Surrender - on the installment plan (Thomas Sowell but NOT on Tuesday)

Thomas Sowell's column, today from Townhall.com, where there are dozens of other great analyses.

From the column:

It is not just a question of looking backward. The decision to second-guess CIA agents who extracted information to save American lives is even worse when you look forward.

Years from now, long after Barack Obama is gone, CIA agents dealing with hardened terrorists will have to worry about whether what they do to get information out of them to save American lives will make these agents themselves liable to prosecution that can destroy their careers and ruin their lives.

This is not simply an injustice to those who have tried to keep this country safe, it is a danger recklessly imposed on future Americans whose safety cannot always be guaranteed by sweet and gentle measures against hardened murderers.

Those who are pushing for legal action against CIA agents may talk about "upholding the law" but they are doing no such thing. Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the Geneva Convention gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law.

What IS the rationale for giving murdering terrorists more mercy than they ever showed their victims...or anyone else, for that matter.

Never Forget

It's almost time for me to post the Tribute I wrote this year for one of the 2,996 people killed in the attack on our country as part of Project 2996. It seems the 11th of September is being put forth by the Adminstration as a day of Service? Bull.

September 11th is the anniversary of the ATTACK on our country by devout members of a religion, many of whose members wish the destruction of the Western World, Civilisation as we know it. I'm not going to "serve" that section of Mankind, sorry, BarryO. They would like no better than to enslave us, and I refuse to bow to their wishes. Take your organization skills to the field where Flight 93 ended. Watch video of people jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center. See the heroism displayed at the Pentagon. Why would I want to forget that?

I will remember that our country was attacked. Our citizens and guests were murdered. I will NOT forget.

Little League World Series Champion CHULA VISTA!

I've had a touch of flu or something all weekend, so didn't do my usual routines...finally feeling up to sitting here and reading (despite my wishes to commiserate with Swampie about her job). My Chief had to make do for himself while I lounged on sofa and snored away in bed most of yesterday AND today. We DID watch the final game of the Little League World Series together, as has become custom, and congratulations to San Diego County's own Chula Vista!!! Woo Hoo!

When My Chief came home from his 'mandatory fun' meeting at work, he brought me a get well card and a bag of Chili Cheese Fritos. I have something to live for! These things are supposedly bad for my heart... and arteries... maybe even my brain... but they are SO good for my SOUL.


Oh, what the heck - let's see TWO non-pc commercials from my younger days...

Bob Tyrrell, founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator

Holy Crow. I knew I liked reading Bob's columns...and I know he must be good at tearing the masks off clowns and impostors, but THIS one really takes BarryO and His Band of Merry Marxists to task. Whew! Make sure you read the comments, too, especially Becky and Grzmlyk.

Here's just a taste of Bob's genius:

My belief, based on reports in the news and from my private network of seasoned agents and provocateurs, is that this White House is a carousel of incompetence. How else do we explain the ravening push on all fronts, health care, the environment, fiscal reform, intelligence reform, and a foreign policy of humility and apology? Unsurprisingly, on every front the President is in trouble. Remember chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's, callous enjoiner, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste"? This White House is a serious crisis.

Ya think???

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?

Question about 'rights'

If you have children...I'd like your take on this topic.

Do your precious babies have unrestricted use of the computer, or possibly their own? Are they allowed on social networking sites? Do you oversee the way these sites are used by your children?

Do you (or they) consider it a violation of their right to free speech if when they post something to a page belonging to someone else they get a reply they don't like and with which they (vehemently) disagree? Do you believe children (under 18 and living in your home) have the Right to Free Speech? Is anyone - including parent - having and expressing an opinion counter to said child's opinion or view considered repression and oppression of THEIR First Amendment Right?

I'm trying very hard to keep my temper, considering the sources...but it sure is giving me the Opportunity for Growth I was told about when I first decided to change my life...lying and stretching the truth and convenient selective memory and name-calling and dragging up the past to no good end tends to make me grumpy. Your thoughts are ALWAYS welcome here, thanks for stopping by!

UPDATE: Another question - when posting to the site of another, are your precious babies sure it's ok with Mom and Dad if they swear, insult, or lie to or about the person whose site they comment on - because that's just what said child is like, he/she doesn't 'care' what anyone thinks (no chit, Cherlock?) and so what?

*sigh*

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...

Thomas Sowell Tuesday with Cal Thomas, too - Decisions, Decisions

We're going to keep beating this drum. Who do YOU think should be making decisions about YOUR medical care? Some government flunky who works for a Political Appointee of the Administration? Your own doctor, in accordance to YOUR wishes? Thomas Sowell at JewishWorldReview.com on The Man Who Would Be In Charge of the "Death Panels."

At one time, it would have been none of Dr. Emanuel's business if your physician prescribed the latest medications for you, rather than the cheaper and obsolete medications they replaced. It would have been none of his business if you preferred to have a nice hospital room with "amenities" rather than being in an unsanitary ward with inadequate nursing care, as under the National Health Service in Britain.

The involvement of government gives Dr. Emanuel the leverage to condemn other Americans' choices — and a larger involvement of government will give him the power to force both doctors and patients to change their choices.

As for a "death panel," no politician would ever use that phrase when trying to get a piece of legislation passed. "End of life" care under the "guidance" of "some independent group" sounds so much nicer — and these are the terms President Obama used in an interview with the New York Times back on April 14th.

Here's Cal Thomas:

Anyone wishing to revise America's medical system and model it after Britain and Canada ought to thoroughly examine how these health care systems function before plunging into the same pool. A reasonable conclusion is that these systems require long waits and treatments (if you can get them) that are inferior to the U.S., based on government "guidelines" that frequently approve care only if the patient is deemed "worthy of the investment."

As a symbol, Adolf Hitler has been overused, but the philosophy behind the horrors he unleashed can be found in the beliefs of some of those who would use the power of the state to determine who gets help and who doesn't.

El Campeador has this little bit of 'fluff' from FoxNews, about the FABulous care you'll get when we're all covered by British-style "health" care.

Charlotte, of Oswestry, Shropshire in England, was prescribed Tamiflu via the flu hotline, but when she didn’t feel any better, she was admitted to the hospital on July 29 where she died two days later after her lungs collapsed.

The 16-year-old girl died after being misdiagnosed with the H1N1 virus, when she really had tonsillitis, London’s Daily Mail reported.

Charlotte Hartey’s condition was diagnosed over the phone, like many other H1N1 viruses in the United Kingdom, but when complications arose from Charlotte’s real affliction – tonsillitis – the teenager died.

A post-mortem exam showed Charlotte died from “natural causes.”

Remember - BarryOCare will give you EXACTLY what the British people get. Aren't you excited??? YES WE ARE!

Fifty years since...

I have no real memory about this - I wasn't quite 4. I've been to Yellowstone - more than once - I think the first time I may have been 8 or 9, could have been 11 - but, as I said, I was so young AND had never been there at that time of the quake. My only memories are from after, and of course pictures.

Mama Nature isn't a kind, gentle, cuddly nurturer. Mother Earth can be a real killer, and has been since Time began.

from Patriot Guard Riders website

...we stand in flag lines

...we stand for hours in silence

So we can see one moment like this.............


(tip of my cap to My Chief, who sent this in an email this morning)