Headache

I have a headache. Not that you give a rip one way or the other, but it is MY blog...gotta go get the Pixie in a few minutes, don't feel like doing much at all, so here's a fun column I can't seem to read all of...lots of good things in the sidebar there, and if you have a spare moment, think about those within short distance of wildfires. I'd rather have a headache.

Anyway, here's Lori Borgman at JewishWorldReview.com, on RELAXING - which is highly overrated, in my opinion:

Every fall I love reading essays by people who wax poetic about the melancholy they experience as they close up their summer cottages and return to the city. But now I'm wondering what it is they do all summer.

Had to get Teddy out of my sight...so back to BarryOCare

Robert Tracinski at JewishWorldReview.com:

I have news for the president: Brother, you ain't my keeper.
...

If the person invoking it is asking for your help, it means: you are my keeper. It is your job to work and struggle and produce wealth, so that you can support me and provide for my needs. To take a timely example, it means the union worker who wants billions of taxpayers' dollars to keep GM afloat, or who wants the UAW to be put in line in front of Chrysler's creditors, so that he can continue to collect inflated wages and a bloated pension. It is the manifesto of a leech.

...

But the way Obama means it is even worse. He does not view himself as a man in need of keeping; he views himself as the keeper. He invokes that line about being his brother's keeper in order to sell us on a health-care bill that will require all health-insurance plans to be designed and approved by a government overseer, and in which we will all be pushed into accepting health care provided by the government, on the government's terms.

...

The morality of altruism—the idea that we are our brother's keeper—is supposed to be a morality of benevolence and good will, but it actually offers men a choice between two roles: the keeper or the kept. It is the moral code of a kind of saccharine tyranny, a combination of maudlin appeals to pity and condescending authoritarianism.

...

That's the code that we need to affirm in response to Barack Obama's injunction about being our brother's keepers. We need to tell him that he is not our keeper—that we do not want to be keepers nor to be kept, but to be free and independent men.

Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment

Scum at a molecular level. Liar, cheat, thief. Pompous A**hole.

Tell me, someone - anyone - why this worm deserves a kind or respectful word?

From Three Beers Later:

"Then Kennedy threw himself on top of the woman. The waitress implored Mr. Kennedy to 'Get off me!'

"Another waitress entered to find 'things all tipped over and Kennedy was on top, [the waitress] was in the middle and Dodd was on the bottom.' At that point the sandwich was disassembled." -- Washington Times

Unlike a commenter at GrouchyConsvervativePundits, I don't feel sorry for his family, either. They know what he was - commenter SwampWoman:

Of course, the fact that he was attempting to deny the healthcare to the masses that HE was the recipient of will be overlooked.

I thought of referring to Teddy as a pig, a dog, or maybe a weasel (though he WAS an Elected CongressWeasel, that's just part of a previously named Group of Scum), but reverse-anthropmorphising only makes my brain hurt for the poor creatures used as illustrations. I've made an exception with 'worm' only because it fits so well...so does maggot. From Kae's link - The Australian, some small understatement:

In 1969, Kennedy accidentally drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick in Massachusetts, killing a female companion, Mary Jo Kopechne.

The scandal deepened when it emerged that Kennedy had swum to safety from the car, leaving Kopechne, then waited until the following day to report the incident.

My final bit on this topic comes from Robert Stacy McCain:

Forgiven by the media, liberals are shameless about such things. And so, in subsequent years, Americans were often subjected to the shameful spectacle of Ted Kennedy, the Chappaquiddick swim champ, lecturing us in moralistic tones about this, that and the other.

Whenever Kennedy would inflict his pompous self-righteous liberal moralizing on us, I'd always hear Ann Coulter's immortal words: "Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment."

And so I've used that line for the last time. And the knowledge of that finality is the only sadness I feel about Ted Kennedy's death.

Read the whole thing.

A user and abuser and a taker by nature has left the building - after FAR too long and ruinous stay on this planet.

UPDATE! Piece of Work In Progress has a GREAT visual!

What could go wrong...

...shamelessly reprinted from The Patriot Post email I got this morning.

Let me get this straight.

Obama's health care plan will:

• Be written by a committee whose head says he doesn't understand it.
• Be passed by a Congress that hasn't read it (but exempts themselves from it).
• Be signed by a president who smokes (and also hasn't read it).
• Have funding administered by a treasury chief who did not pay his taxes.
• Be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese.
• Be financed by a country that is nearly broke.

What could possibly go wrong?

---

What could possibly go wrong:

The phone rings and the lady of the house answers, "Hello?"

"Mrs. Sanders, please."

"Speaking."

"Mrs. Sanders, this is Dr. Jones at St. Agnes Laboratory. When your husband's doctor sent his biopsy to the lab last week, a biopsy from another Mr. Sanders arrived as well. We are now uncertain which one belongs to your husband. Frankly, either way the results are not too good."

"What do you mean?" Mrs. Sanders asks nervously.

"Well, one of the specimens tested positive for Alzheimer's and the other one tested positive for HIV. We can't tell which is which."

"That's dreadful! Can you do the test again?" questioned Mrs. Sanders.

"Normally we can, but the new health care system will only pay for these expensive tests just one time."

"Well, what am I supposed to do now?"

"The folks at Obama health care recommend that you drop your husband off somewhere in the middle of town. If he finds his way home, don't sleep with him."

"Repentence for a misspent youth"

Jonathan Rosenblum at JewishWorldReview.com:

...Western liberals were also prone to the illusion that all dilemmas of public and private life can be resolved by experts, psychotherapists and other "engineers of the human soul." The most learned of men, Berlin nevertheless insisted that intellectual elites have no business presuming that they know better than the man or woman in the street.

Really good column, telling me about a book I'd wouldn't pick up in a hundred years, written about a man I never heard of. The author is Michael Ignatieff. Wow. Explains a LOT about the way BarryO and His Band of Merry CongressWeasels and Their Friends - in the education system, the legal system, the health care system and every government bureaucracy around the country - think, and what they're headed for...not that I didn't know before, but this gives me extra insight.

Belief in a single rational solution to every problem leads as well to nasty politics. Marxists have a term for those who fail to acknowledge the rational solution: "false consciousness." False consciousness can infect entire social classes, and when it does they must either be re-educated or eliminated. In non-totalitarian regimes, ridicule replaces re-education for all those too stupid to accept the consensus. Perhaps that explains why so many writers to the Yale Law Magazine find calling George W. Bush an idiot the height of sophisticated wit. Even "jokes" about Sarah Palin's Down Syndrome son and "retarded" family are not beyond the pale.

Does your government scare you YET?

Thomas Sowell on Tuesday

This column is BRILLIANT!

Some of my favorite lines - single lines or paragraphs - compelling bits of words put together that say more than any 5 random columnists can say:

--Students are discussed largely as passive recipients of good or bad education.

But education is not something that can be given to anybody. It is something that students either acquire or fail to acquire. Personal responsibility may be ignored or downplayed in this "non-judgmental" age, but it remains a major factor nevertheless.

--The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one's own behavior.

--There can be grave practical consequences of a dogmatic insistence on external explanations that allow individuals to escape personal responsibility. Americans can end up ruining the best medical care in the world in the vain hope that a government takeover will give us better health.

--"...there is a small minority of workers who do not rise and a large number of people who seldom work and who— surprise!— have low incomes as a result.

Seldom is there any thought that people who choose to waste years of their own time (and the taxpayers' money) in school need to change their own behavior— or to visibly suffer the consequences, so that their fate can be a warning to others coming after them, not to make that same mistake.

It is not just the "non-judgmental" ideology of the intelligentsia but also the self-interest of politicians that leads to so much downplaying of personal responsibility in favor of external explanations and external programs to "solve" the "problem."

Project 2,996: James D. Cleere

I found a reprint / repost of a Washington Post list of House Document No. 107-285, Commemorative Joint Meeting of the Congress of the United States In Remembrance of the Victims and Heroes of September 11, 2001. It gave me my idea of how to write this Tribute. You see, I volunteered to write and post a Tribute after finding my way to a site called Project 2,996. The name I was assigned belongs to a man who was...well...a man who was in one of the Towers of the World Trade Center that day.

It's a very plain-looking list, as are most of the other reprints of that long long list - no frills or fanfares, no candles or flowers or flags waving in the breeze. Most of us live lives that don't come with public fanfare or frills or parades or widely posted Tributes. The Americans killed that horrible day were mostly just like you and me...going about their business in the ways they knew best. Though they worked in a talked-about building - or compound, as there were more than 2 "towers" - their everyday lives involved the same kinds of things we all do - taking out the trash, answering the phone, losing a cell while crossing a bridge, talking to the kids, the grocer, the neighbor, folding a load of laundry, picking up a prescription, grabbing a quick bite. Ordinary...yet so very extraordinary, and now never to be forgotten.

James D. Cleere was living his life. He was 55. He was from Newton, Iowa.

He was sentenced to Death by the murderers that day because of where he was and who he was. They did not know him or care about him or his family or his friends. They didn't know how he got from Iowa to New York City, where he went to school, or what he had for breakfast every day. They only cared that he die that day because he was in that building.

I didn't know him, either. But I will never forget him.

James D. Cleere was on the 49th floor of the South Tower, in the offices of Seabury and Smith Insurance, when the hijacked Flight 175 out of Boston slammed into the building at 9:03am on September 11, 2001.

James D. Cleere - you are not forgotten.

That sucking sound you hear...is the stimulus!

Mark Steyn comments on the projects funded by the stimulus plan in his state.

Still, what do I know? Evidently, it's stimulated the sign-making industry, putting America back to work by putting up "PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK" signs every 200 yards across the land. And at 300 bucks a pop the signage alone should be enough to launch an era of unparalleled prosperity, assuming America's gilded sign magnates don't spend their newfound wealth on Bahamian vacations and European imports. Perhaps if the president were to have his All-Seeing O logo lovingly hand-painted onto each sign, it would stimulate the economy even more, if only when they were taken down and auctioned on eBay.
...
...there are diminishing returns to his serial thousand-page, trillion-dollar boondoggles. They may be too long for your representatives to bother reading before passing into law, but, whatever the intricacies of Section 417(a) xii on page 938, people are beginning to spot what all this stuff has in common: He's spending your future. And by "future" I don't mean 2070, 2060, 2040, but the day after tomorrow. Democrats can talk about only raising taxes on "the rich," but more and more Americans are beginning to figure out what percentage of them will wind up in "the richest 5 percent" before this binge is over.

So, how does it feel, traveling to a Third World country without ever crossing a border?