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Well, y'all know what happens to 'em.
Dr. Shrinkwrapped portends the future with universal health care - if past is prologue.
Our health care system is full of thorny difficulties for many of us today. Be careful, however, what you do to alter it. While at times it may appear that it cannot be worse .... Beware.
If this story doesn't warm the cockles of your heart - then you must not have one!
Be sure to view all the photographs of these exquisite, loving and intelligent creatures.
Now, this is funny. (Maybe also rude and crude, but, unlike some: funny!)
Enjoy!
I think dating services attract two kinds of people. Women who want to get married, and men who know that women who want to get married put out. It's a funny world. Men can't find decent women because of all the impostors who only want money, and women can't find decent men because we're all pretending to be sensitive so we can slide into home and then run away at four in the morning. Maybe Eharmony has it all wrong. Maybe questionnaires don't work. Maybe truth serum is the answer.
I think I'm going to start a dating site where all the participants have to agree to be shot full of pentothal and then interrogated about their real intentions while being videotaped. I think you would see a lot of videos of "sensitive" guys in sweaters saying things like, "I just want someone to share my life with and SHOW MY PENIS TO WHILE WE WAIT FOR OUR ENTREE."
Two comedians in the news today.
The first didn't appear in comedy shows nor did she do stand up - but she was a funny lady with a biting wit. Molly Ivins and I didn't agree on hardly any political issues. Still, I admired her writing ability, her passion and her humor. Gone too soon.
The other so-called comedian will be making more news in my state, Minnesota. Apparently Al Franken has decided to give up his mediocre comedic career and go on the road belting 'em out for the Senate. Please note that my distaste for Franken's brand of humor has nothing to do with his politics. Long before Franken ever even considered politics, nor expressed political views, I found his abilities to make people laugh sorely lacking.
Will people in our state take Franken seriously? We'll find out soon if his candidacy is a joke - or not.
Great column by Robert Samuelson on one of the toughest set of economic and moral issues facing our country today.
But the Bush proposal does have one huge virtue: it exposes health-care costs to the broad public. By not taxing employer-paid insurance, the government now provides a huge invisible subsidy to workers. Bush wouldn't end the subsidy, but by modifying it with specific deductions for insurance ($15,000 for families, $7,500 for singles), he would force most workers to see the costs. By contrast, some other proposals disguise their costs. Schwarzenegger's plan shifts costs to the federal government, doctors and hospitals. It's clever, but it perpetuates the illusion that health care is cheap—or even free.
However our health system evolves—with more government control or more market influence—Americans need to come to a more realistic understanding of its limits. Underestimating its costs and exaggerating its benefits guarantees disappointment. If the present outpouring of proposals signals a start of our needed debate, then it is long overdue.
Good enough for liberals. Too dangerous for those on the far right. (I'm sure people like Chris Hedges will be helpful in telling us just who is and is not on the far right.......)
Amazing quotes. Just amazing!
The radical Christian Right must be forced to include other points of view to counter their hate talk in their own broadcasts, watched by tens of millions of Americans. They must be denied the right to demonize whole segments of American society, saying they are manipulated by Satan and worthy only of conversion or eradication. They must be made to treat their opponents with respect and acknowledge the right of a fair hearing even as they exercise their own freedom to disagree with their opponents.
In Prague, fiscal conservatism blooms as it risks withering on the vine in the U.S.
Public finance reform — including a major overhaul of the pension system, tax reform and trimming excessive state budget expenditures — will be at the top of the Cabinet's agenda.
Specifically, the government plans to pursue canceling taxes on dividends and capital gains, as well as inheritance and gift taxes and the property transfer tax. The government will also propose killing a law requiring businesses to have monitored cash registers, a hot button issue in the run-up to elections last summer.
The Cabinet plans to reduce the share of mandatory expenditures on the overall state budget from its current 70 percent to below 50 percent by 2010. It also hopes to slash the share of the state budget deficit on the gross domestic product from about 4 percent at the end of 2007 to 3 percent in 2008.
Major privatization will also be front and center. The Cabinet will prepare and possibly carry out the sale of national air carrier Czech Airlines and the Letiště Praha airport this year. Privatization of railway operator Czech Railways should follow in 2008, and privatization of Czech Post will be considered.
You will like this.
I start…from a belief in individual freedom and that derives fundamentally from a belief in the limitations of our knowledge, from a belief…that nobody can be sure that what he believes is right, is really right.…I’m an imperfect human being who cannot be certain of anything, so what position…involved the least intolerance on my part?…The most attractive position…is putting individual freedom first.
I have never been an apologist nor a strong supporter for Israel. Nevertheless, I do think that this piece raises many good questions.
A century ago (approximately), the early political Zionists believed that having a country would normalize the condition of the Jew in the world. The Jews were singled out, people like Herzl and Nordau (and many others) believed, because there was something un-natural about a people not having a home. Poles had Poland, the Italians had Italy. If the Jews had a country, then finally, the condition of the Jew (being everywhere but being at home no where) would change. And the world would eventually cease its relentless attention on this tiny fraction of the world’s population.
But that, of course, has not happened either. Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur – all conflicts that have taken infinitely more lives than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – receive nowhere near the attention that Israel does. Thousands are raped and butchered in Darfur, and days go by with scarcely a mention in the world’s papers. There are 200,000 child soldiers in Sierra Leone alone, but who even knows about that? Yet one protester ignores IDF warnings to stay out of the way and accidentally gets crushed by a bulldozer, and the world goes ape. Then Broadway produces a (bad) play about her. This is normalcy?
North Korea goes nuclear, Iran threatens to do the same and publicly says that Israel should be destroyed, and still, there’s only one country in the world whose right to exist is still debated. And no, it’s not North Korea. Or Iraq. Or Iran. Or Saudi Arabia, busy exporting the Wahhabism that was key to the 9/11 attacks.
Professor Tony Judt of NYU writes an article in the New York Review saying that Israel is an anachronism, because the Jews got on the nationalism bandwagon too late. The fact that the Palestinians started their nationalist efforts three-quarters of a century later doesn’t seem to enter the equation. The solution to the Middle East crisis, Judt wrote, is an end to the Jewish state. “But what if there were no place in the world today for a ‘Jewish state’? What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome?” he wonders.
They are rarely (never?) answered by the Jimmy Carter types who refer to Israel as an "apartheid nation."
They will not have to worry about this idiot ruining their chances in 2008.
AJ: Tiger has competition in the bird world!
Of course, AJ has his own home page.
John Hinderaker at PowerLine announces a new book, Why I Turned Right. The book sounds definitely worth the time to evaluate. One excerpt which John presents demonstrates a propensity of many liberals and conservatives which I find most curious:
My Hill experience gave me a startling insight: Liberals and conservatives seemed to have mirror-image approaches to paternalism. Liberals made intrusive laws for the competent while conservatives preferred to rely on individuals to make their own decisions. Conversely, conservatives preferred intrusive laws for the incompetnet to whom liberals applied a hands-off policy. Liberals were comfortable with public health paternalism: intrusive nonsmoking laws, taxes on unhealthy products, strict risk-averse EPA and FDA regulations. . . .Yet, when a person was incoherent, defecating in the streets, or freezing a limb off in the part, then -- and only then -- did the principles of autonomy apply.
Why does it seem to be true that at least some liberals wish to restrict the freedom of those most capable of exercising it? And, in turn, they wish to bestow prodigious amounts upon those who are least able to enjoy its bounty?
Perhaps some readers can enlighten us?
Some can hate so much, they wish for something antithetical to their own best interests.
One more voice, urging that we judge people on the basis of what they do, and not upon how they look.
The fact is that, in this country at least, we do not “represent” a color. We represent only our individual selves. There is no reason that our qualifications should be judged differently just because more or fewer of those already chosen happen to share or not share our particular melanin content.
Hat tip: John Rosenberg at Discriminations
The political email group has been rather vicious lately. We discussed the benefit of private giving versus programmed care by the government. I claimed that both public and private aid had their roles in a well-running and caring society; the devoted lefties asserted that I only aimed for more private charity because of my own selfishness. (Never mind that I am in a low tax bracket, and discussions of tax cuts for the wealthy pay no divident to me.) We discussed health care, universal and market-oriented. Once again, those who see a downside to the nanny state are mocked as self-centered, greedy and unconcerned with their neighbor. Of course, within all the debates, the occasional "you're a racist, too" gets tossed about.
Why is it that some liberals seem incapable of understanding the principle of risk and reward? If there is no gain to doing that which is more difficult, then why take the tougher route? If your body were to look the same eating bon bons and pizza as it does fresh veggies, fruits and lean meats, why attempt to avoid tasty but unhealthy foods? If we earned the same income staying at home in our PJ's, watching our favorite TV shows and reading our favorite novels, rather than going out and slaying the dragons of our particular field, why would anyone fight the battles?
It's one thing to say, "We're a compassionate society. We will provide aid to those who happen to be in need" - and altogether something else to say that the government, that is, your neighbor, is responsible for cushioning every pebble that life might throw at you.
I was reminded of all this when I read this excellent explanation of the Geneva Conventions, and of why our country has acted as it has in the battle against world wide terrorism. Why should anyone "fight fair" (yes, there is such a thing), even in the midst of war, if cheating and "fighting dirty" has no downside? The Geneva Conventions were in part crafted to try to place even war and death on a bit higher plane than it might be without the Conventions.
Why is that so hard to understand? Why do these liberals fail to comprehend logic and human nature?
Israel's leaders will grit their teeth and hope that somehow things will turn out for the best. Perhaps, after acquiring the Bomb, the Iranians will behave 'rationally'? But the Iranians are driven by a higher logic. And they will launch their rockets. And, as with the first Holocaust, the international community will do nothing. It will all be over, for Israel, in a few minutes - not like in the 1940s, when the world had five long years in which to wring its hands and do nothing. After the Shihabs fall, the world will send rescue ships and medical aid for the lightly charred. It will not nuke Iran. For what purpose and at what cost? An American nuclear response would lastingly alienate the whole of the Muslim world, deepening and universalizing the ongoing clash of civilizations. And, of course, it would not bring Israel back. (Would hanging a serial murderer bring back his victims?) So what would be the point?
Still, the second Holocaust will be different in the sense that Ahmedinejad will not actually see and touch those he so wishes dead (and, one may speculate, this might cause him disappointment as, in his years of service in Iranian death squads in Europe, he may have acquired a taste for actual blood). And, indeed, there will be no scenes like the following, quoted in Daniel Mendelsohn's recent 'The Lost, A Search for Six of Six Million,' in which is described the second Nazi Aktion in Bolechow, Poland, in September 1942:
'A terrible episode happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and Germans, who had broken into her house, found her giving birth. The weeping and entreaties of bystanders didn't help and she was taken from her home in a nightshirt and dragged into the square in front of the town hall. There, she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd of Ukraininans present, who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth and she gave birth to a child. The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown -- It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with bleeding bits hanging and she stood that way for a few hours by the wall of the town hall, afterwards she went with all the others to the train station where they loaded her into a carriage in a train to Belzec [extermination camp].'
In the next Holocaust there will be no such heart-rending scenes, of perpetrators and victims mired in blood (though, to judge from pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the physical effects of nuclear explosions can be fairly unpleasant).
But it will be a Holocaust nonetheless.
I fervently hope he is wrong.
I fear he might be right.
Hat tip: Powerline
Then trans fats.
Now football?
A very tragic tale which highlights but one more danger in a very popular activity: sports.
Since the former National Football League player Andre Waters killed himself in November, an explanation for his suicide has remained a mystery. But after examining remains of Mr. Waters’s brain, a neuropathologist in Pittsburgh is claiming that Mr. Waters had sustained brain damage from playing football and he says that led to his depression and ultimate death.
The neuropathologist, Dr. Bennet Omalu of the University of Pittsburgh, a leading expert in forensic pathology, determined that Mr. Waters’s brain tissue had degenerated into that of an 85-year-old man with similar characteristics as those of early-stage Alzheimer’s victims. Dr. Omalu said he believed that the damage was either caused or drastically expedited by successive concussions Mr. Waters, 44, had sustained playing football.
In a telephone interview, Dr. Omalu said that brain trauma “is the significant contributory factor” to Mr. Waters’s brain damage, “no matter how you look at it, distort it, bend it. It’s the significant forensic factor given the global scenario.”
Surely if anything can unite those on the left and right, this is it.
In November, Kerry came in dead last in a Quinnipiac poll asking respondents whether they had warm feelings for various prominent politicians. Kerry came in around "arctic." The National Journal asked its brain trust of political insiders to list their top 10 Democratic prospects for '08. Kerry came in behind Sen. Chris Dodd -- and Dodd came in 10th.
Even more damning was the informal poll conducted by Kerry himself. The windsurfing William Jennings Bryan gathered together his team of moneymen, activists and consultants at his posh Georgetown pied-à-terre as part of his effort to get the band back together for '08. He opened the dinner conversation by asking his "loyalists" if he should run again. Normally, you'd expect Kerry's closest backers to say "yes" just out of politeness alone. But Kerry was greeted with the sort of total silence reserved for questions that shouldn't be asked, like "Does this make me look fat?" So, according to an account in the New York Post, Kerry proceeded to tell everyone present why he should run again.
Thanks to Goldberg for an amusing - though accurate - bit of fluff.
