Here are a few of Politico's best quotes on the ObamaCare website. Go here for the complete collection. (And BTW, I love the "snipping tool" for photos that comes with the Windows 7 package.)
And here's my favorite, and I don't know where I found it.
They no longer have the "countdown to deadline" feature on the site, do they? LOL.
Ever since I started going to China for work, I've been haunted by the bone-grinding poverty that my Chinese friends endured for decades while places like Taiwan and Hong Kong (with almost no natural resources but the same language and ethnicity) were able to thrive and prosper.
So I've been taking the Marginal University online course in Developmental Economics. I want to know more about why El Paso and Juarez have such radically different standards of living. Yes, I am a geek. Check it out when time permits. You watch a video, you take a test. You watch another video, you take another test. You take a mid-term. Repeat. With a final.
And for those who don't have a couple of months to watch videos on why The Bahamas prosper and Cuba fails, this is a quick alternative.... Thanks to the Fund for American Studies, here's a six-minute video which tells the story of a nation whose typical citizen had to work 6-7 days a week, with no cell phones, virtually no indoor plumbing, no internet and very few automobiles, and how those people were able to pull themselves out of abject poverty in a relatively short amount of time.
The children’s rights group estimates that 994 people younger than 18 were killed in drug-related violence between late 2006 and late 2010, based on media accounts, which are incomplete because newspapers are often too intimidated to report drug-related crimes.
[...]
Government figures include all homicides of people younger than 17, capturing victims whose murders might not have been related to drugs or organized crime. In 2009, the last year for which there is data, 1,180 children were killed, half in shootings.
U.S. and Mexican officials say the grotesque violence is a symptom the cartels have been wounded by police and soldiers. “It may seem contradictory, but the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs,” said Michele Leonhart, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The cartels “are like caged animals, attacking one another,” she added.
No, you bureaucratic twit, they're attacking children. Civilians, old people, journalists, cops, judges and children.
Here's a pic of Michele Leonhart:
Here she is with Attorney General Eric "Gunwalker" Holder:
I couldn't find a pic of Leonhart with The Teleprompter Jesus anywhere on the internet. He's probably keeping his distance since war criminals generally avoid hanging out in the same place.
So here's a pic of Michele Leonhart's thugs raiding a house to see if the owners have any plants inside:
"I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though - Mickey, my potential initiator, had been just a little too eager for me to go through with that. Said he could do it blindfolded, but he was shaking like a faulty engine when he said it...
"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed; the final fatal role of the would-be black man. Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind. Something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.
"I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in a white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids... You just might be bored or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection.
"And if the high didn't solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism. That's how it seemed to me then, anyway."
He then relates the story of Pablo, who didn't have "his driver's licence that day [when] a cop with nothing better to do check[ed] the trunk of his car... One day [my mother] marched into my room wanting to know the details of Pablo's arrest. I told her not to worry, I wouldn't do anything that stupid.
"'Don't you think you're being a little casual about your future?' she said. 'One of your friends just got arrested for drug possession. Your grades are slipping..."
"I didn't want to hear about this..."
Speaking of things that Obama doesn't want to hear about, there were 800,000 marijuana arrests in the U.S. last year.
The Obama/Leonhart War On Drugs killed 40,000 Mexicans in the last 4 years. Obama has more black men living in cages than the Confederacy did.
There are only two people running for president who favor ending this disastrous war: Gary Johnson and Ron Paul.
In the year 2010 in the U.K., there were 81,400 tobacco-related deaths and 8,644 alcohol-related deaths.
Take out the big two (that have been subsidized by the U.S. government), and you're left with these, the drugs that are produced or distributed by the Mexican Drug Lords:
The numbers drop even further if you eliminate Poly-Drug deaths, (snorting coke while drinking Jim Beam, mixing any two in an unwise combination, etc.) Call it 900 people.
According to the ONS data, in 2010 there were more helium deaths than cannabis, ecstasy, mephedrone and GHB related deaths combined. Helium is an inert gas which kills when people use helium to deprive themselves of oxygen. The recent explosion in helium deaths from under two per year until 2008 to 32 last year appears to be due to it’s recent promotion as a form of suicide.
In the meantime, here's how many Mexicans (most of them innocent civilians) have been slaughtered in the four years since Mexican President Felipe Calderon decided to participate in the War On Drugs four years ago:
34,612
Here's how many Mexicans died in the Drug War in 2010, the year in which 900 died from drug abuse in the U.K.:
15,273
When we decided to end prohibition of alcohol, the violence on the U.S./Canadian border ended. Alcholism didn't increase. Corruption decreased.
Yeah, people still died from alcohol abuse, just like they were already dying from alcohol abuse.
We could do the same thing tomorrow, and save thousands of lives and billions of dollars. We could reduce the pain and suffering of cancer patients.
But thanks to the Narc lobby, the prison lobby, and yes, the alcohol lobby, we won't do it.
The pic of the float from El Salvador's Anti Obama Drug War protest came from here. The conclusions about the massive waste of resources in the UK Drug War are terrifying, and the UK Drug War ain't nothing like our Drug War in the U.S.
I've been swamped at work for about two weeks, and have gotten behind.
So....
KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD ! KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD ! KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD ! KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD ! KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD ! KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD ! KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD ! KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD !
Ah..., that felt good. I don't believe in any of the various Hells, but in the words of my friend Denny, I kinda hope they invent one just for that Totalitarian bastard.
Wolf Blitzer: You’re a physician, Ron Paul, so you’re a doctor. You know something about this subject. Let me ask you this hypothetical question.
A healthy 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides: “You know what? I’m not going to spend $200 or $300 a month for health insurance because I’m healthy, I don’t need it.” But something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it. Who’s going to pay if he goes into a coma, for example? Who pays for that?
Ron Paul: Well, in a society that you accept welfarism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of him. … But what he should do is whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself. My advice to him would have a major medical policy, but not be forced …. That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks.
I practiced medicine before we had Medicaid, in the early 1960s, when I got out of medical school. I practiced at Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio, and the churches took care of them. We never turned anybody away from the hospitals. … And we’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves. Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it.
This whole idea, that’s the reason the cost is so high. The cost is so high because they dump it on the government. It becomes a bureaucracy; it becomes special interests. It kowtows to the insurance companies and the drug companies, and then on top of that, you have the inflation. The inflation devalues the dollar; we have lack of competition. There’s no competition in medicine. Everybody is protected by licensing. And we should actually legalize alternative health care, allow people to practice what they want.
Here's what the Lamestream Media is reporting that Ron Paul said:
Ron Paul: "Let 'em all die !!! Die, die, die !!!"
*********
BEEBE, Ark. — Preliminary autopsies on 17 of the up to 5,000 blackbirds that fell on this town indicate they died of blunt trauma to their organs, the state's top veterinarian told NBC News on Monday.
Their stomachs were empty, which rules out poison, Dr. George Badley said, and they died in midair, not on impact with the ground.
That evidence, and the fact that the red-winged blackbirds fly in close flocks, suggests they suffered some massive midair collision, he added. That lends weight to theories that they were startled by something.
Earlier Monday, the estimated number of dead birds was raised to between 4,000 and 5,000, up sharply from the initial estimate of 1,000.
Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, provided the new numbers.
I once put that many blackbirds on the ground, but it took about 3 or 4 months. Read no further if you are easily disturbed.
I grew up on a rice farm in Mississippi. Our house was in the middle of a pecan orchard. There were 50 or 60 pecan trees in the fields around the house.
(As residents of Fort Worth know, blackbirds and grackles travel in massive flocks. They'll color the sky black. When they select a place to roost in their daily migration, they leave behind a massive pile of blackbird droppings. Downtown Fort Worth's efforts to get rid of them were comical. They used scary rubber owls, air canons, plastic snakes in the trees, and I forget what else. One thing they didn't do? They didn't hire me to shoot them. But I digress....)
One year when I was about 12 years old, the largest flock of blackbirds I've ever seen decided to roost in our pecan orchard. They would fly in at about 2:00 in the afternoon and leave around 7:00. Sometimes you couldn't see the branches on the pecan trees.
My father estimated that they ate about 20 acres of rice. (At the time, a good rice yield was 90 bushels per acre, and we got around $8.00 per bushel. Do the math.)
I had a 20-gauge single-shot, a beloved shotgun that I purchased with my own money in the 4th grade.
My father gave me an allotment of one box of shotguns shells per day....
....and turned me loose in the pecan orchard. That was the best job I've ever had.
As long as he didn't need me on a tractor, every day was a blackbird hunt.
I could aim in the general direction of a tree, and put blackbirds on the ground. My record number was 23 with one shot.
Jack and Jim, our two sorta Border Collies, started following me into the orchard to gorge themselves on blackbirds. They were competitive types who survived on leftovers and scraps, and they didn't bother with chewing. They just ate and ate and ate. Watching them swallow blackbirds was like watching Chris Christie swallow an aspirin.
Eventually the cats (whose name was Legion, for they were many) started following me into the orchard. I'd give almost anything for a picture of me, the dogs, and the cats making our trek into the killing fields. We were a team.
The birds eventually figured out the range of my Western Auto .20 gauge, and it became a bit more difficult to kill quite so many birds per shot. Still, it was a rare shotgun shell that didn't send 8 or 10 of them to blackbird hell.
25 shotgun shells per day times 12 dead blackbirds per shell times 3 or 4 months.
You do the math.
The grossest part, even by my jaded North Mississippi standards, was when Jack and Jim made it back to the house.
They would recline in the driveway, and you could see wounded and unchewed blackbirds moving around inside their ribcages.
I don't know or care what killed 4,000 blackbirds in Bebe Arkansas, but I'm sure the blackbird population will survive.
They've made it through worse things.
Here's Politico, reporting on some good news about the Climate Bill, also known as "the convenient excuse for a tax increase and a massive power grab":
The Senate climate bill has been at death’s door several times over the past year. But with the days before the August recess quickly slipping away, the case may truly be terminal now.
Hit the link to read the whole thing. And then from The Washington Examiner, here's a post-mortem on the whitewash of the Climategate scandal:
When the Climategate e-mails were released last year, the evidence of misconduct by the scientists involved was so strong that the climate establishment was forced to commission a series of tribunals. Yet the conclusions of those inquiries are as specious as the science they were supposed to investigate. By asking the wrong questions -- or not asking them at all -- they have failed to advance the climate debate one iota.
....This panel did not examine the other e-mails on the CRU server, as it was supposed to do. It cleared the scientists of perverting the peer review process simply because their efforts did not succeed, thereby ignoring their clear intent as expressed in the e-mails.
Further, the inquiry failed to ask the most basic questions of the CRU scientists, such as whether Professor Phil Jones had actually deleted inconvenient e-mails. Britain's freedom of information office said that the Cimategate e-mails provided the most cogent evidence imaginable that there had been efforts to avoid FOI requirements, yet the Muir Russell review did not investigate this appropriately.
Even this inadequate investigation, however, found that the way the hockey stick graph was handled was misleading. Imagine what it -- and the parliamentary committee -- would have found if there had been some witnesses for the prosecution.
Those who hope that these inquiries exonerate global warming science are engaging in wishful thinking. The Climategate e-mails are still there for all to read and the questions they raise remain unanswered. Until there are answers, Climategate rolls on.
Here's more from the people who want to take over healthcare, run our auto companies, take care of our retirement, stop us from emitting any carbon, and determine which groups we have to hire.
Vice President Biden added to his lengthy list of gaffes Wednesday when he took a moment to honor the memory of the Irish prime minister’s mother — a woman who’s very much alive.
“God rest her soul,” Biden said as he introduced Brian Cowen and President Obama at a St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the White House Wednesday. …
“Wait … your mom’s still, your mom is still alive. It was your Dad (who) passed. God bless her soul. I gotta get this straight,” Biden said.
What a great bunch of kidders, those guys. I wish they could take care of my health, order my food for me in restaurants, help me at four-way-stops, spell-check my blog posts, remind me not to break the speed limit, watch my caloric intake, restrain my dachshund population, make me switch to decaf, and just help me out with everything. I need them and you need them. You really do.
Give them your money.
We're in good hands. Really. I'm 3,000 % less concerned about everything than I used to be.
The picture of the Irish Prime Minister, Barack Obama, and Obama's guarantee of non-impeachment came from here.
You may have heard about a controversial healthcare plan lurching its way through the U.S. Congress?
Well, go here for more enlightenment. "Middle Aged Dad", a British guy who commented on some of my earlier posts about Obamacare, is a little pissed. (His message to us is "Run for your lives, while you still can ! The Quangos are gonna get you ! Run, for God's sake ! It's THE QUANGOS !")
A Quango is a British derogatory term for any group financed by the government that is not actually part of the government. [qua(si) n(on-)g(overnmental) o(rganization).] We'll soon be calling our insurance companies Quangos. General Motors is now a Quango. Archer Daniels Midland might as well be a Quango. Noted con artist Al Gore wanted to be a Quango, but I think we may have prevented it.
"Middle Aged Dad's" post on his miserable experience with Socialized Medicine had a comment from someone who runs the National Death Service blog. (Get it? Get it? In England their Obamacare program is called The National Health Service? Like, if we implement Obamacare over here, it'll be truly screwed up beyond recognition, and then we'll nickname Obamacare after someone or something that's totally screwed up? Oh. Wait. We've already done it. Maybe someone can think of something worse.)
Anyway, if you have any warm and fuzzy feelings about socialized medicine, go to the National Death Service blog, and hit a few random posts.
Middle Aged Dad has a fairly limited blogroll, but among the honorees is someone named Mark Wadsworth, who declares that "England Is Not A Museum". Mr. Wadsworth is running an online poll about the Keynesian mulitiplier effect. There is only one correct answer, and that would be number 3. Go there. Take the test. Hit option 3.
Happy Saturday morning to everyone. I'm through surfing for the day. Gotta go to work.
Ok, I lied. I was looking for a funny picture to illustrate Britain's National Health Service fiasco, and came across this poster. This is a serious poster. It was designed by non-comedians, who weren't trying to be funny.
1) Just how pissed off are the Brits, if they have to put up posters warning against abuse of National Death Service staff?
2) Go here for the blog post where I found the poster. If you don't have time for that, just note the multi-culti "We Are The World" NHS staff, as compared to the nasty, ethnocentric colonial masters and warlords on the right.
Go to Google and type in healthcare and "civilized nations". You'll come up with an array of editorials and blog posts sniffing that it's time for the U.S. to adopt the socialized medical systems of the other civilized nations. (Canada, Cuba, China, etc.) Just hit this link for a sampling. It doesn't matter which one you open, the message in each will be similar. The general theme is that all the really cool, you know, civilized countries let their governments run their healthcare system.
And now for something completely different. This is from The Daily Mail (U.K.):
A man of 22 died in agony of dehydration after three days in a leading teaching hospital.
Kane Gorny was so desperate for a drink that he rang police to beg for their help.
They arrived on the ward only to be told by doctors that everything was under control.
I want to be sure you understand this. The kid had to call the freakin' police from his British Civilized Nation hospital bed to get some water.
The next day his mother Rita Cronin found him delirious and he died within hours.
She said nurses had failed to give him vital drugs which controlled fluid levels in his body. 'He was totally dependent on the nurses to help him and they totally betrayed him.'
....The death certificate said Mr Gorny had died because of a 'water deficit' and 'hypernatraemia' - a medical term for dehydration.
.....The tragedy emerged a week after a report into hundreds of deaths at Stafford Hospital revealed the appalling quality of care given by many of the nurses.
This week a task force called on nurses to sign a public pledge that they will treat everyone with compassion and dignity.
Or at least sign a statement that you're willing to get up and get a kid a glass of water.
I know, I know. This happened in England, not the U.S. The people who run our Post Office, Department Of Motor Vehicles, and Department Of Health And Human Services will be much more compassionate and efficient.
I'm a huge fan on the movie "Shattered Glass", a film in which journalist Michael Kelly is portrayed as a brilliant editor for The New Republic magazine. After leaving TNR, Kelly went on to edit several other news and opinion journals and was eventually killed while covering the war in Iraq. I immediately bought a copy of "Things Worth Fighting For", a collection of Kelly's collected journalism pieces. One of my favorites in the book is this gem, which was originally published in GQ. The link is much shorter than the original. I hope you'll go there and get back to me. It's pure, undiluted greatness.
Next, imagine if GW Bush had done this....
But, as Shakespeare said (or maybe it was Christopher Marlowe), the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. Here's Nick Gillespie, of Reason magazine on Kennedy's major accomplishment:
There is, buried deep within Kennedy's legislative legacy, a different set of policies worth exhuming and examining, precisely because they were truly a break with the normal way of doing business in Washington. During the 1970s, Kennedy was instrumental in deregulating the interstate trucking industry and airline ticket prices, two innovations that have vastly improved the quality of life in America even as—or more precisely, because—they pushed power out of D.C. and into the pocketbooks of everyday Americans. We are incalculably richer and better off because something like actual prices replaced regulatory fiat in trucking and flying. Because they do not fit the Ted Kennedy narrative preferred by his admirers and detractors alike, these accomplishments rarely get mentioned in stories about the late senator. But they are exactly the sort of legislation that we should be celebrating in his honor, and using as a model in today's debates about health care, education, and virtually every aspect of government action.
So at least he deregulated the trucking industry. I owe him a big one.
Here's a picture of him coming out of the swimming pool, shortly after killing somebody.
Multiple coats of high gloss Whitening to Instapundit for the collections of links.
Please discuss this cartoon. Be thorough. All religions, communities of faith, bodies of believers, and skeptics are welcome. Did God intervene in the US Air jet landing and rescue operation on the Hudson river? If God does intervene, why didn't he do something about the 25,000 or so people who died of malnutrition on the same day as this rescue? If God intervenes, why didn't he simply intervene to save the geese? Why are there no rescue tugboats in the cartoon? Are we terrified to admit/affirm that we've been in an unbroken chain of cause and effect ever since The Big Bang?
