Tuesday! Thomas Sowell!

Can you bear another column on BarryOCare and the coming demise of private health insurance? Sure you can, because it's written by Thomas Sowell. The POINT of this column?

The only rational explanation for such haste to pass a bill that will be slow to go into effect is to prevent the public from knowing what is in this massive legislation that even members of Congress are unlikely to have read. That is also the only reason that makes sense for postponing the time when Obamacare goes into action after the next presidential election.

Excellent column, as usual.

Chilly here this morning - +37 and still dropping. Almost like...WINTER in NEFL! Have a wonderful day, thanks for stopping by.



PS - Please continue to read and support JewishWorldReview.com - Binyamin is improving, but he needs all the help he can get...and he's finally willing to accept.

Merry Freakin Christmas

I have NEVER been this down at Christmas. Twenty years ago, we were on our way from one duty station to another, and got to spend Christmas with Lovely Daughter's grandparents on her daddy's side. The phone rang - no cell, my in-laws phone on the wall of their kitchen - and my mum told me the results of the exploratory surgery Dad had undergone. He refused any more treatment for the colon and liver cancer that would end his life in about 2 years.

This is worse, because my dad CHOSE his treatment...or lack thereof. We understood, because we knew him and loved him.

Congress has become the totalitarian regime that Nazi Germany was so proud to put in place. From "Nazi Fascism and the Modern Totalitarian State:"

Totalitarianism is a form of government in which all societal resources are monopolized by the state in an effort to penetrate and control all aspects of public and private life, through the state's use of propaganda, terror, and technology. Totalitarian ideologies reject the existing society as corrupt, immoral, and beyond reform, project an alternative society in which these wrongs are to be redressed, and provide plans and programs for realizing the alternative order. These ideologies, supported by propaganda campaigns, demand total conformity on the part of the people.

"It is about the accumulation of power by any means necessary."

I have been attacked by a cold, and I feel like last week's lunch. I made two big pots of turkey noodle soup over the weekend, though, and they were SO good. One is almost finished at this house, and the other is being lunch at work for Lovely Daughter. I have more carcass, think this one will probably make turkey rice soup...cuz I'm out of noodles.

I've read Arnold Ahlert's letters to the editor and comments at The American Spectator. JewishWorldReview.com picked him up as a new contributor a few months back and I am pleased as I can be.

Mr. Ahlert's most recent column is SO good, I wish I could reprint the whole thing. Some exerpts:

On the reaction of Old Media to word that the "scientists" involved in pushing the idea of 'global warming' might not be in consensus AND might fudge data?

The reaction to these revelations? Perhaps as revealing, if not more so, than the revelations themselves. Much like the ACORN scandal, the mainstream media—once again with the exception of Fox News—has either avoided the story completely, or sought to focus on the manner in which the emails were procured. This last bit is pivotal, because it is the basis by which the intrepid folks at the New York Times and other media sources have determined that they will withhold the damning evidence from the public: stolen material is unfit for print or broadcast.

Apparently this is a spanking new standard for the Times, whose appetite for disseminating purloined or secret stuff goes back at least as far as the top secret, "not intended for publication" Pentagon Papers in 1971, all the way through to revealing top-secret info about how the Bush administration conducted various aspects of the war on terror.

Mr. Ahlert points out that many Americans simply don't know what they don't know - and what they don't know is a n 800-pound gorilla:

Which brings us to the 800-pound gorilla: you can't learn what you haven't been taught. Or worse, you can't make informed decisions when those decisions have already be made for you by an educational establishment which has been in the liberal tank for decades. With respect to this particular subject, how many school age children have been forced to watch Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and given the impression that a blowhard politician with no scientific credentials whatsoever, a man whose own lifestyle contradicts everything he ostensibly believes in, is the last word on the subject? How many kids have been told global warming is "settled science" without offering them a scintilla of contrasting information? How many have been brainwashed into believing that "living green" is tantamount to the religious mandate to "go and sin no more?"

Every effort mankind has ever undertaken to obliterate individual freedom and increase the power of the state has always included the inculcation of children too young to think independently. This one is no different. If America is going to right itself, the war for our children's hearts and minds must be won.

But in order to win it, more people have to realize it exists. More importantly, they have to do something about it. This is a difficult undertaking for parents who are the front-liners in this fight. At the end of a busy day, very few people want to know—exactly—what their children are learning in school. Unfortunately, such apathy is the mother's milk of progressives for whom raising a generation of school children who disdain American exceptionalism is a prime directive. People with no particular pride in their country are a much more malleable bunch than those with a real understanding of self-reliance, Constitutionalism, and historical perspective.

A long, difficult, and often tedious journey has begun for us - I hope the old dogs are up to learning new tricks - so the next generations will be taught properly.

To the CongressWeasels, the Constitution isn't fluid or 'living' - it's chalkmarks they can rewrite or ignore at will!

Something puzzles me.

The Boston Tea Party was a protest in answer to crippling and unfair taxes by the Crown and Governors of the Crown who ran the Colonies. It was one in a long list of grievances against the Crown by the Colonists. (I know, that's a simplified description, but it's nearly bed time and I have a miserable headache). We fought a war - long, bloody, and eventually successful - to have the rights our Founding Fathers reminded us IN THE CONSTITUTION come only from the Creator. The 'rights' of Government are enumerated and limited by said Constitution because the Founders knew what a Government Right was like - oppressive and tyrannical. Deadly.

Now, the CongressWeasels we elected - only the most recent in a line of such weasels - have deemed it necessary to have all Americans covered by 'universal health care.' The bill currently before these tyrants has the only option as buying Government-approved health insurance...or facing fines and JAIL!?!?!?

This Current Occupant and His Weasels are going to FORCE Americans to BUY something or be put in JAIL!?!? Are they HIGH? Have they all gone off the sanity diving board like lemmings?

Oh, that insanity was the answer. These Servants to the Crown want Power - and more Power - and they will let nothing stop them from taking their Rightful Place at the feet of their Emperor. They know exactly what they're doing, and they're pretty sure there's nothing We The People can or will do to stop them.

We's in deep doo-doo if they succeed. Does YOUR Elected Representative still represent YOU? Mine doesn't. Unfortunately she's in a gerrymandered, bulletproof district. But they're not ALL bulletproof, are they.

Frugal Living

Here are some reader tips in a column by Sara Noel. We've made pumpkin seed snacks for years, but I never had the directions written down...and we washed them, which I see was NOT necessary.

Thomas Sowell has Part III on The 'Costs' of Medical Care. You can find Part I here and Part II here.

ADDED: Thomas Sowell's The 'Costs' of Medical Care, Part IV is here.

I am feeling low today. Overtired. Money...or lack thereof. Mostly overtired, I think. How do I tell someone who really needs my help that I am not physically capable of doing what she needs, and doing it well, along with my other duties...*sigh*

I think the Pixie and I will see if we can find something unhealthy for breakfast...like raisin toast, maybe... Might be more later, but I won't bet on it, cuz My Chief gets off work early today. Thanks for stopping by!

Tuesday with Thomas Sowell

So, it's Election Day in a few key places around the Nation. Do us all a favor if you're voting today - vote for the good of the Country, not the party.

If you voted for the Current Occupant a year ago, I 'hope' you've come to your senses about it. As a Constitutional scholar, BarryO doesn't need to "learn" what he should and shouldn't do, he knows exactly what he's doing and is getting exactly the results he knew he would get. And even with his unConstitutional use of 'czars' to help run things, he has to have the help of the CongressWeasels in most of his schemes. There is still a system for 'change' in this country, and San Fran Nan is not the idiot we wish she was...

Thomas Sowell points out some hard truths today in his column about The Costs of Medical Care. A bit from that column:

Letting old people die would undoubtedly be cheaper than keeping them alive — but that does not mean that the costs have gone down. It just means that we refuse to pay the costs. Instead, we pay the consequences. There is no free lunch.

Providing free lunches to people who go to hospital emergency rooms is one of the reasons for the current high costs of medical care for others. Politicians mandating what insurance companies must cover is another free lunch that leads to higher premiums for medical insurance — and fewer people who can afford it.

ADDED: Mona Charon gives a personal story about the costs of the coming health care fiasco.

UPDATE: Thomas Sowell's "The 'Costs' of Medical Care, Part II" is here.

Joke. Yes, another clean one.

From a link at Are We Lumberjacks:

What is the difference between Bird Flu and Swine Flu?

For bird flu you need tweetment and for swine flu you need oinkment.

Panic in Perspective

From a link at Grandpa John's, I found a terrific post at American Thinker.

Remember - they're from the Government, and they're here to HELP:

Additionally, and even more disturbing, many cases are assumed to be H1N1 without testing. Yes, the CDC advised the states to stop testing for and tracking cases of H1N1. Their rationale? There is no need to waste resources when the government has already confirmed there is an epidemic. In other words, just trust us. The debate is over. I had no idea Al Gore and the IPCC were working for the CDC. As I originally contended, the number of cases of H1N1 has been overestimated, and even CBS News reported this.

I have had twenty-two patients call me or come in to the office claiming to have had contact with patients who were diagnosed with the "Swine Flu." In each and every case I took the time to investigate the contact case to determine whether the patient had actually been tested. In every case so far, the contact case either was not tested or tested negative but was given the diagnosis just the same.
...

Evidence is mounting that, as I opined previously, "Swine Flu" is less of a threat medically and epidemiologically than was feared, but is a great mechanism for the promotion of political pork. Our founding fathers taught that it is healthy to regard government intentions with skepticism. We have failed to heed their wise advice, and we are now learning that the military tactic of deception is alive and well in the Obama Administration. While we are being threatened by H1N1, they are using the distraction to infect us with a much more deadly disease that will affect not only us, but our children and grandchildren: the disease of subjugation.

It seems the H1N1 virus is epidemic and you MUST do something NOW...and you MUST give your Government saviors MORE so they can DO MORE TO SAVE MORE...but for the troops in Afghanistan there's no big hurry.

BarryO and His Weasels prove every day to be more...weaselly. *sigh*

Quotable Democrats

Quotes from...well, you'll see...

Great Orators of the Democrat Party...

'One man with courage makes a majority.' - Andrew Jackson
'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.' - Franklin D. Roosevelt
'The buck stops here.' - Harry S. Truman
'Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.' - John F. Kennedy

And from today's Democrats...

"It depends what your definition of 'is' is?" - Bill Clinton
"Those rumors are false .... I believe in the sanctity of marriage." - John Edwards
"I invented the Internet." - Al Gore
"The next Person that tells me I'm not religious, I'm going to shove my rosary beads up their ASS." - Joe Biden
"America is--is no longer, uh, what it--it, uh, could be, uh, what it was once was...uh, and I say to 'uh, I don't want that future, uh, uh for my children." - Barack Obama
"I have campaigned in all 57 states." - Barack Obama (Quoted 2008)
"You don't need God anymore, you have us Democrats." - Nancy Pelosi (Quoted 2006)
"Paying taxes is voluntary." - Sen. Harry Reid
"Bill is the greatest husband and father I know. No one is more faithful, true, and honest than he." - Hillary Clinton (Quoted 1998)

And here's one of my favorite quotes, though not a politician, just a Real Man.
"Life's tough. It's even tougher if you're stupid." -- John Wayne

(Thanks, Fred!)

UPDATE: I've been reminded that gaffs are not party-exclusive. ALL politicians have things come out of their mouths that are wrong, mistaken, lies, or examples of oral dyslexia - just like the rest of us. WE, however, don't spend a lot of time with cameras and tape recorders following us around to preserve our flubs for posterity...thank goodness! This particular little collection just happened to be all in one place all at one time, so here it is.

Tinnitus --- WHAT???

Being the doctor-averse lil broad that I am, I have diagnosed my own affliction. Now I need to figure out what to do about it. My particular 'ringing' seems to be a bit like the computer being on all the time, but with a slightly different pitch. *sigh*

Dr. Gott's column has been mentioning Lypo-Flavonoid for quite some time, but I didn't pay much attention after I told My Chief about it...because HIS tinnitus has been diagnosed for several years. Mine was intermittent and didn't interfere with anything, so I ignored it. Now it interferes with my hearing more often than not. So I'll be checking the price of this stuff, and having a visit with my doc in the near future. Not in the next WEEK, as I'm covered up prepping to lead a Retreat...but NEAR future, anyway.

Think I'll go find something to eat, y'all have a FINE day, and thanks for stopping by! Stay warm - ya lucky dogs...

Tuesday - Thomas Sowell!

Were you ever told the fable about the dog who had a bone, then seeing his reflection in the river and deciding to take what he believed was a bigger bone, he dropped the bone he had in the river, and ended up with neither bone?

Thomas Sowell's column at JewishWorldReview.com:

While I was told a story in my childhood to help me understand something about the real world, today adults are being told things to reduce them to childish thinking.

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.

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."

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?

Thomas Sowell, Part IV

Pretty durn good analysis. Too bad our Elected CongressWeasels aren't this thoughtful. Or down-to-earth. Or honest.

Whose Medical Decisions? Part IV:

What we also should stop to think about is the mindset behind this legislation, which is very consistent with the mindset behind other policies of this administration, whether the particular issue is bailing out General Motors, telling banks who to lend to or appointing "czars" to tell all sorts of people in many walks of life what they can and cannot do.

The idea that government officials can play God from Washington is not a new idea, but it is an idea that is being pushed with new audacity.
...

The thing most associated with America — freedom — is precisely what must be destroyed if this is to be turned into a fundamentally different country to suit Obama's vision of the country and of himself. But do not expect a savvy politician like Barack Obama to express what he is doing in terms of limiting our freedom.

Thomas Sowell, Part III

A few hundred words in one column can barely scratch the surface of the discussion that NEEDS to take place and the information that NEEDS to be passed along to the American People about the "Health Care Rationing" bill. Here's the next installment from Mr. Sowell.

Please, THINK about this, people...you're not just being blind-sided, you're being lied to at every turning:

Amid all the controversies over medical care, no one seems to be asking a very basic question: Why does it take more than 1,000 pages of legislation to insure people who lack medical insurance?
...
Despite incessant repetition of the fact that millions of Americans do not have medical insurance, hardy souls who have actually read the mammoth medical care legislation being rushed through Congress have discovered all sorts of things there that have nothing whatever to do with insuring the uninsured — and everything to do with taking medical decisions out of the hands of doctors and their patients, and transferring those decisions to Washington bureaucrats.
...
Deception is not an incidental aspect of this medical care legislation, but is at the very heart of it.

Thomas Sowell, Part II

Part Two of Thomas Sowell's column:

It is not just a question of what the government will pay for. The logic of their collectivist thinking — and the actual practice in some other countries with government-controlled health care — is that you cannot even pay for some medical treatments with your own money, if the powers that be decide that "society" cannot let its resources be used that way, or that it would not be "social justice" for some people to have medical treatments that others cannot get, just because some people "happen to have money."

Fiji water ain't exactly green...unless it's from the MONEY!

I used to buy Fiji water for Lovely Daughter because I love the bottle...when we lived in Hawai'i. Now, if I have to drink water, I get it from the tap and I add Country Time lemonade packets to it. Much better and half the price. John Stossel says I might be on the right track...