Month: July 2009

Sean Kinsell has a cute post (titled “SLOW: stimulus area ahead”) about something he considers a relatively minor annoyance, the spending of millions of dollars in highway funds for “economic recovery” signs: The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is spending $60,000 of its stimulus money on $2,000 road signs to highlight projects funded by the massive…

Pat Buchanan is largely right in his latest piece, “Socialist America Sinking.” Especially this: Taxes drove the American Revolution, for we were a taxaphobic, liberty-loving people. That government is best that governs least is an Americanism. When “Silent Cal” Coolidge went home in 1929, the U.S. government was spending 3 percent of gross domestic product.…

I don’t usually blog about vehicular accidents, but there’s something I found strangely disconcerting about the details of a fiery tanker crash which happened on a major Detroit area overpass on Wednesday. The driver of the car — an unapologetic 27 year old who got his driver’s license (from the Secretary of State) in May…

When I watched this video — titled “Naked Man Bangs on Memphis Women’s Windows While Masturbating” — it occurred to me that it was a pretty good illustration of why this commenter was right when he said: There are biological differences that no fashionable philosophy can change. The reaction of the women (called “victims,” which…

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I posted this video at Power and Control With this comment: Obama in Russia. Evidently the guy don’t get no respect. H/T Backyard Conservative Raving Dave in a comment to that post gave me a link to this video from Obama’s Saudi Arabian tour: I guess he can’t get any respect even from his “friends”.…

I liked IowaHawk’s “Guest Commentary by Judge Sonia Sotamayor” (“Menudo of Justice”) so much that I did something I rarely do with blog posts. I sent a link to a non-blogger friend who isn’t a blog reader. He loved it so much that he emailed back called it “brilliant” and he laughed out loud. Now,…

I was in a hippie house on Webster Avenue, just off of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California, watching avidly on a B&W TV. I never imagined that we would stop manned missions to the moon and beyond for such a long time. Here is a book about it: The First Men on the Moon: The…

Other Senate Doctors shows: The Doctor Show – Thursday, July 9, 2009 The Doctor Show – Tuesday, July 14, 2009 The Doctor Show – Thursday, July 16, 2009 You can get questions to the Senate Doctors by the following methods: e-mail Facebook YouTube Twitter Read the Democrat health insurance plan [pdf]. All 1,000 plus pages.…

Speaking of “entitlements,” just what is an entitlement? A right? Not at all. The “right” to collect social security derives from a law passed by Congress in 1935 and signed by the president. Same is true of Medicare (which simply amended the Social Security Act). Like any law, these laws can be repealed or changed…

A discussion of the talk (and other speeches given at the conference) can be found here. A really good book that also deals with the human rights problems of the drug war is: Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State I have read it. You should read it. If you can’t…

While it’s huge news right now, what Vice President Biden said to the AARP sounds exactly what President Obama said in May. Biden: Vice President Joe Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that unless the Democrat-supported health care plan becomes law the nation will go bankrupt and that the only way to…

In an excellent discussion of what Obamacare will mean, Rick Moran (in a piece titled “Word to the Wise: Don’t Get Sick”), touches on another obnoxious idea from noted euthanasia and infanticide advocate Peter Singer: that we should ration health care. The trouble is, Singer (an “ethicist” — which is like calling Caligula a “moralist”)…

Yesterday a friend sent me a link to this picture of Madonna: When I considered putting it in this blog, I realized that while I would be doing so for entertainment value, it’s also crass and exploitative, because if we live long enough, we will all have sagging flesh. Despite my daily physical exercise routine,…

I’m not enough of a geek to know exactly what to do about this, but this blog is having more and more of a problem with legitimate comments being junked. They are automatically being sent to the “junk comments” folder, where they are easily lost among the many actual junk comments which are generated by…

A New Jersey brewer has attracted the ire of the Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for naming beer after highway exits: New Jersey craft brewer Flying Fish has attracted the attention of MADD, the NJ Turnpike Authority (NJTA), and the press for breaking the taboo with its line of beers named after exits on the New…

We are all taught (at least most of us are) that honesty is a virtue, and that we should not lie to people. At least, that’s the ideal. A piece by Amy Alkon that Dr. Helen linked raises the question of whether there is any duty of honesty towards assholes. Alkon lives near what used…

In case you didn’t catch Glenn Reynolds’ must-read piece on health care this weekend: But there’s another cost that isn’t getting enough attention. That’s the degree to which a bureaucratized healthcare system will squash medical innovation just as we reach a point where dramatic progress is possible. To see how important that is, I don’t…

One of these days I’m going to have to figure out why I find politics so depressing. But it was a pleasant distraction from politics to be asked recently which country I’d rather live in, India or China. I had to put on my thinking cap, and think long and hard. My answer was China,…

You can see an excellent video that explores the Canadian Health Care system at the link. The bottom line? The Canadian system is a two tier system. The poor get long waits (leading to injury and death) the rich buy their health care. Here is the health care bill Congress is preparing to vote on.…