I absolutely adore this show. I love Drew Carey and all the guests he has one. This time, a little something special. It's hilarious. Some welcome comic relief.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The Part of the Porkulus Bill No One Seemed to Notice
Glenn Beck was all over this on the radio and on Fox today. I have to say, Obama is pretty sneaky. Let's just sneak this health care bill, nothing to do with stimulus, because by GOD WE WILL HAVE SOCIALIZED MEDICINE! As the article says, Daschle's fingerprints are all this. Get ready all you old people, me included. If you're just too old and won't get that many good years out of treatment, you ain't gonna get it. To all those who voted for Obama, thanks a freaking lot!
Courtesy of Atlas Shrugs
SOCIALIZED HEALTHCARE
Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.
Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).
The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.
But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”
Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far.
New Penalties
Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)
What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.
The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.
Elderly Hardest Hit
Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.
Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464).
The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.
In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.
Hidden Provisions
If the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passes the Senate in its current form, seniors in the U.S. will face similar rationing. Defenders of the system say that individuals benefit in younger years and sacrifice later.
The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined (90-92, 174-177, 181).
Hiding health legislation in a stimulus bill is intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. “If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it,” he said. “The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol.”
More Scrutiny Needed
On Friday, President Obama called it “inexcusable and irresponsible” for senators to delay passing the stimulus bill. In truth, this bill needs more scrutiny.
The health-care industry is the largest employer in the U.S. It produces almost 17 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Tom Daschle is out of the picture, but his greasy fingerprints are all over this one. He stated in his book that the reason that Hillarycare didn't work was because the people found out about it. This time it must be done swiftly and without too much detail. This fits that bill.
DO AS I SAY
The more I listen to Obama speak to the common masses, the more he comes off as a cajoling distant relative, the kind you only see every eight years when someone dies but he still knows what you want and need. He's a snake oil salesman, alright. Right out of Something Wicked this Way Comes, the evil circus master, bending people to his will through the sheer force of his messianic qualities. Running roughshod over the Constitution and making people love it! What a guy.
These are What Tools Look Like
They belong in their very own smarmy "I Pledge" video. I mean, they are just too cute, doncha just wanna eat them up? Maybe beat them up, but seriously, what does it say about people who have virtually put on hold doing community service or just something nice for someone else until the right man was elected president. People, this is pathetic to the nth degree. And the sad part is, they have no idea how pitiful and ignorant they are. God, please tell me there are not a lot more of these people out there.
Another Feel Good Video
Frankly, I have spent weeks now on the financial "stimulus" generational theft package the Obama administration, with the help from a few RINOs, is saddling us with. I thought this would be the time for a little break of just downright cuteness.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Is Dissent Still Patriotic?
I came across this article written by David Harsanyi of the Denver Post and he makes some excellent points. Why exactly is it that condemnation of President Bush was accepted, even encouraged by the left, but they will brook no criticism of Barak Obama. Jillette Penn of Penn and Teller has a You-Tube video where he points out that while George Bush was President, his criticism of his adminisration was welcomed among his friends, but now that he is criticizing Obama for many of the same reasons, he is being told to shut the *#@$%^& up. Bottom line is that Penn cares about America no matter who is president and no matter who is president, he will speak out when he sees something he doesn't like. Caring about America really is a nonpartisan concept, though all that seems to have gotten muddied along the way. Here's an excerpt of Harsanyi's article. You can read the rest here
Do all Americans truly have a yearning to fundamentally "remake" our nation? There must be a subversive minority out there that still believes the United States — even with its imperfections and sporadic recessions — is, in context, still a wildly prosperous and free country worth preserving.
Some of you must still believe that politicians are meant to serve rather than be worshiped. And there must be someone out there who considers partisanship a healthy, organic reflection of our differences rather than something to be surrendered in the name of so- called unity — which is, after all, untenable, subjective and utterly counterproductive.
How about those who praised dissent for the past eight years?
Is there anyone who still believes the Constitution was created to ensure each citizen liberty and the ability to pursue happiness rather than a guarantee of happiness — and a retirement fund, health care, a job, an education, a house ... ?
Yes, two important historical events transpired Tuesday: The first was the peaceful transfer of power from one freely elected politician to another (an uninterrupted streak we often take for granted). Then there was the first presidency of an African-American, which proves we can transcend our unsightly past.
After that, what we had was just another election. We conduct one every four years. For those of you not shouting hosannas, it might have occurred to you that we are suffering from a rampant sickness in American life that casts government as the author of your dreams and an Illinois politician the linchpin of your hopes.
Tom Brokaw — whose hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, corraled thousands of innocent Asian-Americans into internment camps and assaulted the Constitution at every turn — went as far as to compare Obama's inauguration to the Czechs' fight for freedom over Communist oppression.
George Bush's administration, which I have a multitude of problems with, is not comparable to a tyranny, despite the protestations of his emotional detractors.
Liberals rightly recoil at the prospect of conservatives dictating which morals they should live by. Obama, though, has spent the past year preaching his own brand of morality — with a list of demands. Everyone, you see, "must" sacrifice. Michelle Obama recently explained, "Barack Obama will require you to work. . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."
Those of us who refuse to buy left-wing orthodoxy will remain "uninformed" and, inevitably, "selfish."
To be fair, I'm uncertain what Obama is going to require of me during these next four to eight years. I do know, right off the bat, that if he passes his centerpiece trillion-dollar, ideologically driven government expansion (in the guise of a "stimulus" plan), he will be demanding my grandchildren work overtime to pay it off — and that's after they're done paying Bush's tab.
The Rapacity of Odacity - James Lewis, American Thinker
Excellent article by James Lewis of the American Thinker on socialism. Here's an except:
The Rapacity of Odacity
By James Lewis
Just before the election, Barack Obama made fifteen references to "pie" in 100 seconds of a speech -- all about dividing up that yummy pie of the American economy. His audience laughed and chanted, "Pie! Pie!" to show how hungry they were. In one fell swoop Obama gave away the rapacity of socialism. In his first weeks of his presidency the world has seen how hungry he really is.
Mr. Obama doesn't look like he has an eating problem, but he is hungry, voraciously hungry. Or as Michelle O explained,
"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."
Socialism is rapaciously greedy -- that's what endless envy warfare comes down to. The Left likes to preen itself with the word ‘progressive,' when it is actually the most regressive political strategy in history. The key political move is to seek out the most rapacious people -- not hungry for food but power -- and use them to mobilize an attack on the productive sector, the milk cows of society. It is the most primitive political strategy ever. It goes back to the Romans and long before. Karl Marx merely reinvented a very old and decrepit wheel.
That is why everything is grist for the mill of Obama Marxism. Old-time Marxism just pitted the poor against the rich -- a compelling sympathy play in the 19th century, with grinding poverty, industrial workers living in little better than slavery, and peasant farmers in Europe who were all but slaves, as in Czarist Russia. Then decades of capitalist vitality provided the goods and services for an unprecedented spread of wealth, so that today Joe the Plumber is an instinctive conservative. Industrial workers became prosperous.
So the Left needed a new underclass. That is why the Boomer Left had to find new victim groups -- women who could be made to envy men, blacks to envy whites, homosexuals to envy heterosexuals, the young against their parents, each ethnic group against the other. The New Marxism plays off any victim group against any perceived winner. In this presidential election, the Democrats pitched it perfectly, setting every manipulable group against its favorite scapegoats, symbolized by President Bush and Veep Dick Cheney.
That is why today, in his first month in office, President Obama needs to go after executives who earn more than 500 thousand dollars per year. Marxism has become the politics of universal envy and rapacity, as long as there is a victim group hungry enough to be led into battle against the ever-shifting enemy. That is why racial politics has not been left behind by the Democrats; on the contrary. The United States is more racially sliced and diced than it has been since the Dixiecrats lost their power.
Socialism is rapacious because it has an endless appetite for power. If you doubt it, look at Britain today, where average people -- the productive ones -- are taxed, constantly bullied by the government-owned BBC, and bribed into voting socialist. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has gone to the logical extreme of demanding that British citizens donate their body parts to the National Health Service when they die -- mandatory organ donation, or socialist cannibalism. He calls it ‘presumed consent," which means that if you're dead, the government gets to decide who will re-use your mortal remains.
That is also why the socialist parties in Britain have suicidally imported hundreds of thousands of Pakistani Muslims, and are constantly telling them how welcome they are to import 7th Century Shariah law into the former home of parliaments. Those votes are easy to buy, and jihadi terrorism be damned. Antisemitism is now rife in Britain, whipped up by the radical Left, the BBC, and the Guardian, in alliance with Islamic fascists. It is a shameful loss of decency, no different than any other race baiting politics in human history.
Odacity is voracious because there's never enough free pie. It's the pie supply that grinds to a halt if the bakery is coerced into working without compensation -- a condition that used to be called "slavery." Without suitable incentives, producers can only be forced to work by the threat of punishment. And with full media control, our socialists make sure the baker gets the blame for any sudden pie shortage. We've watched it happen with Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Coal, and on and on -- but never with Big Media or Big Government. It's easy to tell who the demagogues are -- their names are never on the hit list. As the bitter old Soviet joke went, "Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is the opposite." Only the apparatchiks, the new ruling class, wins.
Our universities have gone that way already. That is why Harvard University dumped President Larry Summers for telling a well-known truth about precocious mathematical talent among boys. Nobody knows exactly why, but the typical genius mathematician is a pimply teenage boy with girl problems. That's been true for centuries, and most of the time it has been a source of pity or ridicule for those socially isolated boys. Today talented mathematical geniuses of the Wrong Sex are the objects of feminist envy. Almost every Harvard faculty member knows all that, but they kept their heads down when the campus Left went after Larry's scalp for telling the truth. That's Politically Correct socialism, and the firing of Larry Summers was designed to chill free speech on all the campuses. It was a power-play, and everybody understood who won. Harvard now has a new set of Feminist Commissars, to make sure that forbidden thoughts are never again spoken in public.
Read the rest here
There are lots of great articles on American Thinker. Be sure and check out the site.
Ronald Reagan on the Role of Government
For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told there are no simple answers to the complex problems which are beyond our comprehension. Well, the truth is, there are simple answers -- they just are not easy ones. The time has come for us to decide whether collectively we can afford everything and anything we think of simply because we think of it. The time has come to run a check to see if all the services government provides were in answer to demands or were just goodies dreamed up for our supposed betterment. The time has come to match outgo to income, instead of always doing it the other way around--Ronald Reagan
Even after all these years, his words are as pertinent today as they were then. He was a forward-seeing man and many of the things he held most true included smaller government and a society where each man had equal opportunity to prosper through hard work. Unfortunately, the current administration holds none of these traits as valuable. These are dark times for those of us who believe in free speech, capitalism and the greatness of America.
New Tax Form So You Never Ever Ever Need Worry About An Audit
...or even PAYING your taxes. I'm free, I'm free. Courtesy of DaveG at Ann Althouse's and Ranger at Just One Minute.
CLICK TO ENLARGE
Big Hollywood - Steven Crowder on Abortion
Steven says "Ever notice how leftists make abortions seem like an “event”? It’s presented as a sort of “fun for the whole family” affair. That’s why they opt to use words and phrases such as “choice” and “women’s health” instead of “kill” or “jamming scissors.” I say, we flip it on them. Instead of calling them “liberals,” let’s call them “Baby-killing, family-destroying, self-serving, Tim Robbins-loving, Biden-muzzling, socialist jackasses.”
Visit Big Hollywood here It's great!
New US Currency - Thank You Suckers!
Courtesy of The People's Cube
The People's Cube says:
Basic economic analysis of the $780 billion stimulus package indicates that the plan to socialize the US economy will likely fail unless the Obama Administration backs it up by replacing the existing legal tender called "the dollar" with a new kind of motivational currency called the "Thank You Sucker" (TYS) notes, which would flood the markets and stimulate the economy without causing inflation. Above is our original design proposal of the new motivational money that features the portrait of Barack Obama, who once complained that he "didn't look like those guys on the dollar bills." The bill also features one of Obama's most relevant money quotes, "Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows poverty of ambition," as well as a couple of axioms that serve as cornerstones of the progressive fiscal philosophy: "Money is the root of all evil" and "I win, you lose." In place of denomination at the top corners, the bill features the big letters "O," which some may misread as big zeroes, and at the bottom corners, the anagram "TYS" in the shape of the hammer and sickle.
Obama won the election with a rhetoric that skillfully replaced the words "socialist revolution" with the word "change." Now he is skillfully replacing the word "recession" with "catastrophe." The next logical step is to keep the economy running by replacing "dollar" with "thank you."
Click on The People's Cube above to see more great stuff.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Obama Breaks out the Can of Whup-Ass
Who are these people applauding? Must be the 28% who still think his Porkulous bill is a good thing. Good grief, has everyone had a lobotomy!
Stay Classy, Will Ferrell
You know, I really used to like him. His last few movies weren't funny at all, but I thought he was okay. Boy was I wrong.
WILL FERRELL'S BUSH LEAGUE SHOW
By KYLE SMITH
Is it too much to ask for Hollywood's leading comic actor not to use the deaths of our troops in combat for a giggle? Stay classy, Will Ferrell.
In his new (almost) one-man Broadway comedy "You're Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush," Ferrell spends the entire (barely 80-minute) show in character as President Bush, strutting around the stage lampooning the president's just-got-off-a-horse walk and his carrying-a-large-cylindrical object arm gestures.
Pointless? Pretty much, but near the end of the show things turn tasteless as well. Ferrell/Bush asks the audience for a moment of silence to honor our troops who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the performance I saw, most of the audience members went silent but a few tittered nervously. Who can blame them? This is a comedy show. They were expecting a gag, and they soon got one.
After a few seconds of silence a phone on the stage rings, and everyone laughs. The relief is palpable. Hurrah! That thing about honoring our war dead? It really was just the setup to a joke!
Ferrell/Bush is startled by the noise too, because he's already told us that the phone is just a prop that isn't connected to anything. He picks up the phone, listens for a second and says, "I didn't know 'Annie Get Your Gun' is playing! I love Tom Wopat too!" Then he tells the audience that he was afraid God was calling him on the phone. "Swear to God - I thought I was having a heart attack in my butt hole!"
The problem is, during what turned out to be merely a pause to set up the punchline, I actually was thinking about our war dead, and so were a lot of others. Left and right, we all believe, or supposedly do, in honoring the sacrifice of our servicemen and women.
Here, Hollywood is letting its mask slip. Ferrell and his director Adam McKay are so confident that everyone shares their contempt for Bush that they slosh over into contempt for all things associated with Bush: the show includes cracks about Texas, Christianity, and finally the military.
The military is the military. It isn't going to whine. It isn't going to organize a team of protesters to cause a ruckus in front of the Cort Theatre. It is just going to keep its head down and drive on. The military's finest men and women will continue to be ignored at best and loathed at worst. No Medal of Honor winner will get even one percent of the publicity Ferrell will generate with this show. For every hundred books written about the failures in Iraq, there will be one paragraph written about the post-surge turnaround.
But is it too much to ask for our war dead to not be ridiculed by wealthy comedians? Maybe those who fly on private jets, live in closely policed communities with surveillance cameras covering every inch of their property and send their kids to private school don't understand that there is such a thing as public security, and that it isn't a joke.
Ferrell should remove the jokey "moment of silence" from the show, promise to leave it out of the upcoming HBO broadcast and apologize to the military. Better yet: Do it in person, on a USO tour of Iraq." Read the entire story here
Obama's Tax Problems
Well Daschle is gone, thank God, but we missed biting the bullet by this much (ala Get Smart)! I never saw a cabinet eliminated so quickly all for the same reason, not paying taxes. That is, with the exception of the one who DID get confirmed who is going to be over the IRS. Define irony.
School Obama
The proud students at Barack Obama Elementary School in Hempstead, New York, can now say that they attend the first US school named after the president. They also own new navy sweatshirts - courtesy of the school itself -emblazoned with "Sí se puede" or "Yes we can". Officials at the school, which has just been officially renamed (the decision to do so was taken back in November), say that the impetus for change came from the children themselves. The name change really sends a message to children that when they get involved they can make a difference," said acting school Superintendent Joseph Laria.
I find this more than mildly creepy. It's up there with the cultish video showing those kids singing praises to Obama and the celebrity "I Pledge" video. Why did it take Obama for ANYONE to WANT to make a difference. Were people really that addled and lazy and complacent that they were doing nothing for all this time waiting for the messieh, Obama? How sad is that?
Before the White House, He's Just Like Us
That's the caption for this picture in a national newspaper. Really, just like US? Somehow, I don't think so. Other than politics, the man has never worked for a living. And pardon me if I don't consider politics a real job. He sends his kids to a school where the tuition costs $60,000 a year. That's just tuition mind you. He spends over $10,00 a year on dance and music lessons. Just like US? Those two items are more than I make in TWO YEARS. He is NOT just like us. None of the Presidents of modern day have been JUST LIKE US except maybe Harry Truman, the haberdasher. This is an insult. The golf clubs in the picture probably cost more than I make in a year. Just like me, INDEED!
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