don't fill me up with your rules, old man

paraphrasing one comment here:

"The 60s radicals are now "the man," and the Tea Partiers are now the civil rights activists."

reverse the curse

A common complaint made by atheists (particularly the militant kind) is:

"How can there be a god if there is so much evil in the world?"

I wonder if any of them have ever asked themselves (or anyone):

"How can there be no god if there is so much truth and beauty in the world?"

2011 Mustang GT

I only see two problems with it:

1) They still haven't fixed the crooked lines over the headlights and under the taillights.

2) The number on the badge should be "302" not "5.0"

blowing the curve for everyone

one of the few times i can recommend cbs news site, check out president hussein's low grades.

dances with wolves - in space!

i can't wait for the sequel :D

Health Care Deformed 2

Ten updates was enough for the previous post about the big 0's healthcare scam. Here's more:

Phil Gramm:

Any real debate about health-care reform has to be centered on solving the problem of cost. Ultimately, there are only two ways of doing it. The first approach is to have government control costs through some form of rationing. The alternative is to empower families to make their own health-care decisions in a system where costs matter. The fundamental question is about who is going to do the controlling: the family or the government.

President Obama and his congressional allies systematically excluded every major proposal to empower consumers to control costs. From beginning to end, they insisted on a government-run system. That's why compromise was never possible.

NRO:

"It’s a sad day when the President of the United States uses taxpayer dollars to travel around the country ridiculing and provoking those taxpayers with whom he disagrees."

Director Blue lets Chavez Del Norte and his victims speak for themselves.

racism has jumped the shark

...and it wasn't even a great white ;)

Health Care Deformed

(10 updates below)

The anti-intellectual liberals at my workplace are congratulating themselves today as to how much more compassionate they are than "those bigoted and mean-spirited conservatives". I would like to ask them "how can ruining everyone's health can be considered compassionate?" (...but i'd much rather remain employed)

update 1: in response to one particular person's wait-and-see attitude, i'll point out that the legal resistance has already begun.

update 2: some related quotes via dustbury:

Our political class and bureaucracy are a bunch of bumblers, time servers who are squatting on the neck of society. Their cost far exceeds their benefit. It is perfectly rational — not extreme — to demand relief from their predations. They simply aren’t very good at what they do and need to be downsized like any other enterprise that has lost its focus and no longer produces value... Political leaders have no idea what they are doing. They need to listen rather than preach so that they can become marginally less incompetent... It isn’t that there is some magic formula, some set of politicians and policies that can make huge, centralized authoritarian societies work well. They can’t work well. It’s a silly idea that arises from muddled thinking that glosses over the particularities of systems. It [is] a juvenile notion that belongs in a jar kept by the door where you place your cherished illusions when leaving your cloister to engage with the reality of the world at large.

update 3: imao is optimistic:

There’s no use in conservatives getting too down in any political defeat, because we’ll always still be our awesome selves, and liberals will still be losers who smell weird... We’re conservatives; we have useful things to do.

update 4: double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble.

update 5: telling us all what some of us already knew - "it's all about control".

update 6: if the program is so great, why did obama, pelosi, et.al. exempt themselves from it?

update 7: truth in numbers and pictures.

update 8: the best summary yet:

We've passed a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that exempts themselves from it, to be signed by a president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that's broke. What could possibly go wrong?".

update 9: How do the democrats plan to enforce their takeover of America? ACORN brownshirts.

update 10: explanation of how this is bad numbers and bad law

coincidence? 2

up against cspan's healthscam vote coverage, tonight's tv schedule includes:

madhouse
mad men
mafioso
monster
kill bill
tool academy


the titles (if not the actual shows) seem fitting...

yes. please. now.

Impeach Obama:

"(The Slaughter Solution - the scheme to avoid actually voting on president hussein's healthcare takeover) would be an unprecedented violation of our democratic norms and procedures, established since the inception of the republic. Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution stipulates that for any bill to become a law, it must pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate. That is, not be "deemed" to have passed, but actually be voted on with the support of the required majority. The bill must contain the exact same language in both chambers - and in the version signed by the president - to be a legitimate law. This is why the House and Senate have a conference committee to iron out differences of competing versions. This is Civics 101.

The Slaughter Solution is a dagger aimed at the heart of our system of checks and balances. It would enable the Democrats to establish an ominous precedent: The lawmaking process can be rigged to ensure the passage of any legislation without democratic accountability or even a congressional majority. It is the road to a soft tyranny. James Madison must be turning in his grave.

Mr. Obama is imposing a leftist revolution. Since coming to office, he has behaved without any constitutional restraints. The power of the federal government has exploded. He has de facto nationalized key sectors of American life - the big banks, financial institutions, the automakers, large tracts of energy-rich land from Montana to New Mexico. His cap-and-trade proposal, along with a newly empowered Environmental Protection Agency, seeks to impose massive new taxes and regulations upon industry. It is a form of green socialism: Much of the economy would fall under a command-and-control bureaucratic corporatist state. Mr. Obama even wants the government to take over student loans.

Yet his primary goal has always been to gobble up the health care system. The most troubling aspect of the Obamacare debate, however, is not the measure's sweeping and radical aims - the transformation of one-sixth of the U.S. economy, crippling tax increases, higher premiums, state-sanctioned rationing, longer waiting lines, the erosion of the quality of medical care and the creation of a huge, permanent administrative bureaucracy. Rather, the most alarming aspect is the lengths to which the Democrats are willing to go to achieve their progressive, anti-capitalist agenda.

Obamacare is opposed by nearly two-thirds of the public, more than 60 percent of independents and almost all Republicans and conservatives. It has badly fractured the country, dangerously polarizing it along ideological and racial lines. Even a majority of Democrats in the House are deeply reluctant to support it.

Numerous states - from Idaho to Virginia to Texas - have said they will sue the federal government should Obamacare become law. They will declare themselves exempt from its provisions, tying up the legislation in the courts for years to come.

Mr. Obama is willing to devour his presidency, his party's congressional majority and - most disturbing - our democratic institutional safeguards to enact it. He is a reckless ideologue who is willing to sacrifice the country's stability in pursuit of a socialist utopia."

Democrats... would guarantee that any bill signed by Mr. Obama is illegitimate, illegal and blatantly unconstitutional. It would be worse than a strategic blunder; it would be a crime - a moral crime against the American people and a direct abrogation of the Constitution and our very democracy.

It would open Mr. Obama, as well as key congressional leaders such as Mrs. Pelosi, to impeachment. The Slaughter Solution would replace the rule of law with arbitrary one-party rule. It violates the entire basis of our constitutional government - meeting the threshold of "high crimes and misdemeanors." If it's enacted, Republicans should campaign for the November elections not only on repealing Obamacare, but on removing Mr. Obama and his gang of leftist thugs from office.

"The 50 Worst Things Ever to Happen to Music"

The list is "debatable and crude, but funny."

"stop making sense"

when i first saw "stop making sense", the talking heads' famous concert movie years ago, little did i know that so many people would make its title their personal philosophy...

(this thought was inspired by several recent "debates" with people whose logical skills are not yet as advanced as chomskybots.)

The hopes, they is a-changing

History will note that, after numerous setbacks, the American Dream died during the Obama administration. Now all we have to wonder is how and when the light of freedom will shine again. (I'm hoping for November of this year or sooner, or winter of 2012 at the latest...)

okgo

cool video

update & bump: cool conclusion

random thought

i'm old enough to remember way back when "jedi" was just two words out of a beverly hillbillies episode

;)

breaking up

...should be easy to do

power

Peter Hitchens via Viewpoint:

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of power worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.

read the rest of both

un(?)intended results

dustbury, edited:

"Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not."

... "Why not?"

It never occurred to (utopian progressives) then — and it doesn't occur to them now — that there might be good and sensible reasons why not. In the summer of 1968 we were not quite four years into the War on Poverty, and no one except for those evil, wicked conservatives ever wondered if it was ever going to end; poverty was already on the decline after Lyndon Johnson made his pitch and Congress followed through, and the level of poverty hasn't changed very much in the decades since. (Did someone say "quagmire"?)

If you think about it, just about every single ostensibly-"progressive" idea pitched in the last forty years has been motivated largely by "Why not?" It's not a function of partisan politics per se: pie-in-the-sky notions have risen from both sides of the aisle on a regular basis, and there's no reason to think the practice is in decline. And once in a while, something actually works: (our cities have cleaner air, for instance...) But generally speaking, the more utopian a proposal... the more likely it is to generate something downright dystopian.

don't mess with Texas

"...contrast Texas, the nation's second most populous state, with the most populous, California. Both were once Mexican territory, secured for the United States in the 1840s. Both have grown prodigiously over the past half-century. Both have populations that today are about one-third Hispanic.

But they differ vividly in public policy and in their economic progress -- or lack of it -- over the last decade."

read the rest

update: a related comparison chart

truth is...

a zombie in pajamas says:

"Leftism fails as a coherent philosophy on its own terms. We shouldn’t try to wring significance from the delusional outburst of someone who just happened to be leftist. There are plenty of ways to logically disembowel Marxism and its numerous noxious contemporary offspring without having to resort to an unnecessary round of political “gotcha!”"

read the rest

if you care about your health...

Here's what Parker Griffith says about President Hussein's "frantic, late-stage push on health care":

"We can, and we must, stop this government takeover of health care,"

"For (democrats), health care reform has become less about the best reforms and more about what best fits their 'Washington knows best' mentality — less about helping patients and more about scoring political points.. This is no idle observation. I've witnessed it firsthand."

multiverse

i've long thought about the multiverse and related concepts. viewpoint does so more clearly, and comes to a surprisingly grand conclusion.

rooting for the dark side

this time they offer more than just cookies...

Unconstitutionality

Researching two current issues - the Census' unconstitutional questions and Chicago's unconstitutional gun laws - I found one quote in particular that applies wonderfully to both:

"States may have grown accustomed to violating the rights of American citizens, but that does not bootstrap those violations into something that is constitutional."

This also applies to ongoing Ponzi schemes...

saudi influence

looks like the house of saud (rhymes with fraud) is running quite an "anti-zionist conspiracy".

spam trap

to whoever commented on my old optimus keyboard post: if your seemingly irrelevant comment about raising rabbits was legitimate, i apologize for deleting it, but it looked like a spam test to me. feel free to explain in comments here (in a turing-test-passing way) if that was a mistake.

it's not just restaurants

Restaurant News Magazine explains why the industry is shrinking despite a growing population.

The increase of government legislation targeting the foodservice industry, on the federal, state and local levels, is one of the largest challenges restaurateurs face...

...the intrusion of government through such proposed legislative measures as menu labeling, card check and health care reform, would have the most profound effect on the industry’s future cost of doing business.

“Government, that’s the greatest single threat we have,” Luther said Monday during a panel discussion at the New York State Restaurant Association’s trade show...

down please

...and take your crooked gang with you.

obama takes charge, demands "up or down vote" on health care.

substance

I don't know who Snooki is, but Broun makes sense:

Washington, Mar 2 -

U.S. Representative Paul Broun, M.D. (GA-10) released the following statement after President Barack Obama announced his intentions to incorporate only four minor Republican ideas into the 2,000-plus page health care bill:

“I don’t know if we should be insulted or humored at the President’s feeble attempts to incorporate Republican ideas into his latest health care proposal. Snooki, from the Jersey Shore, has more substance than President Obama’s offer.

“Instead of listening to the American people, the President has once again demonstrated his arrogance and ignorance about what the nation expects from its leaders. This is “The Situation,” Mr. President: the American people do not want unconstitutional mandates and job-killing tax increases. They are concerned with the costs of premiums, the quality of their health care and ensuring their children and grandchildren are not left with the bill. If you want to govern with the consent of the governed, you need to scrap this government take-over plan and embrace more of our commonsense solutions that protect the vital patient/doctor relationship and decrease the costs of premiums without adding to the national debt.”

coincidence?