Beck Exposes Rahm's Chicago Way

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Inside Corruption

clipped from pajamasmedia.com How do you keep someone from using what he knows? The Los Angeles Times describes a warning by Neal Barofsky, the special inspector general for the banking rescue program, who says the government bank rescue package can wind up enriching the very people who put it into effect. A controversial $40-billion government program to buy toxic securities from ailing banks has a flaw that law enforcement and financial experts say could allow traders to illegally profit from inside information. … The danger is that traders in the government program could wield enormous influence in the market — and there are no explicit restrictions on how they could use that influence to profit inside deals of their own. For example, a trader could privately buy up groups of toxic mortgages on the cheap then later drive up the price by purchasing similar mortgages using government money. The practice, known as “front running,” could be technically illegal

Hostages

clipped from gatewaypundit.blogspot.com Remember: Private Sector-- Bad Government Control-- Good Obama accused insurance companies of "holding Americans hostage" on Friday. Instead he wants to take away all competition and allow government to hold Americans hostage.

It Already Exists

clipped from www.americanthinker.com Former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin has come under fire for her Facebook post accusing President Obama and the Democrats of including a "death panel" provision the health care bill. The Associated Press recently ran a ‘Fact Check' article rebutting Palin's claim.  The AP is technically correct in stating that end-of-life counseling is not the same as a death panel.  The New York Times is also correct to point out that the health care bill contains no provision setting up such a panel. What both outlets fail to point out is that the panel already exists. H.R. 1 (more commonly known as the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, even more commonly known as the Stimulus Bill and aptly dubbed the Porkulus Bill) contains a whopping $1.1 billion to fund the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. Who is on the Council? One of its most prominent members is none other than Dr. Death himself Ezekiel Emanuel.

Every Blade Of Grass

clipped from theblogprof.blogspot.com What is it with liberals and gun rights. Liberals simply cannot find an individual right to carry in the U.S. Constitution, even though it is explicitly cited in amendments that specifically address only individual rights, but can find a right to abortion which is somehow invisibly inserted somewhere in the same document. Just recently, a Macomb Township ordinance banning guns in public places came under scrutiny when a gun rights group, Michigan Open Carry, was to hold a picnic in a park - by definition a public location. From The Macomb Daily: Law backs right of gun group to hold picnic.

Zero Results From Zero

clipped from newsrealblog.com Cap-and-Trade has already passed the House, and there is a very good chance that the Senate could take it up in September when it returns from its summer recess. If the measure ultimately becomes law, it is destined to do one thing with absolute certainty: it will raise immense revenues for the government and for those special-interest groups and individuals actively supporting its passage. As for its effect on the environment, there will be none. Zero. That’s right. If implemented, cap-and-trade will have no effect on the environment. Who says so? None other than Thomas Crocker, the man who devised it! “I’m skeptical that cap-and-trade is the most effective way to go about regulating carbon.” Crocker initially thought up cap-and-trade way back in the 1960s, as a university student trying to finish his thesis.  It was a theoretical model designed to address the specific problem of pollution produced by fertilizer plants in Florida.

Some Questions

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com 5) The average annual temperature in Antarctica is minus 50. Temperatures would have to increase 85 degrees 24/7/365 for a century or more, to melt South Pole ice caps and raise sea levels 20-50 feet. Can you explain how a 0.02% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (from 285 ppm in 1850 to projected 485 ppm) can overturn basic laws of thermodynamics, replace the powerful natural forces that caused Ice Ages and other climate changes in the past, and produce ice-cap meltdowns? 6) Replacing hydrocarbons with green energy will require millions of acres of land for turbines, solar panels, geothermal facilities and transmission lines. Do you support relaxing environmental, endangered species and other laws, to fast-track approval of these projects, despite their impacts on habitats? Or do you want them subjected to the same rules that have stymied thousands of other energy projects, so that renewable energy projects can't be built either, and we have a huge energy gap? ...

That Fierce Moral Urgency

clipped from pajamasmedia.com BYRON YORK: The Netroots’ Agenda: War? What War? “I attended the first YearlyKos convention, in 2006, and have kept up with later ones, and it’s safe to say that while people who attended those gatherings couldn’t stand George W. Bush in general, their feelings were particularly intense when it came to opposing the war in Iraq. It animated their activism; they hated the war, and they hated Bush for starting it. They weren’t that fond of the fighting in Afghanistan, either. Now, with Obama in the White House, all that has changed. . . . Not too long ago, with a different president in the White House, the left was obsessed with America’s wars. Now, they’re not even watching.” Yeah, funny how the fierce moral urgency drained out of the antiwar movement as soon as a Democrat was elected President.

The Volt Nears Reality

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Nazis

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Commenter Slapdown

clipped from www.humanevents.com There is not a hospital in the country that will deny a person care. sure there is. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/01/waiting.room.death/index.html NEW YORK (CNN) -- A 49-year-old woman collapsed and died on the floor of a waiting room at a Brooklyn psychiatric hospital and lay there for more than an hour as employees ignored her, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, which on Tuesday released surveillance camera video of the incident. Burns: one mere incident in a nation of 330M? Get real boy. The woman was a habitual hypocondriac also who showed up nearly daily.

Morrisey On Rights And Healthcare

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"Nice" People

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com How many "nice" people I know, who casually asserted that a certain George W. Bush was mentally retarded, resembled a monkey, and was guilty of war crimes. Suddenly the same people have "had it up to here" with squalid personal attacks on his successor.

Stoned In Gaza

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com There’s absolutely nobody to root for, as Hamas puts down a threat to their control of Gaza by invading a mosque and slaughtering more than 20 people. GAZA (Reuters) – Palestinian Islamists Hamas struck back at an al-Qaeda challenge to their grip on the Gaza Strip by storming a mosque in overnight battles that left the leader of the “Warriors of God” splinter group among up to 28 dead. After fighting ended early on Saturday the town of Rafah was sealed off to media, but Hamas said the physician and preacher who led the group and who had declared an al Qaeda-style Islamic “emirate” from a local mosque on Friday was dead — blown up by his own hand along with a Syrian ally after killing a mediator. In this screwed up surrealistic conflict, Hamas is actually the “moderate” side. The “Warriors of God” dressed like the Taliban and wanted to impose strict Stone Age conditions on Gaza.

But of course, it's really the Israelis that cause all these problems with their oh so awful oppression.

Bullsh*t.

Two Against One

clipped from pajamasmedia.com SCENES FROM A NEW AMERICA: So I dropped the girls off at a movie, and — since the Insta-wife was lunching with her mom — stopped at a Sonny’s Barbecue for lunch. A man — late 40s, big, with a wife and a daughter — came in with an empty holster on his belt. As he sat down at the booth next to mine, the manager came by and asked him if he’d left his gun in the car. Yes, said the man, who had a permit but thought he wasn’t allowed to carry in restaurants in Tennessee.. Well, they’ve changed the law, said the manager, and if you want to go get it that’s fine with us. It’s legal now, and I’m happy to have you carrying — if somebody tries to rob me, it’s two against one. The man stepped outside and returned with a Springfield XD in the holster, chatted with the manager for a bit about guns, and then sat down and had lunch with his family.

46 Million?

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com In Portsmouth, Obama had this to say: I don't have to explain to you that nearly 46 million Americans don't have health insurance coverage today. In the wealthiest nation on Earth, 46 million of our fellow citizens have no coverage. They are just vulnerable. If something happens, they go bankrupt, or they don't get the care they need. Hennessey breaks this group of nearly 46 million into five categories. The first, consisting of about 6.5 million, actually is insured. According to Hennessey, they are enrolled in Medicaid or S-CHIP but didn't tell the census taker. This is called the "Medicaid undercount." The second group, about 4.5 million, consists of people who are eligible for Medicaid or S-CHIP but have not enrolled. If they need care, the hospital or clinic generally enrolls them. The third group, about 9.5 million, is comprised of non-citizens. The fourth group, another 10 million, earns an income more than three times the poverty line.

Help Not Wanted

clipped from article.nationalreview.com And the latest hires rate — the worst in the history of this measure — confirms what BuzzCharts has been reporting for months (see “Obama’s Magical Misery Tour” and “The Jobless Recovery”): Entrepreneurs and business managers are frozen. They’ve stopped posting want ads and they’ve stopped adding staff. When I look at the chart above, I see a giant sign hanging in the window of America. It reads: “Help Not Wanted.” No, but Obama has made them scared. Everywhere I go I hear the same story. Business owners know the little details that academics and pundits don’t, and they know what not to do. They know, for example, that payroll taxes are not only scheduled to rise, but already have risen. And they know all too well that government-mandated unemployment compensation is funded by employers through an unemployment-compensation payroll tax. As a result, they know not to hire.

But Not Before Admiring It

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com Granted, I am a mystical Catholic nutjob, but I can't help thinking they'd be wiser just to attend daily mass; which is cheaper, too. For the collection plate is passed only on Sundays. As I have argued, almost ad nauseam in this space, contemporary western man has replaced religion with a quasi-religion: a fanatic moral relativism founded upon the cosmology suggested by Darwinism. Instead of faith in God, we have a neurotic scientism. And with that comes a grievous concern about the world, and all the distress of environmentalism. For if you don't think God is in charge, it may follow that we are in charge. We must regulate everything: even the weather. The conclusion to which the Low-tech Magaziner seems to leap is one I might contest, but not before admiring it. His headline was: "Information damages the environment." At least I would qualify this by saying that information wouldn't do half as much damage if people would stop acting upon it.

Why They Come Here

clipped from proteinwisdom.com Via Dicentra comes this valuable comparison between current American healthcare and Britain’s NHS 1. U.K.’s heart-attack fatality rate is almost 20% higher than America’s 2. Angioplasties in Britain are only 21.3% as common as they are here 3. NICE ruled against the use of two drugs, Lapatinib and Sutent, that prolong the life of those with certain forms of breast and stomach cancer 4. Breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate; in Britain it’s almost double at 46% 5. Prostate cancer kills 19% of American and 57% of Brits 6. in 2006, a U.K-based board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took three years to get that outrageous decree reversed.

M4GW

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I needed a laugh tonight.

Odiosy

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Hmm. So it’s like this: Obama: I’m going to turn healthcare upside down. Not sure how. People: I don’t think I’ll like this. Obama: Haters! Remember how Bush was supposed to be the idiot who went into Iraq without a plan, while Obama was supposed to be the cool methodical one? But Reich is admitting that despite all the Administration hoopla, there’s still no plan. Or, possibly, that the White House has a plan, but won’t tell us what it is. And yet the people who don’t want to see a bill — some bill, doing who-knows-what — rammed through in the dead of night are somehow the ones who are ignorant and being manipulated. Right.

Yes He Did

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COTD #2: Another Joe

clipped from www.qando.net Here’s one I did as a response to this back in 2005: Larry the liberal gets out of bed at noon in the apartment paid for by his dad Joe, he is in his 8th year at college.  Enjoying all the benefits of modern technology such as skateboards, skis, electric guitars, telephones, inexpensive electrical appliances, plentiful water and power he rarely thinks that most if not all of these benefits were the result of efforts of entrepreneurs and businessmen who risked financial ruin. He checks his email with a low priced computer and shareware that he never paid for, and since he has time he downloads some MP3s for free. On a normal day,  he would then call his drug dealer for an .oz of pot and an 8 ball of coke to offset the boredom of having nothing to do but watch TV. But today is a big day.  He has to drive his girlfriend, Sunshine, to the women’s clinic for an abortion because he wasn’t going to be bothered with using a condom.

COTD: Democracy

clipped from www.qando.net And the term “democracy” wasn’t always viewed positively because our fathers and grandfathers understood “democracy” can be explained quite adequately with the simple scenario of three wolves and 2 sheep voting on lunch.

Battle Of The Joes

clipped from www.qando.net Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards. He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised. Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He makes it with a machine he could not possibly have made himself. The company that insures the manufacturer of the coffee machine required that it meet certain safety guidelines, as established by the private insurance-company-funded Underwriters Laboratory. Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with bottled water because he knows that the municipal water system supplies water that occasionally has e coli and other natural organisms that will make him ill–after all his mother died from drinking water that was polluted by sewage after a heavy rain.

ObamaCare And The Doc

clipped from www.americanthinker.com I have been sitting quietly on the sidelines watching all of this national debate on healthcare. It is time for me to bring some clarity to the table by explaining many of the problems from the perspective of a doctor. First off, the government has involved very few of us physicians in the  healthcare debate. While the American Medical Association has come out in favor of the plan, it is vital to remember that the AMA only represents 17% of the American physician workforce. I have taken care of Medicaid patients for 35 years while representing the only pediatric ophthalmology group left in Atlanta, Georgia that accepts Medicaid. For example, in the past 6 months I have cared for three young children on Medicaid who had corneal ulcers. This is a potentially blinding situation because if the cornea perforates from the infection, almost surely blindness will occur. In all three cases the antibiotic needed for the eradication of the infection was not on the approved Medicaid list.

RTWT. This is the sweepstakes winner from a Doc so far.

We Sure Could Use Those Kidneys

clipped from hotair.com Etc etc etc. The difference between this and ObamaCare pushing living-will consultations for seniors in the context of cutting costs is the difference between a general public campaign asking people to consider organ donation and some government employee visiting you in the hospital after an accident to remind you that a lot of needy folks sure could use one of those kidneys. It’s all a matter of coercion, bad government incentives, and which circumstances are most likely to give rise to it. As the ‘Cuda herself explained last night: Last year, I issued a proclamation for “Healthcare Decisions Day.” [6] The proclamation sought to increase the public’s knowledge about creating living wills and establishing powers of attorney. There was no incentive to choose one option over another. There was certainly no financial incentive for physicians to push anything.

No Doubt We'll See This One Plastered All Over The State Run Media

clipped from www.foxnews.com NEW ORLEANS  —  An African-American man from Mississippi admits posing as a white supremacist to send a death threat across state lines by Facebook. The U.S. Attorney's Office says 20-year-old Dyron L. Hart of Poplarville pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to making a threat in November 2008. Hart admitted creating a name and using a white supremacists' photo to pose as a white man who planned to kill blacks because Barack Obama had been elected president. He originally was charged with threatening three black students at Nicholls State — where he had attended one semester — but pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count. He sent the threats from a computer in Poplarville. The maximum sentence is five years in prison and a $250,000 fine; sentencing is Nov. 18.

Riiiight.

Olinskyville

clipped from www.americanthinker.com The students told Alinsky they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush's address.  That's the wrong approach, he rejoined, not very creative - and besides causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school.  He told them, instead, to go to hear the speech dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards reading, ‘The KKK supports Bush.'  And that is what they did, with very successful, attention-getting results." Planting major falsehoods has been a favorite Alinsky strategy from the start.  His acolyte, Barack Obama, learned his Industrial Areas Foundation lessons on deceiving for power while on a side trip during his Harvard years, then taught the Alinsky power tactics at the University of Chicago.  Hardly qualifies as ‘Constitutional Law' if you ask me. Covering for oneself by accusing the other fellow has been the left's most successful deception for decades now.

The Opposite Is True

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Bill Otis offers a good summary of the ways in which the health care debate has taken the luster off of the Obama presidency: Obama has really fumbled this heathcare business. It was going to be trouble to start with, because most of the country is happy with its health care and insurance. But the whole thing has exposed him in a way the press was heretofore able to cover up, but can't, or doesn't want to, now. First, so much for Mr. Post-partisan. Second, the totalitarian/thug side is on display big time, what with the report-your-fishy-neighbor to the White House. The Stasi should have done as well. Third, the outright lying. We can cover 46,000,000 more people but it's going to cost less!!! RIGHT, RIGHT. The savings that will pay for it all will come from trimming waste, fraud and abuse. RIGHT, RIGHT. (It's not just that nobody believes this, it's that the opposite is true, as it always is in government-run programs).

Setting The Record Straight For OBozo

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com President Obama is fond of claiming that the debate over health care has been hijacked by special interest groups and other bad guys who are deluding the public by providing misinformation. It will be interesting, then, to see how (and if) he responds to this statement by the American College of Surgeons, which accuses Obama of "getting his facts completely wrong" when discussing some of the practices of surgeons: The American College of Surgeons is deeply disturbed over the uninformed public comments President Obama continues to make about the high-quality care provided by surgeons in the United States. When the President makes statements that are incorrect or not based in fact, we think he does a disservice to the American people at a time when they want clear, understandable facts about health care reform. We want to set the record straight.

Decompartmentalization

clipped from chicagoboyz.net Seniors no doubt base this suspicion in large part on their 50+ adult years of watching politicians over-promise and under-deliver. They probably remember back to 1965 when Medicare itself was sold as a cost-saving measure, and today we’re told it’s going to bankrupt the government unless we socialize 15% of the economy. They no doubt wonder how long it will be before Obama’s ideological descendants will tell us that Obama’s miracle plan is a disaster than can only be solved by more socialism. Seniors have another reason to be nervous. Obama’s plan will put them in direct competition with everyone else for health care spending. Right now we compartmentalize government health-care spending. We have one program for the poor (Medicaid) and one for the elderly (Medicare). Each is paid for by a separate flat tax on wages. The government doesn’t spend any money on health care for the middle class.

Healthcare Innumeracy Watch

clipped from pajamasmedia.com SHANNON LOVE: The dangers of decompartmentalized health spending: “The elderly consume 70% of all health care spending. That means that when it comes to cost control, they will bear the brunt of the burden. If we don’t cut spending on the elderly we can’t reduce cost without simply denying care for everyone else. When it comes down to choice between spending on old people and children, the elderly know full well who we are going to pick.”

I Am The Mob

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Set Aside

clipped from bariumtitanate.blogspot.com Saqib Rahim and Jessica Lebers of ClimateWire made one mistake in their recent NY Times article: there's no mention of any skepticism regarding these DOE funds for batteries. It seems odd that all of this money is circulating and no one is asking any difficult questions about it. For example, I don't think I've read a single article on this battery funding that questioned the underlying supply of lithium ion or the fact that instead of obtaining oil from the middle east we will be gathering our lithium from Bolivia or China. Also, no reporter has examined the relationship between winners/losers of stimulus funding with basic lobbying/campaign donation funds at OpenSecrets.org. I'm not saying anything is amiss for certain. But, it seems good journalism practices would at least lead one to inquire into some of these issues. It just feels like ever since the Obama administration began, all the tough questions have been set aside.

Question Time

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Gore customarily used excessive language like “brown shirts.” Senators Durbin, Kennedy, and others compared our soldiers to Saddamites, Pol Pot’s killers, and Nazis. Ward Churchill compared the victims in the Twin Tower to “little Eichmanns.” Sen. Robert Byrd likened Pres. George W. Bush’s policies to what transpired in Nazi Germany. Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros agreed with Fidel Castro, the Iranians, and North Koreans in comparing Bush to Hitler. Jonathan Chait wrote in the New Republic on why “I hate George W. Bush.” Garrison Keillor likened Bush’s Republicans to “brown shirts in pinstripes.” Even old hero Sen. John Glenn said of the Bush agenda: “It’s the old Hitler business.” There’s more. UPDATE: Reader Julie Carlson thinks the townhalls are tame: I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, but it occurred to me with all the media wetting themselves over the tenor of the town hall meetings, haven’t they ever watched Question Time on C-Span?

Remember

clipped from atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com The Jews were concentrated mainly in the four "Holy Cities": Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron. By and large, the Jews were regarded as second-class citizens of the Ottoman Empire. They encountered legal discrimination at every turn, and evidence given by them was not recognized by the courts. Jews were debarred from attaining high government office. They were subject to daily mockery and scorn, were forbidden to ride camels or horses within the city limits, and were obliged to make way for Moslems. Their persons and possessions were unprotected by law and prone to constant abuse (without any possibility of appealing to the courts of justice). M. Reisher, who lived in Jerusalem, writes in 1866: "When a Jew walked among them in the market, one would throw a stone at him in order to kill him, another would pull his beard, and a third his ear-lock, yet another spit on his face, and he became a symbol of abuse". Remember that. Historical accuracy versus Islamic revisionism.

Don't Call Them Death Panels Though

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now. So Obama "suspects" that the legislative process will produce some sort of independent group that can give non-determinative "guidance" on end-of-life care for the chronically ill, with an eye towards saving money.  Just don't call them death panels!

Sounding Familiar

clipped from mises.org The economic position that the United States is now in is the result of a series of economic bubbles. To explain the nature of bubbles, I'm going to start by talking about their history; I'm not going to go all the way back to Tulip Mania and John Law, but I do want to mention some things from the Roaring Twenties that might sound familiar to us today. Over the eight-year period of that boom, the money supply increased by 62 percent. I always talk about the economics of booms and bubbles in the framework that Murray Rothbard outlined in his great book, What Has Government Done To Our Money. He points out that inflation confers no general social benefit. Just creating more money does not create more benefit for the general public. It merely redistributes wealth to the first people to receive the new money. Since 1998, the money supply (as measured by M2) has doubled. So we have an expansion in the money supply now that is similar to what we had during the Roaring Twenties.

Paglia Dimly Senses The Blatant Lies

clipped from neoneocon.com But Paglia’s still thinking, at least, and asking the right questions: I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy. Girlfriend, let me help out and connect the dots for you. The insane rush, the failure to give the American people the details, are purposeful and not accidental. They are cheating on us, and “they” includes Obama. They are lying, and they know it. Have you not seen this video?