

The point being: They have to advertise. The health care consumer has other choices, and Kaiser has to advertise to get their share of them.

We already have health care competition. Yes--we would benefit by having more competition. But adding a .gov "public option" because we don't have enough competition is the wrong answer to a question that doesn't need to be asked. The better question is: What can we do to stimulate private health care competition?

Jack Webb Schools Barack Obama....

Lifted whole from Allahpundit.

Sunday morning talk shows.....

So here I sit in Jacksonville in a hotel I hate with a TV spectrum that does not include Fox News watching Meet the Press (which I can barely tolerate).

David Axelrod is the guest this morning, and he's spent much of his interview defending the failing healthcare initiative.

He also was asked about Zero's plan this next week to address the nation's school children. And in that vein, Axelrod said that he was a bit perplexed that Zero's message of stressing individual initiative and responsibility was being rebuffed.

I was struck with the contrast between his plan to socialize health care, yet stress individual achievement in academics.

The First Rule of Blogging....

Kevin reminded me the other day that a decent blogger (which I am far from) will put up something--anything--every day. I found out long ago, that this whole blogging thingi is more work than it may seem. I like it, but I started this thing as a means to both craft my thoughts, and to develop the writing skills to be able to put those thoughts down intelligently on this cyber-paper. I have a long way to go on both fronts.

But in that vein, I present this....



I found this via a scroll through Sean Linnane, who has kindly added me to his blogroll. Sean Linnane is a contributor to Theo's place, who also added me to his blogroll a while back, and I suspect that Sean has taken many of Theo's links wholesale into his place. I check in with Theo every now and then...he has a snarky sense of humor which appeals to me, and he includes pictures of some very lovely ladies (which I can always look at). I think I achieved my place on Theo's blogroll through a comment I put onto one of his posts one day, but frankly, I don't think of myself as worthy. And I am certainly not worthy of Sean Linnane's link. He has a wonderful viewpoint, and I am humbled to be linked on his blog.

I really don't know much about Warren Zevon, other than he was a sort of edgy guy. His music didn't appeal to me much, but the performance of Roland is haunting. He knew he was sick, and Letterman offered him his stage for a last performance. I used to like to watch Letterman...his humor was wry and twisted like mine, but in the last couple of years, he has gone fully into the BDS, and has not found a way out. His jokes about Sarah Palin were unforgivable, and I am one of his former audience members. But I do give Letterman credit for hosting Zevon on this last night.