Friday, July 31, 2009

Just who are the 47 million "uninsured"?

Michael Ramirez illustrates:



Which makes for some interesting observations and questions:

--If we got rid of the illegals, our emergency rooms would not be busted out, and our American born "uninsured" would have a modicum of care.

--Are those affluent who choose to pay out of pocket, and the young workers 18-25 to be forced to buy insurance in order to make a larger pool so that others who buy insurance will have lower per capita costs?

--In a prolonged recession, like the one we are going to get when bogus "stimulus" does not work, the "in between jobs" category is going to explode, and presumably the sob stories about not having insurance will too. Could it be that non-working "stimulus" and tax hikes were deliberately engineered to crash the economy and thus raise the sob stories???

Another Michael, in Michigan, has interesting discussions on the matter here and here.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

The "Obama Birth" Delusion

One of the sadder delusions going around today, even among a blogger I otherwise like and admire, is the delusion that President Obama isn't really an American citizen.

Wasn't his mommy American? Yes, she was....

As much as I loathe Obamunist policies, the "Obama Birthers" are the right-wing version of "9/11 Inside Job Troofers", and I think we make ourselves silly with that. There is more than enough to attack Obama about in terms of communistic policy alone.

Some say that it is a simple matter to put to bed, all Obama has to do is produce a "Legitimate" Birth Certificate. Which he did, and which, duh, was in the State of Hawaii. Case closed. Is there any credible evidence he was born in Kenya? (So what if it was called "A Certificate Of Live Birth"??? Why do I think I am entering crazyland with some of these Obama Birther people?)

Moreover, has it occurred to them that this is a "rope-a-dope" move on his part? They get worked up on a phony non-issue, waste all their energy and credibility, and then the Obamunist rams through socialized medicine. (I am terrified that he and "Rommel" Emmanuel are just this cunning).

And riddle me this: why would the egomaniacal Hillary Clinton NOT bring this up during her bitter primary fight? A woman who we all just know feels rooked out of the Presidency that she thinks was her birthright/marriageright for the taking, and no doubt is seething and biding her time and will probably desert the Obamunist ship once the Porkulus Non-Stimulus fails and Obama becomes Carter II.

Why? Because she knows there is nothing to it.

When John McCain's citizenship was questioned by the Senate during the campaign the Senate investigated John McCain and found that his birth as the son of a naval officer in the then Panama Canal Zone did not matter, and that he was and is a legitimate citizen. And would Obama not qualify as well if McCain did? So what is the point of wasting time on this when there is so much crap coming from the Obamunists to fight?

I loathe the Obamunist policies, but the fantasy that somehow he will be dismissed from office isn't going to happen. Like it or not, enough of the American people are dupie dupes and voted for this crap. Elections DO have consequences.

How much energy squandered on this Obama Birther campaign could be devoted to getting REAL Republicans (not RINO phonies) voted into your Congress District in 2010, and the Senate Seat in your state if 2010 is an election year for one of them?

Two articles in American Thinker explain why this delusion is happening: (1) because the lamestream media gives the Obamunists and other Democrats so much political cover that it is extremely frustrating, and (2) Obama has been so evasive that it's easy to believe it:

There are two reasons why so many find the Birther theory compelling. One is the opaqueness of Obama himself. There is much about our president we still do not know.

For example, throughout 2008 the media showed little interest in Obama's connections to the underworld of Chicago politics, regarding Hillary Clinton's references to fraudster "slumlord" Tony Rezko as mere fear-mongering. When the Blagojevich scandal exploded in December 2008, many journalists were quick to accept Obama's assurances of innocent naïveté.

Other details about the president's past remain hidden or suppressed. Obama has never, for example, provided a convincing explanation of why he disposed of his papers from the Illinois State Senate, or how he managed to lose the thesis he wrote at Columbia. He sometimes fibs about essential details of his personal life -- such as where he met his wife -- and offers inauthentic projections of empathy with ordinary folk, such as references to arugula or memories of "Cominskey Field."

The Obama team also has a habit of releasing information in cryptic drips and drabs, and Friday-afternoon document drops. During the campaign, he suddenly revealed
that he had taken a trip to Pakistan in 1981 -- a voyage he had not alluded to in either of his two memoirs -- and his staff only belatedly acknowledged his authorship of an unsigned Harvard Law Review article on abortion.

The candidate who promised transparency has been anything but transparent, feeding the suspicion that drives the Birther theory.

The other reason the Birther theory has caught on -- particularly among conservatives -- is the weakness of the Republican opposition.

Despite the GOP's success in slowing down ObamaCare, Democrats still have a huge majority in the House, a filibuster-proof margin in the Senate, and a White House that is aggressively expanding its executive power. One Republican leader after another has stepped down or been tarnished by scandal.

Many Americans -- including some who had convinced themselves that Obama was a moderate -- are eager for a way to stop the runaway left-wing agenda of Obama and Nancy Pelosi's Congress. In the absence of strong Republican leadership, some find the Birther theory a compelling, if desperate, solution.

Yet it is ultimately a self-destructive one -- not just because it is almost certainly false, but because it contradicts the essential spirit of the conservative movement.

The philosopher Robert Nozick distinguished between two approaches to political thought: the "invisible hand" and the "hidden hand." Those who embrace the "invisible hand" believe that people, given the freedom to make their own choices, tend to achieve social goals without being forced to do so.

Sometimes the invisible hand fails, and strong central leadership is needed. But as a general rule, free markets and civil liberties have worked well in promoting human progress. They have certainly proved better than the alternative, in the form of state control, which has produced only poverty, war, and misery.

"Hidden hand" thinkers, by contrast, believe that everything is controlled by unseen forces -- not spiritual but human in nature. Socialism thrives on such ideas.....In fact, socialism depends on conspiracy theories to justify its war against personal liberty, to blame for its inevitable failures, and to cover up its own very real machinations.

Come on, patriots, we are better than this.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Yes, there are Death Panels in Obamunist Care

There is no way you can increase the number of able bodied people on a Medicare like program, while cutting payments to the doctors on this program, without the existing seniors and disabled getting shafted.

Who Will Tell Michael J. Fox He Needs to Die?

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Ben Stein: We have figured Obama out....

Why is President Barack Obama in such a hurry to get his socialized medicine bill passed?

Because he and his cunning circle realize some basic truths:

The American people in their unimaginable kindness and trust voted for a pig in a poke in 2008. They wanted so much to believe Barack Obama was somehow better and different from other ultra-leftists that they simply took him on faith.

They ignored his anti-white writings in his books. They ignored his quiet acceptance of hysterical anti-American diatribes by his minister, Jeremiah Wright.

They ignored his refusal to explain years at a time of his life as a student. They ignored his ultra-left record as a "community organizer," Illinois state legislator, and Senator.

The American people ignored his total zero of an academic record as a student and teacher, his complete lack of scholarship when he was being touted as a scholar.

Now, the American people are starting to wake up to the truth. Barack Obama is a super likeable super leftist, not a fan of this country, way, way too cozy with the terrorist leaders in the Middle East, way beyond naïveté, all the way into active destruction of our interests and our allies and our future.

The American people have already awakened to the truth that the stimulus bill -- a great idea in theory -- was really an immense bribe to Democrat interest groups, and in no way an effort to help all Americans.

Now, Americans are waking up to the truth that ObamaCare basically means that every time you are sick or injured, you will have a clerk from the Department of Motor Vehicles telling your doctor what he can and cannot do.

The American people already know that Mr. Obama's plan to lower health costs while expanding coverage and bureaucracy is a myth, a promise of something that never was and never will be -- a bureaucracy lowering costs in a free society. Either the costs go up or the free society goes away.

These are perilous times. Mrs. Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State, has given Iran the go-ahead to have nuclear weapons, an unqualified betrayal of the nation. Now, we face a devastating loss of freedom at home in health care. It will be joined by controls on our lives to "protect us" from global warming, itself largely a fraud if believed to be caused by man.

Mr. Obama knows Americans are getting wise and will stop him if he delays at all in taking away our freedoms.

There is his urgency and our opportunity. Once freedom is lost, America is lost. Wake up, beloved America.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Episcopal Church Goes Gay And Will Implode

The Washington times reports.

Hey, Gays and Leftists: Here's a thought. If you don't like a particular church, how about joining another one more to your liking, or forming one of your own, rather than demanding it accommodate you? If you want to worship the great UFO gods or be a "sky clad" pagan, go for it (well, not in public for the latter; I'd rather not see your junk flapping around). What is so annoying about you leftists and gay activists (am I repeating myself) is that you demand that the Church fit you, rather than you fitting the Church.

If you *can't* fit the Church, how about finding or starting a "Teh Ghey" religion that better suits you?

And yes, a "church" is by definition Christian or an offshoot thereof. If you want to be a pagan, be a pagan.

What's odd is that complaints about "Inclusiveness" are coming *precisely* when "mainline" Protestant and "liberal" Catholic churches became so "inclusive" that they stopped standing for anything. As a result, these churches are falling apart. Happy-clappy pseudo-Christians have thrown out Church teachings. "Progressive" church publications wallow in nonsense with Reverend Clown and Dr. Feel-good applauding Deaconess Heretic for the latest "Progressive" Protestant, "but my conscience tells me" argument, that flies in the face of plain Scripture. Simultaneously, "Progressive" Catholic publications began defying the Papacy, particularly "just war" doctrine, in favor of first borderline pro-Soviet and now borderline pro-Jihadist policy positions.

Protestant evangelical "megachurches" and traditional Catholic factions like Opus Dei grow because they are "bitter clingers" who have the "bigoted" notion that Dad's dumping Mom for Tom, or Mom's dumping her man for Jan, might just really screw the kids up. O.J. Simpson and John Walker Lindh, two people from very different backgrounds, did suffer the exact same kind of family breakup as kids.

Protestant evangelical "megachurches" and Catholic Opus Dei factions also have the "bigoted" notion that theirs may just be the true way to salvation, especially when they listen seriously to what all too many Muslim imams are saying and doing, just as they listen seriously to what their ministers and priests say and do. Taking a religion seriously? You don't say!

Meanwhile, at the "progressive" churches, Father Flapdoodle or Reverend Leftylib are getting indicted on account of credible accusations of homosexual rape. Indeed, statistically, liberal "mainline" Protestant denominations like the Episcopalians have even *higher* proportions of pedophile or homosexual abuse than do Catholics!

Of course, the word from the good leftist Catholic or Episcopalian or Unitarian hierarchy is that they are victims of "sexual McCarthyism". But the ex-parishioners / congregation members who got wind of it aren't surprised. After all, if Fr. Flapdoodle and Reverend Leftylib aren't preaching traditional Catholic or Protestant sexual morality, it shouldn't surprise anyone that they aren't living it either.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

The sad truth about Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson


Many people were shocked that Michael Jackson died at age 50 and Farah Fawcett at age 62. But modern medicine could not have prevented what these celebrities did to themselves. It was Jackson's and Fawcett's own behavior that led to their relatively short lives.

This sober truth should serve as a warning to young people: don't get hooked on prescription drugs or other artificial substances, don't engage in sexual promiscuity, and don't get your value from the attention that people lavish upon you.

Michael Jackson
As a child, Michael Jackson's identity was damaged by his father and never restored. In his 30+ years of adult independence, the "king of pop" made a series of horrible lifestyle choices that led to his early demise. Outliving Jackson is his abusive father (age 80) and his codependent mother (age 79).
• He remembered his father taunting him about his "ugliness."
• He underwent a series of plastic surgeries because he didn't "want to look like my father."
• He was reportedly a homosexual who dated men, in addition to his pedophile-like behavior of "sleeping" with boys.
• His addiction to prescription drugs began in 1984. After so many surgeries, addiction to painkillers is not surprising.
• Nearly 20 years later, in 2003, he entered clinical treatment for his drug problems.
• In the last three years, he was taking heavy prescription drugs including Demerol and morphine.
• He had a personal physician or nurse check him out regularly, and near the end, his doctor was with him every day.
• His nanny had to regularly pump drugs out of his stomach.
• He was hardly eating and was becoming anorexic and was suspected of being bulimic.
• He had recurring nightmares and could hardly sleep, keeping on lights and music all day and all night.
• At night, he was hooked up to an IV that pumped him with Diprivan (Propofol), a potent injectable drug used to induce and maintain anesthesia during surgeries and to provide continuous sedation.
• Because the drug-related cause in Jackson's death is so strongly suspected, his body was buried without his brain so it can be studied to determine which drug was the most lethal.

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide idolized Michael Jackson, given his incredible musical talent.  Yet, despite his "spiritual" public funeral, would anyone really want to be like him?

Jackson's lifestyle was a death style, full of emotional misery, many resulting physical problems, and a dangerous mix of prescription drugs. His personal demons had devoured him.

For all his weirdness, emotional immaturity, pedophile-like activity, homosexuality, crotch-grabbing dance moves, and nightmares, I wonder if Michael Jackson had been molested as a child to set him on this disastrous course. Only his father Joe Jackson knows for sure.

Farrah Fawcett
Early on, Farrah Fawcett's identity was in her looks. Influenced by years of attention from boys and girls and men and women, Fawcett became the "pin-up poster girl" of the late 70s, and had lots of sexually-charged admirers. In the end, it was a sexually-transmitted disease -- human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes anal cancer -- that killed her. Outliving Fawcett is her father (age 91); her mother died at age 91 in March. Unlike Michael Jackson, by all accounts her parents were quite loving and supportive. However:
• When she was a young girl in Texas, her parents let children come over to look at how beautiful she was.
• In high school and college, she got lots of attention for her looks and won "best looking" contests.
• She became world famous in 1976 for her lust-inspiring swimsuit poster and her TV role in "Charlie's Angels."
• Porn kingpin Hugh Hefner said, "Men fell in love with her and women wanted to look like her."
• Her life in Hollywood involved drug abuse, alcohol abuse and cosmetic surgery gone wrong.
• She had several affairs and had to have caught HPV from one of them.
• She was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006.

First Fawcett developed an appetite for others' attention, then she entered the sexually-promiscuous modeling world. In the midst of it all, she had one marriage and several notorious relationships before and after. Promiscuity opens women, especially, to being infected by human papilloma virus (HPV), which is the cause of 73% of anal cancer cases and is associated with up to 90% of cervical cancer cases.

Saturday, July 04, 2009

Independence Lost: The Obamunist "Cap-And-Trade" Hoax

The Obama-backed, House-passed bill is economically suicidal and scientifically grossly irresponsible. Its only justification is as a Democrat, left-liberal power grab.


Barack Obama called for House passage of the cap and trade tax bill last Friday by calling it a jobs bill. The bill is designed to raise the price of energy in the U.S. so much that it will reduce the use of fossil fuels by 17% by 2020 and by 83% by 2050. Sentencing the U.S. economy to high cost energy is insanity when it comes to creating jobs. The Charles River Associates, a Harvard based economics consulting firm, estimates a net loss of jobs from the bill of about 2.5 million each year.

This is surely a gross underestimate of the net job losses from a bill designed to reduce the use of fossil fuels to the level in 1907! All those soccer moms better get used to riding their horses to the grocery store and back. And their husbands better get used to working the farms again, by hand, as high cost energy will chase remaining American manufacturing out of the country to India and China, which do not suffer from Al Gore's delusions about supposed global warming.

Yet Barack Obama calls it a jobs bill. This reflects a by now well-established pattern of deceptive, misdirection rhetoric, raising broadly appealing ideals in promotion of policies that would do just the opposite. We already see this with Obama trying to sell us a new health care entitlement, larger than any of our already grossly overgrown entitlements we can't finance, with the argument that it will actually reduce costs, even while CBO estimates that it will increase Federal spending by $1.6 trillion (and I bet anything that amount is woefully underestimated).

Earlier this year, Obama released his budget with great fanfare about how it would supposedly reduce the federal deficit in half in five years. Hidden in the fine print was the awful truth that his budget, now passed by the overwhelmingly Democrat Congress, explodes this year's deficit to a record busting $1.8 trillion, four times bigger than Bush's largest deficit, and seven times bigger than Reagan's largest, which caused so much caterwauling among liberals in its day. The deficit in the last budget passed by a Republican controlled Congress was $162 billion, less than 10% as much.

Last year, Obama campaigned on proposals to raise the top two income tax rates by over 10%, the capital gains tax rate by 33%, and the tax rate on dividends by 33%, while restoring a permanent death tax rate of 45%, and raising taxes on corporations that already pay virtually the highest tax rates in the industrialized world, all the while focusing on his promise to cut taxes for 95% of Americans. That tax cut turned out to be a puny $400 per worker tax credit that is phased out after next year, when his tax increases will become effective to sink the still sputtering economy.

During the campaign, Obama also pledged that he would never raise taxes in any form on Americans making less than $250,000 per year. But his cap and trade tax is estimated to cost American families almost $2,000 a year when it becomes effective, growing to almost $7,000 a year for a family of four by 2035. That will be paid through higher prices for electricity, oil, gasoline, natural gas, home heating oil, coal, food, and every product that is produced or transported using energy. Remember: when the first President Bush violated his oft-repeated campaign pledge not to raise taxes, voters booted him out in the next election.

Democrats have suggested that the legislation would cost American families only $175 a year, or as little as $80. But fossil fuel use is not going to be reduced by 17%, growing to 83%, through added costs of $80 to $175 per year.

The rationale for this bill is to counter global warming by sharply reducing greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide. But even if the bill works exactly as envisioned, the most radical environmentalists admit that it will only slow temperature increases by 2050 by a ridiculous 9/100th of one degree Fahrenheit! Even after all the costs of reducing the use of fossil fuels by 83%, that is all that would result.

That is because all humans across the planet produce less than 5% of all carbon dioxide emissions. So slashing U.S. emissions won't have much effect in any event. Moreover, don't expect other nations to follow us in this foolhardy policy. Even the Europeans never really enforced their own cap and trade regulations, so their carbon dioxide emissions have actually increased more than ours over the last 10 years. Now nations from France to Poland, Japan, the Czech Republic, Australia, New Zealand and others are turning away from cap and trade policies, and souring on the whole notion of global warming. China, now the world's number one carbon dioxide producer, India, Russia, Africa, and South America have shown no interest in the suicidal economics of global warming fantasy. But the left-wing extremists now running America are too close-minded and religiously dogmatic to even consider an alternative course.

As the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) recently asked:
Does it really make sense to eliminate between 2.3 million and 2.7 million jobs each year, and force families, farmers, and drivers to pay higher power bills, higher heating and cooling bills, higher food and goods prices, and higher gasoline and diesel prices, all for the promise of slowing temperature increases by merely hundredths of a single degree Fahrenheit by 2050?
The Global Warming Hoax

Worst of all, the science behind global warming is now collapsing. The most reliable satellite weather data shows that global atmospheric temperatures have declined over the last 11 years, with the trend downward accelerating. Even global warming advocates are now conceding that this trend may continue for decades.

Moreover, the latest and best science shows that the temperature patterns of the 20th century correlate with natural causes, not global warming theory. Temperatures did not increase steadily throughout the last century, even though carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases did. Temperatures in the U.S., which has the most thorough and consistent temperature record and historically the most CO2 emissions, were stable until 1920, increased some in the 1920s, and then soared to produce the hottest decade of the century during the 1930s (before the later, more rapid increases in greenhouse gas emissions). The climate then cooled during most of the period from 1940 until about 1977. Temperatures climbed upward from 1977 until 1998, except for a sharp downturn from about 1988 until about 1995. Temperatures are down again over the past decade.

This record is more consistent with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a long-term pattern of ocean currents that turns from cold to warm back to cold every 20 to 30 years, and with variations in solar activity, particularly sunspots. Indeed, our current accelerating temperature decline correlates with an extended trend of slowing sunspot activity, which may portend another Little Ice Age, as happened from the early 1400s to the late 1800s.

Democrat political rhetoric labels carbon dioxide as pollution, arguing that the bill sharply reduces such pollution, and targets "polluters." But carbon dioxide is a natural substance essential to all life on the planet, not pollution. All plants must take in carbon dioxide to survive, and emit oxygen. Humans and all other animal life need that oxygen to survive, and breathe out carbon dioxide. Moreover, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were several times higher in the past than today, for hundreds of millions of years, with only beneficial effects in the flowering of plant and animal life recorded.

Despite what you have heard from the Democrat party controlled media, the polar ice caps are not melting. The melting of glaciers still going on due to the end of the last ice age, and, therefore, not due to global warming, has caused sea levels to rise by roughly 400 feet over the last 18,000 years! That rise has been decelerating over the past 5,000 years, settling into a stable rate of increase over the last century of about 1.8 mm per year, regardless of global temperature fluctuations. That would result in a sea level rise over the next 100 years of less than 9 inches.

Finally, the latest science shows that the theory of significant man-made global warming has now been definitively proved false. The UN's own climate models, the top source of global warming hysteria, project that if man's emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were causing global warming, there would be a particular pattern of temperature distribution in the atmosphere, which scientists call "the fingerprint." Temperatures in the troposphere portion of the atmosphere above the tropics would increase with altitude, producing a "hotspot" near the top of the troposphere, about 6 miles above the earth's surface. Above that, in the stratosphere, there would be cooling.

All scientists, both the alarmist warm-mongers and the pacifist cooler heads, agree that this temperature pattern would result if man were causing global warming, reflecting the pattern of CO2 and other greenhouse gases that would prevail in the atmosphere. Warming due to solar variations or other natural causes would not leave such a fingerprint pattern. Higher quality temperature data from weather balloons and satellites now enable us to settle the man-made global warming debate definitively.

The observed result is just the opposite of the modeled global warming fingerprint pattern. The data from weather balloons show no increasing warming with altitude, but rather a slight cooling, with no hotspot. The satellite data confirms this result: no increasing temperature with altitude, no hotspot, no fingerprint.

These arguments are now increasingly accepted by scientists all over the world. Those who argue there is a scientific consensus to the contrary are posturing fakers. As Kimberley Strassel wrote in the Wall Street Journal last Monday:
In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming….Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion."
Even a suppressed study from inside the EPA concludes, "Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data." Investors Business Daily reports in a June 26 editorial regarding that study:
What the report says is that the EPA, by adopting the United Nations 2007 "Fourth Assessment" report, is relying on outdated research by its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The research, it says, is "at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field" and ignores the latest scientific findings….
We have noted frequently the significance of solar activity on earth's climate and history. This EPA draft report not only confirms our reporting but the brazen incompetence of those "experts" that have been prophesying planetary apocalypse.
"A new 2009 paper by Scafetta and West," the report says, "suggests that the IPCC used faulty data in dismissing the direct effect of solar variability on global temperatures. Their report suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in the Earth's global temperatures."
One of the best sources for the true science of global warming is the operation of Dr. Fred Singer at SEPP. Singer is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, and the founder and first Director of the National Weather Satellite Service. Another top source is the Heartland Institute. There is no collection of scientists in the world smarter and better than those who speak at and attend their regular international conferences on climate change. Heartland has just published the definitive rebuttal to the theory of significant man-made global warming, the 880-page Climate Change Reconsidered.

Probably the most articulate and informed single advocate countering global warming hysteria is Marc Morano. The Competitive Enterprise Institute also does top drawer work on the fallacies of global warming.
Global warming has nothing to do with science. It is about cover for massive increases in government power and taxes at all levels, including UN dreams of becoming a world government with global taxing powers. This is the only reason it is so heartily embraced by liberal/left interests. These people don't know anything about science.