Congratulations!

To Chris Muir and Sam, Zed, Jan and Damon, the heroes of Day By Day, on a successful completion of the annual pledge drive. Keep giving them hell, Chris, and I look forward to the new site!

About time!

Finally, conservatives are fighting fire with fire. Tom Mannis at Chicago News Bench reports.

You heard it here....

This is probably not new to a lot of you, but here is 0bama, Bawney Fwank, and IL Congressbroad Jan Schakowsky (wife of convicted felon Robert Creamer--thanks, Chicago News Bench) saying that yes, the government takeover of health care (to which I can be reported to flag@whitehouse.gov for saying) and the destruction of private and employer health insurance plans, and thus insurance companies, is just a matter of time:



Thanks to Yo at Yobeeland for digging this up.

Think about this for just a minute: You already pay income tax, half of your Social Security tax, and half of your Medicare tax. Your employer pays the other half of Social Security and Medicare, and federal unemployment tax. (If you're self-employed, guess who pays those taxes?) If you have employer-paid health insurance, you and your employer share the cost, and you can pay the premium with pre-tax dollars. (Of course, if you're self-employed, or don't have a health insurance plan, you pay the whole cost with after-tax dollars.) What 0bama and his cronies (better than half of Congress, ACORN, the SEIU, MoveOn--an organization funded by billionaire socialist George Soros and the de facto owner of the Democrat Party--and their lapdogs in the media) want to do is force a single-payer, government-controlled, and taxpayer-funded system on the American public. They can deny it all they want, they can tell you to turn in your friends for saying it, but they have said it to their friends in the unions and the media. Your taxes will increase, you'll have no choice on how much you get or how much you pay, and it'll come out of your paycheck. Small businesspeople and self-employed individuals will be hit especially hard.

Remember the "I Am Joe" movement? We knew he was a socialist then, and did nothing.

This hardly surprises me

Jan's waking up in today's Day By Day.

A better form of healthcare reform

Not that the Totalitarian-in-Chief will follow any of the suggestions....

Cafe Hayek links to John Mackey of Whole Foods in today's Wall Street Journal. In it, Mr. Mackey offers eight reforms that would reduce the cost of health care while at the same time allowing the free market to work in ways that it isn't allowed to work today (and hasn't been allowed to function since, oh, say, the New Deal). I agree with Don Boudreaux that I'd rather see a "loser pays" reform instead of tort reform, but aside from that, Mr. Mackey makes sense and stated the plan in under 500 words--two reasons that it wouldn't stand a chance in Washington.

To all those politicians ...

...who think that people who protest the government takeover of one-seventh of the economy are "unAmerican", "political terrorists", "lackeys of the insurance industry", "deliberately spreading misinformation", and my personal favorite, "Nazis", two words:

SCREW YOU.

More airplane nonsense

I love Fox News because betwetting lefties hate it so much, and Sean Hannity started here in Atlanta and is a protege of Neal Boortz. Anyway, he had a story last night about this, and today the Democrats have changed their tune:

House Leaders Drop Plans to Buy Fancy Jets

WASHINGTON -- House Democratic leaders said Monday that they will not force the Pentagon to buy four new passenger jets used to ferry senior government officials.

Democrats have been criticized for adding $330 million to the Air Force's 2010 budget to buy the jets even though the Pentagon didn't request the money.

Recall that these are the same Democrats that got on their high horses when the auto executives flew on a private jet to ask Congress to bail them out. No doubt "senior government officials" included the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House.

Remember what I said here about what I think of these politicians flying private jets? Unemployment is now at 9.4%, and they're talking about new airplanes to fly their worthless asses around? Let them fly in the baggage hold.

Surprised?

Fair warning: the first twenty seconds are the annoying EBS two-tone, added by the creator...



So Hillary Clinton and DiFi are blaming the US for illegal weapons in Mexico. No doubt there will be a huge push by the 0bama Administration to limit firearms in this country as a result. Hillary, DiFi and a lot of Chicago politicians (including 0bama) have been using any excuse they can dredge up to take away Second Amendment rights in this country. Chicago has a total ban on handguns, which is why Chicago has the highest number of murders by handgun in the nation.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: we do not have a gun problem in this country. We have one hell of a violence problem that needs to be dealt with, and which has not been. This country doesn't deal with violent criminals the way it should, because for years this country has been run by people (including Hillary, DiFi and 0bama) who don't think violent criminals should be locked up for the rest of their lives or, in extreme cases, put to death. But, God forbid someone defends himself with a handgun against a violent criminal...

And, by the way...

No doubt the White House would claim that the content of the last post was disinformation, and that you should report me to flag@whitehouse.gov. So, go ahead. I double dog dare you.

Been a while, hasn't it?

The truth? I haven't much felt like posting here. Not because I hate my readers (both of you) and not because there hasn't been anything to say; more like because everyone else in the blogosphere does a better job of it, and they have two hands with which to write blog entries. My quest for dictation software may be complete with the appearance of MacSpeech on the market, but that means that I have to upgrade to Leopard, which I'm ready to do, except that I haven't really got the money to do that, according to Mary. But that's another issue altogether.

What has me writing, though, is this article posted by one of my bed-wetting, booger-eating leftist friends, titled, typically enough, "I am an American conservative shithead". Evidently, it's been going around the Internet in some circles, obviously not the ones I typically belong to, and it is generally thought to be terribly hysterical, showing what ugly, stupid hypocrites we conservatives and libertarians are, using the services provided so generously by the Federal government while at the same time complaining that the socialists who run the government don't know what they're doing.

Har-de-fucking-har-har.

But, let's take a closer look at this:

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

OK. The Department of Energy didn't exist until 1977, under the administration of The Grinning Idiot from Plains. It started out as the Atomic Energy Commission, which became the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1974. From all appearances, these government agencies exist or have existed for one purpose alone: to hinder the expansion of this nation's ability to generate energy by preventing the construction of electrical power plants (nuclear and otherwise), preventing the exploration of potential sources of oil (in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency), the expanded use of coal for electrical generation, and the mining of oil shale for the production of petroleum, while at the same time requiring the use of ethanol (which uses more energy to produce and is less efficient than the oil it allegedly saves) to power cars and promoting the idea that windmills and photovoltaic cells can generate the entire energy requirement for this entire nation--provided, of course, that we stop needing so much electricity and other forms of energy, because we are such greedy and selfish pigs.

Most conservatives and libertarians believe that the Department of Energy is about as useful as tits on a bull, and would quickly close it (and a lot of departments and agencies of the federal government) and fire all of the employees, but Democrats, liberals and their cohorts (generally the labor unions, radical environmentalists, and other kooks) could not bear the thought of losing control over that many jobs and of that much power, and since they still control a good amount of government, well, we're stuck with them.

Ditto the idea that it is most efficient to maintain monopolies that are closely controlled by the government to provide electrical power, because that means that these monopolies have to beg the regulatory agencies for rate increases. After all, isn't it best that the electric companies (and, for that matter, the natural gas, phone and water companies) have to open themselves up to abuse from every unemployed troublemaker that attends the public meetings that are required before they can be allowed to raise their rates?

For the Democrats in particular, and liberals in general, allowing businesses to function as they are meant to, and to allow competition from other utility companies without their say-so, is anathema. There are too many vested interests involved, many of whom vote Democrat (along with dead and imaginary people, a huge Democrat voting bloc).

I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.

See above.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Ah, the FCC. Didn't they do a fine job of handling the conversion to digital TV?

And who says that satellites have to be launched by NASA, and that weather forecasts have to come from the government? Yes, satellites are expensive, as is the process of putting them into geosynchronous orbit, but there's nothing that says that the government has to do it. In fact, putting private satellites into orbit is a form of corporate welfare. Ditto the weather forecasts that are packaged by NBC (owner of The Weather Channel) and sold to cable and satellite systems, who then telecast them (with lots of commercials) to subscribers who pay a lot of money to receive the broadcasts.

Think about this: could the National Weather Service exist as a private corporation, packaging and selling weather information to interested parties? I'm not a pilot, but there's a good chance aviators are already paying for that information. Newspapers and TV and radio stations get the information, and sell it to their readers, viewers and listeners. Why not just formalize the deal?

And, wasn't NASA's objective to put a man on the moon? Unless you happen to think that the lunar landing was an elaborate hoax, we can all say, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, NASA!" And get rid of it, or at least cut it loose and let it become a private company, subject to competition.

Let's go on...

I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA; who needs 'em? All it's good for is delaying the introduction of new pharmaceuticals onto the market, preventing potentially beneficial foods to be sold, and generating tons of paperwork that companies have to complete to sell their products. A useless vestige of the New Deal, like Social Security.

I watch a lot of daytime TV, and there are all kinds of ambulance chasers drumming up members of classes of people ready to sue the manufacturers of FDA approved drugs that have proven to be harmful despite the FDA's determination that they were safe. The manufacturers are going to get sued; why not the FDA?

Electrical appliances generally carry the certification by Underwriters Laboratories, a private company in the Chicago area, that they have been tested and shown to be safe. I trust UL more than I trust the FDA. Why not have them (or a similar private company) approve pharmaceuticals, supplements and food?

At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

No reason the atomic clock needs to be maintained by the government, although the Navy is one of the few uses of tax money authorized by the Constitution.

The NHTSA has mandated I don't know how many "safety" modifications to cars that (a) haven't made them any safer and (b) have reduced fuel efficiency. Traffic accidents still take lots of lives, despite the earnest efforts by these bureaucrats. The Gaia-worshipping bureaucrats at the EPA have ensured that the fuel that I put into my car meets ever-more-stringent anti-pollution standards while delivering worse fuel economy. And, we've all seen the fine job that the Federal Reserve, a private company put in charge of the money supply, has done. It's gotten so bad that people are calling for an audit of the Federal Reserve.

I could keep going (and I would, if my one typing hand wasn't so tired), but the point should be obvious: conservatives and libertarians are forced to use the inefficient, counterproductive, byzantine and moronic systems that liberals have devised to suit their real agenda of forcing people to use those inefficient, counterproductive, byzantine and moronic systems, because liberals like subjecting people of every color and stripe to the whims and fancies of huge bureaucracies that employ lots of bureaucrats who are themselves liberals and/or Democrats, and because these same liberals have made it impossible or undesirable, either by law, regulation, or bureaucratic aggravation, to devise, implement and employ anything else. In short, they've been allowed to write the rules that are impossible to follow and which will take years to rid ourselves of.

The argument that this idiotic post seems to be making is that these systems are good, and socialized medicine will therefore be good. But we know that these systems are no good, and that socialized medicine will be every bit as larded with the same crap as everything else that the government touches.

Good reading

The last two days of Chris Muir's Day By Day have been particularly good. And be sure and read the Political Math entry that he refers to in yesterday's comic and ask yourself why politicians rush in to fix things and only make them worse.

Wait a minute. I know why. It's because they think that, because they managed to fool enough people into voting for them, they can do anything, and believe it even in the face of evidence that they're only making things worse, and because the media will cover for them, and because the majority of voters actually believe what they hear in the media. Seriously, how many votes would a politician get if he got up in front of the voters and said, "I'm not going to do anything, because I'll only f*ck things up worse than they are if I do"?

Why am I not surprised??

Congressional Allowances Raise Eyebrows

A few weeks ago, we discussed how disclosures of British members' of Parliament expenditures are causing a stir with taxpayer dollars being spent on products and services ranging from cleaning services over porn movies, to horse manure and cat food. In light of this growing controversy, the Wall Street Journal reviewed thousands of pages of reimbursement requests for Congressional allowances for 2008 expenses.

The result: While most of the expenditures went to areas such as staff salaries, travel, office rent and supplies, and printing and mailing (unlike British members of Parliament U.S. members of Congress cannot get reimbursed for personal living expenses), the Journal came across a number of "eye-catching" expenditures:

Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings spent $24,730 in taxpayer money last year to lease a 2008 luxury Lexus hybrid sedan. Ohio Rep. Michael Turner expensed a $1,435 digital camera. Eni Faleomavaega, the House delegate from American Samoa, bought two 46-inch Sony TVs.
(...) Rep. Howard Berman expensed $84,000 worth of personalized calendars, printed by the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, for his constituents. A spokeswoman for Mr. Berman, a California Democrat, didn't return requests for comment.

Why is no one, as Mencken said so well, spitting on his hands, hoisting the black flag, and slitting throats? That these mandarins (of both parties) are doing this kind of shit when every decent American is cutting back is a disgrace. I don't even think we should leave six for pallbearers.