This review will not take long. Darling wife and I took our three young children and a neighbor kid from across the street to a movie followed by Five Guys for burgers.

We saw Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze’s tragically flawed adaptation of the Maurice Sendak classic. Perhaps you like watching depressing movies about relationship problems between people who refuse, idiotic, to change. Then you might like this movie. Perhaps you like watching a movie with the message that your friends are waiting until you slip up, at which time they will eat you up, cannibal-like. Then you might like this movie. Perhaps you like movies that speak the unselfconscious symbolic language of children while carrying a lesson that relationships cannot last, that marriage ends in divorce and mutual alienation, that only relationships between simpletons like Ira and Judith can last, and that on a more basic level relationships are just a bummer. Then you might like this movie. Or perhaps, like me, you recognize the seductive beauty of the movie, and hate it for the psychic poison it delivers to the defenseless minds of kids.

We will not be buying it on DVD.

Did I mention that while rushing to the bathroom to pee, our 4 year old Sugarlump vomited her popcorn all the way down the carpeted hallway behind the theater? And that after cleaning up and returning to our seats she curled up in her daddy’s lap and went to sleep? That made the rest of the movie more bearable.

We finished the evening at Five Guys with the best burgers and fries the kids ever ate. That’s what they said. Evening saved.

Other reviews: NYT, Tech Banyan, Entertainment Weekly, HuffPo, NRO

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Technorati Tags: Spike Jonze, Where the Wild Things Are, Movie Review

All hands alert!

I don’t have anything to add because this is so shattering there is nothing that can be added. If this extract scares you then you have to read the whole thing. And then we all shall have to do something.

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.

[laughter]

And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.

Read the treaty. Read the rest of Lord Moncton’s remarks. If this is signed and passed, it will be the greatest act of BETRAYAL that has ever been committed on the American people. We all must act, every one of us, doing whatever we can.

This must not stand!

Update: Lord Moncton’s powerpoint presentation and video are now available online.

Xposted from

Technorati Tags: Obama, Copenhagen, Climate Treaty, Environmentalism, Tyranny, Constitution

After the NFL has made a mockery of itself by obsequiously smacking its forehead against the ground on which DeMaurice Smith, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton walk, it is up to NFL fans to find out if it is possible for the NFL to be embarrassed any more. Remember, this is the league that welcomes people convicted of homicide, rape, burglary, wife-beating and dog-fighting back into the players’ ranks. Yet it is also the league that refuses to let a conservative radio personality and lover of the game of football become a minority owner of a team, using vile, racist quotes invented out of whole cloth to smear him.

The question begs to be asked. Can fans embarrass the hell out of the NFL? Not by throwing ice-balls at opposing teams; Not by booing lustily at little kids; Not by wearing nothing but body paint on their torsos in midwinter; But can fans embarrass the hell out of the NFL by making a spectacle of rejecting the new NFL determination to goose-step to the drumbeat of the race hustlers and slanderers of the progressive left?

Some have proposed cutting up team jerseys and sending the pieces to Roger Goodell’s office. Some have proposed canceling your NFL Sunday Ticket. Those are good, and they hit at the wallets of these hypocritical leftist slimeballs, but they are not embarrassing enough. Embarrassing an organization as big and wealthy as the NFL with all its television time and bootlicking local sports reporters requires strategic planning.

Don’t just cut up your stuff. Don’t just cancel. Make a spectacle of it!

How to Make a Spectacle

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At the top of the news are a few Nobel Blogs about the very deserving winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics

• Michael Spence gives an overview
• Peter G. Klein on Oliver Williamson
• Paul Romar on Elinor Ostrom
• Peter Boettke on Lin Ostrom

Barack Obama is George Soros’s marionette?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/what_soros_wanted_obama_delive.html

Liberal warnings of TEA party violence are pure psychological projection. Bitten off any fingers lately?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/liberals_violence_warning_come.html

The Nobel Peace Prize sucks. The world need a Reagan Peace Prize.
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/13/the-reagan-prize

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1. The biggest news of the day is the slow melt of the glaciers of journalistic support for the pseudo science of anthropogenic global warmening. Today Drudge has the following links above the fold
   • BBC: What happened to global warming?
   • US CHILL MAP…
   • Montana cold breaks records…
   • Record Cold temps in Idaho threaten potato crops…
   • Austria: Earliest snowfall in history set to break records…
   • Man has microphone cut off after asking about ‘errors’ in Gore film…
   • Video…
   • Soros says aims to invest $1 Billion in green tech…
   • Greenpeace activists clamber on to Houses of Parliament in climate change protest…
   • Energy crisis postponed, new gas rescues the world…
2. Obama didn’t win the 2009 Nobel in Economics. In a shock development felt worldwide, some economists won it instead (NYT)
3. Argentina’s media clampdown continues
4. Time Magazine thinks we should blog about Education!
   • Successful Schools Avoid False ChoicesEducation Week News (subscription)
   • Education Secretary Criticizes Education CollegesInside Higher Ed
   • Community must be involved with education in HarrisburgThe Patriot-News - PennLive.com
   • Hartford Courant -Examiner.com -Torrington Register Citizen
5. Insurance Industry projects $4000 per year per family in added costs for health insurance. White House throws tantrum. Memeorandum links. White House promises to hold breath until it turns blue. (That last sentence was wishful thinking)
6. Top on memeorandum: White House bites the hand that feeds it. Calls gay activists the “Internet left fringe.”
   • BREAKING FROM NBC: White House official calls gays part of “Internet left fringe” —  UPDATE FROM PAM: … And let me just add that if we’re all insignificant children who don’t understand politics, and who the White House doesn’t worry about, then why did a White House official feel the need …

     <!– cts(’http://www.americablog.com/2009/10/breaking-from-nbc-white-house-official.html’); –>

     Link Search: Technorati, Google, IceRocket, and Ask
     Discussion: Washington Monthly, Politics Daily, The Hill, Another Black Conservative, Left Coast Rebel, La Shawn Barber’s Corner, Ruby Slippers, American Power, Mock, Paper, Scissors, Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion, Stop The ACLU, RedState, The Stranger …, Breitbart.tv, Gates of Vienna, The Other McCain, Pundit & Pundette, Osborne Ink, Confederate Yankee, Raw Story, RADAMISTO, Time and Times of London
7. Democrats set to ratchet up personal attacks, dirty tricks in 2010.
8. Obama’s Safe Schools Czar wrote that killing someone for calling you names was “not aberrant behavior”
9. Obama White House has already planned to put severe restrictions on “sport fishing.” That means you going fishing with your kid in fresh or salt water.
10. Lindsey Graham backs “cap and trade making electricity too expensive for ordinary people to afford it” bill

Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard is not really a book. It is an article from the “Philistine” magazine of March 1899 that became immensely popular and was reprinted as a pamphlet in Russian, German, French, Spanish, Turkish, Hindi, Mandarin and Japanese, perhaps more. It is freely available on the Internet. Briefly, it is about two things:

1. Excellence;
2. One person can change the world.

There are those who do things excellently, as opposed to those who only partly do a thing if they bother to do it at all. The excellent can make huge changes. Those who do not seize excellence can barely do their job. The common wage-earning man of 1899 was useless when given any task requiring judgement and initiative.

make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio”.

Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task?

On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions:

Who was he?

Which encyclopedia?

Where is the encyclopedia?

Was I hired for that?

Don’t you mean Bismarck?

What’s the matter with Charlie doing it?

Is he dead?

Is there any hurry?

Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself?

What do you want to know for?

Such a man is a waste of a position, and might as well be let go. He will never be a great success unless he changes something in himself. Such a man must transform himself to be more like Col. Rowan, who was asked by Pres. McKinley to carry a message to Col. Garcia, the leader of the Cuban rebels against Spain. Rowan had lived in Cuba and written a book about the island. Rowan traveled by himself in small boats to Cuba, then hiked by himself across an island occupied by the hostile Spanish, through jungle and over mountain to Garcia’s jungle encampment, where he made contact, delivered his message, developed a rapport, then left the island and returned with a command of American soldiers to assist Garcia in his successful rebellion.

Cuba was able to throw off the Spanish yoke because Rowan reached Garcia and delivered McKinley’s message. Without Rowan’s excellence in every task he had to complete in order to carry that message it would not have happened.

How relevant is this pamphlet?

Though nobody knows the story of Rowan and Garcia, the problem still exists. The article is more than a simple historical curiosity. There are still plenty of workers like the man who only works when he is being supervised, only does what he is told, fobs off his responsibilities on others, argues against every new assignment, complains, and makes excuses for his failures when he bothers to do his job at all. Unions and HR Departments exist to protect such people and keep them employed.

One man can change the world. He doesn’t have to be extraordinary, but he has to embrace excellence. We need to remember this in these days when the progressive march to eliminate individual freedom in these United States has been advancing, almost without interruption for 110 years.

Take heart, stay optimistic, and think strategically. We have nothing to fear but panic, nothing to lose but mediocrity, and our country’s freedom to win again.

Xposted from

Technorati Tags: Message to Garcia, Conservatism, Book Notes

The Guardian recently analyzed David Cameron’s speech to the British Conservative Party Conference for the popularity of his applause lines. I’ve extracted in popularity order all the lines that got more than 15 seconds of applause, while excluding the introduction. The interesting thing to me is that all the most popular lines are based specifically on conservative principles.

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1. Heading up the news today, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for what again? AP analyzes something for once.
   http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091009/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_nobel_analysis_1
2. How about Obama’s war record?
   http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/10/09/exit-stage-left-exeunt-stage-right/
3. “Classy” White House calls Joe Scarborough an A—hole for laughing at President Pantywaist’s Nobel Peace Prize
   http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2009/10/09/white-house-scarborough-e-mocking-nobel-scarborough-rushs-manhood-
4. Tom Coburn proposes to dump Political Science research funding since it’s pure Marxist propaganda. I can live with that. Marxists not so much.
   http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/08/coburn-political-science/
5. Safe Schools Czar wrote forward to the compleat idiot’s guide to pedophilia. I fixed the book title to clarify it.
   http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/10/report-obamas-safe-schools-czar-kevin.html
6. Too late to watch, an actual documentary actually airing on PBS actually praised capitalism which actually lifts poor from poverty, & actually defeats tyranny. Huh.
   http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-philbin/2009/10/08/documentary-airing-tonight-shows-unfettered-capitalism-lifts-poor-d
7. Youtube seminar on basic online video production/shooting the video
   http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/10/webinar-on-basic-shooting-techniques.html
8. White House advisor on Muslim affairs says Sharia law not such a bad idea
   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/6274387/Obama-adviser-says-Sharia-Law-is-misunderstood.html
9. Al Qaeda Video on how to Make a Butt Bomb
   http://www.thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?p=76966#76966
10. Cass Sunstein defends communism, says America too racist for socialism and its universal racism
    http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/10/obamas-regulatory-czar-defends.html
11. Karl Marx, the end of the world, and communist eschatology
    http://mises.org/story/3769
12. Kevin Jennings vs. Mark Foley: Battle of the Pederasts
    http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/09/democrats-called-foley-guilty
13. Another case of actual vote fraud, this time from a transvestite prostitute and con-man who ACORN got to vote fraudulently
    http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/08/the-nine-voting-lives-of-darne
14. NASA bombs the moon. Take that, moon monsters!
    http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/091009-lcross-impact-wrap.html
15. Global Taxation without Representation: G20 Discusses Taxing the Whole World
    http://www.qando.net/?p=5157
16. White House finally admits its obvious, unreasoning, deranged hatred for Fox News
    http://newsrealblog.com/2009/10/09/white-house-finally-admits-hatred-for-fox-news/

Cross-posted from Beaglescout.

Quin Hillyer seems to think so, and so writes in the American Spectator.

The Pentagon is playing dirty pool on behalf of the already-dirtiest pool players from Boeing, with regard to the huge (179-plane, about $40 billion) air refueling tanker contract that Northrop Grumman Corp. and EADS won fair and square last year before it was stolen away from them.

As a reminder: The swiping occurred after Boeing launched an unprecedented and underhanded political-hardball campaign after Northrop won the contract with a bigger, more versatile, more efficient plane. Boeing’s bid also was some $3 billion more expensive (or $42 million more expensive per plane) than Northrop’s for just the first 64 planes. And Northrop’s offering would support, it believably claims, some 48,000 American jobs at 230 supplier companies in 49 states, compared to 44,000 new jobs that Boeing claimed it would create. The Northrop plane also could start coming off the production lines sooner than Boeing’s, by all accounts.

Yet after Boeing strong-armed politicians and the Pentagon, the Seattle- and Chicago-based company filed a formal protest, alleging more than 100 irregularities in what already had been the most open, public, analyzed contract award in Pentagon history. (The award actually itself was a re-do; at first the Air Force was to lease planes from Boeing, but Sen. John McCain led an investigation which found such serious shenanigans that several Boeing executives and Air Force personnel were convicted in a sort of kickback scheme.

The rebid was a pure partisan decision that favored Democrat Washington state over Republican Alabama and Mississippi, still recovering from Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina. And with the newly issued rules preventing the Northrop bid from being evaluated for its greater capability while giving Northrop’s pricing data to Boeing without reciprocating to Northrop with Boeing’s pricing data, it is clear that the bid is as dirty and unfair as the Air Force can make it. Will people go to jail again over Boeing’s shenanigans? Maybe, maybe not. Democrats seem to get away scot free with these things. Should they? I’m leaning to yes.

And yes, I still work for Northrop Grumman, though not for the tanker effort. I work in the same region that would supply the workers for this project, so no doubt some of my neighbors would work there. I’m blogging this on my own time. And yes, I’m bitter. I see another decision that was made on the basis of facts overturned because of dirty Democrat party politics. And it makes me sick for my country.

Xposted from

Technorati Tags: Tanker, Boeing, EADS, Northrop-Grumman, KC-45, Corruption

Imagine you are a climate researcher who has been assembling the data that is used to support claims of global warming. Or imagine you are Phil Jones from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. Or imagine you are a scientific fraud. Did I write “or”? I meant “and.”

Before we get into the sleazy details let’s talk about science.

The scientific method that has produced such incredible progress over the last five hundred years depends on peer review, rigorously reproducible experiments, and transparent access to the original data as well as all operations performed on it. Factor analysis, time series analysis and other techniques lead to theories about cause and effect. Empirical data from experimental results indicates numerical relationships. Results are tested and vetted by many methods, including statistical analysis of the data for measurement bias. The result is that scientific theories are never proved. Two things can happen to them.

• Theories can be accepted as good enough for a while; until
• They get disproved.

In science, breakthroughs are made by disproving old theories that were good enough for a long time, and replacing them with new or refined theories.

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At bottom a corporation is simply a legal fiction that allows a business or other concern to be treated as if it were a person. Since it is a fictional person, the taxman treats it like a real person when it comes time to pay taxes, and charges it a tax rate similar to the rate charged real people.

Is this a good idea?

Corporations are employers, buyers of raw goods, producers of finished goods, convenient holding companies for capital goods, and when times are good also sources of returns for investors. If the cost of raw goods plus the cost of production and sales is less than the sales price then the corporation makes a gross profit. Out of this gross profit come the wages of the workers and managers, further capital investments to improve the productivity of workers, and returns for investors. What happens when government reaches into a corporation and takes out a tax? Specifically, who actually pays corporate taxes with his or her reduced take-home pay?

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The Lament Configuration is a portal to Hell from the Hellraiser movies

Every once in a while we need to remind ourselves that progressive neo-Jacobins, syndicalists, anarchists, revolutionaries, communists and fascists have stolen the name “liberal” and invented the fabulist lie “progressive” for what they do. Nobody likes their real names. Storybook demons don’t like being summoned by their true names either. That is because using their true, or correct, name gives you power over them. For one thing, it does not allow you to be fooled by their deceptions. They, the neo-Jacobins, syndicalists, anarchists, revolutionaries, communists, socialists, progressives, and fascists believe that the state should take goods from one group and give goods to the other group. Yes, that is like a tribal society with eternal warfare between groups. They mistake the fact that some people have more money than others for a class structure, ignoring the truth that those who start poor and work hard end up rich. That is not a classist society. That is an economically and socially mobile society that rewards merit and effort. They are no more liberals than American conservatives are the same as traditional European Conservatives (monarchists who do not believe in free markets and transformational scientific innovation). American conservatives are the original liberals who believe in life, liberty and property, and all the other requirements for individual empowerment and the starvation of overweening state power. Neo-Jacobins et al believe in that overweening state power that crushes people underneath its hobnailed jackboots.

Hellraiser was just a movie. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was a bad one. But “Hell” names a place that Lucifer created for himself, where he lives consumed with envy and self-pity. And Hell on Earth is a fair description of what Lucifer’s most faithful recent disciple would have his followers create.

Saul Alinsky claimed to be a champion of the dispossessed against those who oppressed them. But he dedicated his masterwork to Lucifer, who created a Hell to live within. And so with everything that Alinsky and his disciples, such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, want to create in the world. They all want to create a Hell on Earth in which they and their Progressive buddies could lord it over the Have Nots while killing off the old Haves. They are at war with everything good, right, and true. And they want to replace everything good with their coercive state that will scourge us of our humanity and make us into perfect, communist robots. David Horowitz has written a number of posts on the neo-Jacobins and their ilk that covered much of what he said last week when he appeared on the Glenn Beck show.

Here they are:

• Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me: Part I
• Hell on Earth: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part II
• Boring From Within: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part III
• To Have And Have Not: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part IV
• Post-modern leftism: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part V
• Means and Ends One: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI
• Means and Ends Two: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI Continued
• The Nazi Option: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI (continued 2)

America opened the Lament Configuration last November 4. Now we are in for it. Go and read Horowitz’s warning.

h/t: derhoosier

Technorati Tags: David Horowitz, Alinsky, Socialism, Communism, Revolution, Destruction, Lies, Lucifer

K. Gonzalez, the student of unknown (by me) gender who worked so hard to get into Berkeley, to pay for one semester, and wrote this about the experience, sounds like a wonderful person, with one exception: The part that breaks immigration law. But the editorial drone who wrote the headline needs to be slapped silly.

A College Dream Ends Too Soon
I worked hard to get into Berkeley and I worked even harder when I got there. But when my funds ran out, I had to leave.

That headline says one thing: This undocumented alien is a victim. But this excerpt from the article says something completely different: This undocumented alien is a very hard worker and is incapable of acting like a victim.

I found a tiny room near the campus, enrolled in classes, and landed a job selling jewelry in a San Francisco mall. From Friday through Monday, I worked full-time, waking up at 6:30 a.m. to get to work by 9. I couldn’t spend the weekends like other students, lazing in the sun or exploring neighborhoods. Still, for two glorious days each week, Tuesday and Thursday, I had classes from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and was taught by some amazing professors. I would run from one class to the next, using my breaks to stop by the library. I slept odd hours, many days finishing homework at the crack of dawn.

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The calls for fixing America’s “broken healthcare system” are misleading. America does not have a monolithic government monopoly for healthcare like the ones many socialist countries have that are so popular to those conducting UN funded studies. America has a healthcare market with a substantial part of the market controlled by several government monopoly healthcare systems including Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, S-CHIP, the VA, and various union and governmental pension and healthcare insurance plans. In addition, healthcare insurance market is distorted by massive government regulation, at both the Federal and State level, that prevents most individuals from being able to afford to purchase individual healthcare insurance, or even get insurance that covers exactly what they want it to cover. Medical lawsuit abuse and government regulation drives every bit of the increase in healthcare costs. The Democrats do not plan to fix the healthcare “system,” because they do not restrict their plan to the portion of the market that is already the governmental system. They plan to highjack the healthcare market completely, replacing the market with a monolithic government monopoly over 10-15-20 years.

This highjack of the healthcare market must be stopped. We will have to do it without much help.

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Rest in Peace Barbara Wagner. She has died in the year since this was news, but Barbara Wagner’s story was discussed some in late Summer 2008. Not much discussion went on, since there were no healthcare hijack bills on the floor of the House and Senate. But now the White House is discounting claims that the government would pay for suicide pills for sick people before it would pay for life extending treatment.

And yet it has already happened!

A recap of the story.

• Barbara Wagner, age 64, was a lung cancer survivor whose case was in remission.
• She was a low-income divorcee on the Oregon Health Plan, which is a low income Oregon State government healthcare plan.
• Then the cancer came back.
• Her last hope was a $4K a month drug (Tarceva by Genentech) prescribed by her doctor.
• Oregon Health Plan wouldn’t cover it. Medicare doesn’t either.
• But after being denied by OHP, she got a letter in the mail informing her that she was eligible to receive a suicide cocktail on the state’s dime.

So did she get the cancer treatment before she died? Yes. Genentech, the fabled big pharma company, was more sympathetic than the government and gave her Tarceva free of charge. Tell those who claim the government is kinder than free market companies that they are dead wrong.

Video after the fold.

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Obamonsters Inc.© has been flooding the zone with pure insanity about the health scare plan, much of it actually in the bills. Not only are the bills filled with billions, perhaps trillions, in giveaways to ACORN, Americorps, the SEIU, and foreign tourists, they have abortion and euthanasia mandates that would, in turn, close Catholic hospitals and deny curative care to sick old folks while paying doctors to kill them. There are lies galore about the contents of the bills from the flapping gums at the White House. The whole Cloward-Piven mess of lies is confusing because the Dems want it to be. Where is a poor conservative seeker of truth to go in this world of lies and confusion constantly being spit out from the government, newspapers, television news and all those who have long claimed the mantle of truth-telling only to betray the trust we gave them? If you go look at the census data, you will see that those earning above the average income are more likely to be uninsured than those below. People with more money are more likely to have no insurance than those with less. This is clearly not a problem with affordability, but with making a big deal out of nothing. It’s the Chicken Little syndrome.

So since Obamascare is so senseless, we need all the help we can get to make sense of it. Thus the round-up. I’ll put out my links. Readers add their links. I will keep up the updates with your updates for a while. Comment up a storm to make it better.

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The Debate on Health Care is over. At least that is what the hard-left Democrats and their lackeys and lickspittles in the Pravda Media tell us. This was a surprise to me, since I never saw the debate, heard it, or read it. I have a television. I watch the news. I am on the Internet. Man, am I ever on the Internet! No debate there! When was it? Where was the debate? Who debated on each side of the debate? Why am I thinking that I’ve been hoodwinked, flim-flammed, bamboozled, and given the old okey-doke with a wink and a sly, ravenous grin?

Foxy Loxy said “Hello Girls, don’t you look like a dainty dish today!”

This panicked rush to legislate a thousand-page, Obamacare “fix” for medical care that will get re-jiggered in reconciliation (that means the smokey back room where Congressional hacks hide their nasty surprises in the bills with even less transparency than usual) gives me the feeling that I’m caught in the cautionary tale Chicken Little.

The skinny pipsqueak Chicken Little screamed “the sky is falling!” with such convincing, bloodcurdling fright she infected all the other farm animals with panic. They fled the farm for the woods and met the smooth-talking Foxy Loxy, who led them all into his lair to be out of the open. “Never mind the bones and the smell of death in the corner, girls,” Foxy Loxy whispers. “The sky can’t fall on you in here.” Well, we all know what happened to Lucy Goosey, Henny Penny and Lucky Ducky. They ended up as Foxy Loxy’s lunch. Chicken Little escaped though.

Chicken Little is not a story to emulate. It is not one I intend to relive, if that is even the right word, with my wife and children. Perhaps “repeat,” as in “those who forget history are condemend to repeat it,” is the right word. I intend to scream “NO” from the rooftops at the Chicken Littles. Let their imaginary sky-chunks fall on my head. I know I’m safer under the sky than in Foxy Loxy’s lair, or in Congress’ hidden lair where they reconcile the Obamacare bill into its final, nightmarish form.

To the proponents of Obamacare I plead, if you want to live out a Kafka story in your doctor’s office, please, just move to Canada and have at it. Leave my doctor’s office alone!

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Newspaper Press

The Code of Ethics of The Society of Professional Journalists is a flawed document because it holds journalists to inhuman and contradictory standards. No intelligent journalist with an ounce of empathy who learns about the facts of a situation can ever be non-biased and free of attachments to people in the community in the way that the code demands. Can a journalist who receives hard information about the identity of a murderer truly claim to hold no opinion about the murderer’s guilt? Can a journalist who watches corruption take place at a city council meeting fail to draw inferences and conclusions about the corrupt official’s other official actions? Any posture claiming non-bias and non-attachment requires either an extraordinary lack of curiosity, memory, and empathy or wholesale concealment of facts.

Strong claims, indeed. Read on if you wonder whether they can be defended. Before we start, please familiarize yourself with the Code.

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Happy American Independence Day! While you’re manning the grill, playing backyard football, devouring delicious beef and pork products, and watching big explosions in the sky, think about the spark that lit the flame in 1775 and 1776.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord Hymn)

The shot heard round the world has its echoes today in the TEA PARTY movement, state sovereignty and nullification movements, and even the push for federalism amendments. Likewise the long list of abuses by the British crown against the American Colonies has its echoes in the Democrats’ refusal to read thousand page bills before they are passed, or to allow Republicans to read and debate the bills if they won’t, in Obama’s proliferation of unconstitutional “czar” positions and executive branch organizations without significant legislative oversight, in Obama’s intention to put an organization packed full of people who were convicted of vote fraud in charge of the 2010 Census, in the Democrats’ refusal to protect the country’s borders, in their intentions to nullify the rights to own and manage one’s own property and protect one’s self by force of arms, and in their intention to use the courts to enforce racialist policies under the misleading name of Equal Opportunity. The Democrats are too extreme, too far left, for America. Their bailouts, non-stimulus-stimulus, seizures and nationalizations of key industries, regulatory overreach, and subversion of the press’ role as a watchdog of government are destroying our economy and blinding us to the injury.

Will there be another shot? I am not calling for gunplay, but for a symbolic beginning to the political battle. Will more grassroots TEA Parties do it? Or will it take some great suffering, such as the scourging Sarah Palin has been subjected to since September 2008, to awaken America to the injustice of the Democrats’ plans?

Technorati Tags: 1776, July 4, Independence Day, Appreciation, Culture War, Patriotism

Don’t be hoodwinked, don’t be bamboozled, don’t fall for the okey-doke…

If any among my dear readers have ever flicked on a light switch at midnight in a kitchen infested by roaches, they will have seen the stomach-turning sight of a room in sudden, swarming motion as hundreds of roaches scuttle for the cracks at the edges of the room. Roaches don’t like the light. They prefer to operate in the dark. The way to cure a roach infestation is to keep the light on and clean the house, throwing out nesting materials (even behind walls) and poisoning the roaches where they hide. Unfortunately, all too many people, in the face of an infested kitchen, simply shudder, turn off the light, and go back to bed. A particularly determined denier of roach-reality might prefer to paint over the light fixtures with black paint. That would hide the roaches from sight for good.

Apparently, under the Obama administration, the Department of Labor doesn’t mind roaches so much as it curses the light that reveals them and tells us, the Americans who live in the house, to go back to sleep. For instead of fostering transparency, one of Obama’s key words when running for president, the Dept. of Labor fosters opacity when it comes to what unions are doing with the money they hold on behalf of their members, just like the AFL-CIO wants.

The Indiana State Teachers Association’s Insurance Trust exists to pay benefits for disabled teachers. It has $19 million in assets against $86 million in liabilities, is the subject of a FBI investigation, and is being taken over by the NEA.

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